The Social Media Takeaway - Louise McDonnell

How To Start a Business With No Money in 2026 with Estie Starr

• Louise McDonnell • Season 1 • Episode 76

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If building a business or finally acting on that idea has been on your list, this week’s episode is one not to be missed.

I’m joined by Estie Starr, an award-winning strategist, founder of Strand Consulting, and a woman who built a multi seven-figure business without spending a cent on ads… all while raising five children.

In this episode, Estie shares how any idea can be turned into profit using her five-step MONEY framework.

If you’ve got a business idea but aren’t sure if it’ll work, or you feel stuck in strategy mode with nothing to show for it, this episode will give you the push (and process) to just start.

Here’s what we cover:

  • The biggest mistake people make when starting a business
  • Why selling to your inner circle first makes perfect sense
  • The MONEY framework: five simple steps to build a business from scratch
  • Why you should stop jumping straight into marketing…stick with the process.
  • How to build trust and sell without ever being salesy
  • What real growth looks like (and why it’s not “launching online and going viral”)

🎁 3-Day Marketing Success Challenge for free. It’s normally a paid program so grab it while it's free here!

If you enjoyed this episode, be sure to subscribe to my podcast because more like this is on the way!

If you'd like to book a call to see how I can support you head over to my website here. www.sellonsocialmedia.academy/hello

My 2025 Social Media Content Planner & Guide is now available! Packed with 400 content prompts, expert tips, and $377 worth of free resources to help you save time and get results in 2025.

Grab your copy now on Amazon!
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Welcome to the Social Media Takeaway. I'm your host, Louise McDonald, and this is the show for business people who want to know how to use social media more effectively to drive leads and sales for their business. If you enjoy the show, please make sure you subscribe, and if you enjoy this episode, which I have, I'm under no doubt that you will. Please come and give us a five star review. So today, I'm delighted to be joined by Estee Star. Estee is an award-winning strategist and she has built a multi seven figure business without spending a dime on advertising, while also raising five kids. And not only that, but she has helped hundreds of her clients to do exactly the same. Esther, you're very welcome to the show. Thank you. I'm so excited to be here. Ah, Estee, I was doing some research on you, and I can see that from a really early age you had this, an amazing entrepreneurial spirit. Do you wanna share some of those stories with our listeners here today? Sure. I started my first profitable business when I was 10 years old. I sold custom name bracelets, like the kind you get in Mexico, like I'm putting it on my hand, as if you can see it.. But I didn't just make bracelets and sell them. I calculated cost of goods sold, even though my parents paid for my supplies. But I just wanted to make sure I, it was important to me at age 10 to be profitable. So it's just how I'm wired. I think this way. I went to business school on a full scholarship. Based on a business I ran when I was 16, copying notes. so I have been doing this for a really long time. That's so funny that you say that. Just as you told that story, I just had a memory pop into my head when my son. So he's a teenager now. He's about to go to college in the next few years. But when my son was maybe eight or nine he started making bracelets. The loom bands were all in fashion. I don't even remember the Loom bands. And I remember he wanted to sit outside our house and sell them on instead of a little stall. And and then he I heard him token and he said, no, I don't want to do it outside our house 'cause there's not too much traffic. I wanna go outside Granny's instead. And I was like fair flight. Yeah. There you go. They got 'em smart. Yeah. I put advertisements in the sewing store where I bought my supplies. I made this whole like ad thing, like crafted it and then asked them if they would put it out there with our phone number. My kids. some of my kids are similarly wired and they have me as a mom also, and whenever, like they hear me talk all day to clients building businesses and how you do organic marketing. And, I have a training coming up how to start a business with no money. My 8-year-old came to me last week. He's ma, how do I start a business with no money?'cause I don't have money. And so what do I do? but that's just such brilliant exposure for the kids, isn't it? Because it's, you hear your words back, don't you? You hear your words back. Absolutely. So what advice on that very question alone, what advice did you give? What did I give him? I gave him the same advice I give my clients. I said, what do you like to do? What do you wanna do? What would be fun for you? And we didn't really get anywhere with that.'cause it was bedtime and he needed to go to sleep, but. That's the first question, right? There are infinite amounts of things that you could turn into businesses. I can turn any idea, talent, hobby, skills, certification into a profitable business. What do you wanna do? Business is not different than, let's say, weight, right? Fitness. If you eat well. Exercise, sleep well. Don't have any serious medical or hormonal issues. You're gonna be fit. That's just how it is. You're not going to be overweight or low, like your business is the same, right? As long as you don't have any major medical hormonal issues, which would be as long as you have the right kind of idea, right? As long as you haven't taken a bad business idea, which there are, and then you do. A certain set of there are just five steps to turning any idea into money. It will turn into money. It is that simple. It isn't rocket science. So that's the first question. What do you wanna do? My two little ones, I have, I least have five children. My littlest ones are eight and 12 right now. And on Sunday, I don't know, they were bored. They're like, ma, I wanna do a bake sale. I'm like, sure. He's okay. He went, he made brownies and ha, coco put it in a thermos, went and stood on the corner. Came back, made 10 bucks. It's cool. He wants, he wanted a new video game. I was like, there you go. I love it. I love it. Okay, so you talked about five steps there a few minutes ago. So for anyone listening in that has a business idea that you know they really want to do something with it, apart from reaching out to you, what are the steps they should be thinking about in their head to to really see if this is something that they can make money on if they don't have a lot of money to start out with. For sure. Okay, so let's make it really simple. I use an acronym for money. Okay. So we turn ideas into money. By doing money. There's five steps, but we do 'em backwards. Okay? So we'll start with the Y. So it's like Y, but money is, makes it's more memorable. So the Y is your uniqueness. See what I did there? I was so cute. Starts with a Y, but it's really you and this is that you're bringing something unique. To the market. There's something different. Even my kid who's standing at the corner selling brownies, there's no one else at that corner selling brownies. If there was, and they were the same brownies and there weren't that many people, he wouldn't really have something. And so I need you to bring something to the market and it could just be your location. It could be something unique in your offering. It could be unique in the results, but there's gotta be something that makes this different. Than whatever else it is. Whatever else is. So for a service-based professional, it's them, they're delivering the service so they, are part of the uniqueness. They definitely are. Their energy, their life experience, and when we take businesses, so I work with businesses in three stages. Launch bro scale, right? So zero to one. How do you turn this idea into money? Level two, how do you make it a hundred K business, right? Because to me a hundred K is the new minimum wage anywhere you are. And then three, now how do we start scaling it, right? So it's your a hundred K years, month, days when we're starting to scale from dabbling to like proper business owner. That's where we start to look at how do we really take the uniqueness that is you into making this something that goes beyond just your small circles. But that you don't need that to start. Many people mistake, growth and scale strategies for launch strategies, , they try to launch with a scale strategy they throw all this money at and it doesn't work.'cause that's a scale strategy. You're not a startup. You're just starting it up, you're bootstraps. I will say to people, yeah, you're at the beginning when you don't have money to invest, you're hustling. You are the, you have to put the time in. If you don't have the money, you have to put the time, but you can't, you have to put something into it. You have to put something into it. And by the way, money is not a replacement for intelligence. You can throw a lot of money at something unintelligently and it will not work, and you can put a little bit of intelligence on it and it will. I'm not gonna disagree with the hustle, but I also am gonna disagree you do need to give it time and energy, but I think some people, when they hear hustle, they think they've gotta go push you. Go. You've gotta give it time, attention, energy, intelligence. You can do it measured and strategic. You can do it in a few hours a week. If you give this, we have a program. If you give your new business idea an hour a day, we guarantee you'll be profitable within 90 days. It doesn't have to be that crazy kind of, I must dedicate my entire life to this. If you give it an hour a day of focus, appropriate attention, effort, it will work. Very good. So number one is your uniqueness. The Y. Yeah. Next is E, right? So we're going in money backwards, and this is our exchange of value. I've gotta have something that I'm gonna trade, right? All business is an exchange of value for value. That's it. It isn't anything else. You need to have something that you will trade others for the thing you want, which is money. Now, you could also trade. People always say to me what if I barter. I said, if you were gonna pay for those things anyways, did you not just earn money? We just use money as a medium of exchange 'cause it's easier to carry around than chickens or trees or other clumsy things. Right? But you can absolutely trade for services, you can absolutely trade for all kinds of things you need. Typically, you're gonna trade for money because most typically it's harder to find the exact person who you need stuff from. Make sure they need stuff from you. So we trade in money. So you just need this exchange of value. What is it that you're going to give, that someone's gonna wanna give you money for? And you gotta make sure it's profitable, meaning it needs to cost you less per unit than you will sell it for. And this is a mistake a lot of first time business owners make. This is where you can get a bad business idea, right? Some people are only profitable at a certain minimum. That's a problem. If you're only profitable at a certain level, you need to make sure you've got budget to get to that level, and that's not a good way to bootstrap a business, be profitable from ground zero. That's your e exchange of value. Then you have N, this is negotiation. This is what then becomes the sales engine of your business. But at this point, again, starting up, all negotiation is there's a reason for someone to say yes. Why should they say yes to this? Why should they say yes now if you have that reason and you can express it, that's sales. It's not about convincing people, it's not about being that like, so many people hate sales 'cause they think it's lying. It's not about lying. No. There's gotta be a reason for the person to say yes, to exchange value with you. Obviously you have your ideal customer, and then you need to know their pain their problem, how that manifests in their lives, their daily pain, their emotional pain. You need to know all that so that you can convince them that you understand them and you can help them. But there's. You know there's two sides of that. You, they also need to like no, and trust you. So just because you can say I've got that solution. They have to still decide that they want to work with you. It's not about convincing someone, it's about you knowing, liking and trusting them. Two, they all know like it. We work both ways. How about you go out? Know your people like them. Trust that you can serve them. Don't go to convince anyone. Just go to let them know you're here or persuade them. I'm not here to persuade anybody. Yeah. But your messaging needs to be persuasive. Fey, because I've seen, so I've seen people go out with messaging and they don't understand that the messaging needs to, it does need to you, if you're gonna get in front of somebody, you need to let them know the transformation that you can bring about for them, which you do really so well. But then, they need to see, they need to believe that transformation. They need to see what that transformation's gonna do for them. And then I think they're ready to take the step with you. Agree with you. And I think some people, when they hear words like convince, persuade, they translate it as lie. And so all I wanna say to be clear is you convince and persuade by telling people the truth. Of course that's all. Being authentic. Being authentic. You would not go on a first date dirty and smelly. At some point, if this turns into a relationship, at some point I'll be dirty and smelly. At some point I'll have a bad day. So why not let them see from the beginning that I have a bad day?'cause that's not what we do. That's not socially acceptable. You show up as the authentic, best version of you. That's how you show up in your marketing. Also, don't show up dirty and smelly with every caveat of why it might not work. People know that. People know that other people are sometimes dirty and smelly. No one is fooled by your lovely appearance on a first date that you don't ever have a bad day. They're not. They're just not. And if they are that they haven't lived very long. No one in listening to you explain the benefits of whatever it is you're offering, product or service. Thinks that it is. If you lie, yeah, but if you don't lie, thinks that it is foolproof, can never not work. That there's no circuit. Tell them the truth of what it is and how it helps and how it serves. It doesn't need to be perfect. It doesn't need to be everything. It just needs to solve a problem. That is what is persuasion. That is what is convincing. And it doesn't need to be dishonest at any level. I don't think it should. Right. Dishonesty is only a short term strategy. Doesn't last very long. Not in today's world, no. And maybe a hundred years ago, maybe 50 years ago, 30 years ago, pushing it, you could have gotten away with dishonest behavior. Not today. The internet is full of all of the dishonest and just blowing up every day. You get out there with promises you can't keep, it'll come back to bite you. It's not worth it. Brilliant. So now we've done the Y, the E, the N. O is operations. This is your systems and processes as you scale and in the beginning. So these five steps is not just how any idea turns into money, and these are the five foundational elements of every profitable business earning a hundred dollars, a thousand dollars, a hundred thousand, a hundred million, doesn't matter. They just become more sophisticated in these buckets. So as a business scales, this is where all your staffing processes, operations, technology, this is where that lives when you are starting out. You don't need any of it. They don't need you to have fancy tech and all these systems. Everyone's oh, I got this CRM and I got this thing and stop it. All you need is a plan for how you're going to deliver your product or service and how you're going to track all the important information, which is people, money and inventory. If you're service business, your time is your inventory. That's it. That's all I need you to do. All right? Give our students a curated Excel spreadsheet. That's all I need. Track your money. Track your time or your inventory, which is the same thing, and your people done. And have a method for delivery that's operations. Once you have all that, now you're ready to do marketing. Most people try to do their money backwards. They only do the m, they do marketing. They never figure out the . And they go out there and they're like, the marketing didn't work. You just, you have no foundation. In all our marketing programs, they're three prong. They're branding, marketing, sales, and in marketing, we develop the offer and the pricing strategy. You need all of it, and you need it aligned, right? So if you studied marketing in one place, but you studied pricing and packaging somewhere else, and you studied sales somewhere else, you've got this mush mash mess that doesn't work. If your marketing's not working, it's only one of two reasons. It's incomplete or it's misaligned. You are either missing pieces'cause there are multiple pieces or you have all the pieces, but they just, they don't match. Yeah, I say that all the time. Yeah. Just get, it makes such a, it makes, they're confused. No one knows what's going on. Now I have people in my incubator now. Now, one of the participants did one of these coaching programs where they're like, you need this $3,000,$5,000, this offer thing. I was like, what's gonna be in it? Oh we're gonna have 12 weeks of classes and there's gonna be a Facebook. No. What are you? No one's buying 12 weeks of classes and a Facebook group.. What are you solving? I'm not sure. That's why no one's buying it. The transformation. What? What is in it? What if you start taking clients hourly, but that's not efficient. It's a lot more efficient than selling nothing when you don't know what you're doing. Why don't you start there? I worked hourly for years. I didn't do my first package until I was in business, I think five years. I was five years in business before I ever did a package. I'm not saying that's right. I'm not saying it's wrong. That was just my journey, right? I started a consulting firm and we did everything hourly until I had mastered it to the level that I knew about how long it would take me to do something. And I knew I could confidently tell a client, and this amount of time for this amount of money, I can deliver this. And I knew that because I had done it for hundreds of hours at that point. Now we're thousands of hours in about 12,000 hours in 17 years in. Yeah. I've been doing this a long time. Yeah, I know it. And I think I'll say that as well. I say, people say the marketing isn't working or the ad isn't working, you're going, no, there's nothing wrong with the ad. It's everything else that's not working. And I also have this conversation in my own group coaching programs where I say, the difference between what people want and what we believe they need. So sometimes as experts, we tend to, people tend to talk about, tell their ideal customer what they need, and people don't buy what they need. They buy what they want. What do you think of that Este? I have a nursery rhyme about that. This is the nursery rhyme. I made it up and I tell all my clients and students to tattoo it on the inside of their eyelids. This is the master marketing principle. Sell 'em what they want, give them what they need, and they will buy again and tell their friends. It's so true. Okay. that's brilliant advice, those five steps. So for somebody who has a great idea with no funding, no audience and no connections, like they should start with looking and, or they should sit down and map out those five things. What is unique about what they're bringing? What are they going to trade? And I would say if you're starting out, start with the minimum unit. Yeah. Meaning everyone's trying to start too big, right? Because they watch all these things and they read all these things. They're like, oh, I need this and I'm gonna do a program and a package and stop it. Why don't you see if you can get someone, especially if you're a service provider, if you're a coach or a guide of any sort, just do one session. Yeah. Can you get someone to pay you 30, 50, a hundred, 150? Again, depending on your level of expertise and experience to help them one time, get someone to pay you one time. Now we have. Proof of concept. There is a human who will pay for this. And start with your inner circle. Don't start with strangers. They don't know you. Start with your inner circle. Who do you know in your world that you might be able to help? Oh, I wouldn't charge those people. Why not? If those people won't pay you, why should anyone else ever pay you? If the people who already know you love you, trust you wouldn't pay you. Why should a stranger pay you money? Don't need you. Again. This is your first sale, your second sale. Once you've made a few sales, guess what? Now you have money. Now you have some money. You have a proof of concept and some money to start investing in learning more. In growing more. Figure out what you're selling. Make it your minimum viable. Figure out a reason someone should say yes. Figure out how you're gonna deliver it. So am I gonna do this session in person? How am I gonna collect their money? Is it cash only? Just figure out the details. Because when someone says how will this work? You need to know how it will work. So I don't need you to sit in what I call the white tower forever, which is the other place people get stuck forever. Planning forever. Strategy, more education, more training, more programs, more lessons. You don't need more lessons. You don't need more pro. To make your first sale. I have given you everything you need on this podcast. And SC I'll say to people as well for the people who are stuck in the towers, 'cause there are many of them. And I'll say, you know what, it's okay to start and it's okay to think, maybe this time next year I won't be doing exactly what I've started with, but if I don't start, I'm never gonna know. Correct. And if you don't start, you might not know that you don't like it. I've started. Dozens of businesses in my life, and I've not stuck with most of them. I've done everything from hairstyling to inspirational speaking to teaching, hip hop, dance, exercise classes. Every single one of those businesses was profitable. Some I did for months, some I did for years. I wanted to try it, and I found out if I liked it or not. And in my own business, we try different products, we try different programs, we try different services. I don't know until I, I ran a marketing agency for over a decade and then I decided not to anymore. I know. And yeah, I think that even though all my career, like I'm over 15 years in business as well, and everything I've always done has been marketing. So marketing is service marketing related, but I have packaged that up in so many different ways, depending, because the market's always changing. What people respond to is always changing. So you're not going to develop a program or a service and then it's never gonna change. You're gonna be continually. Adapting it to the marketplace and to what people are responding to. So I think that's all very much part of it as well. Yeah. Yeah. That's what they need to do. Just go out there. Your first level marketing, your first m is your talk to the people you already know. Now, if you're the kind of person who likes to talk to strangers. Go ahead, talk to strangers. That's you, right? If you're the kind of person who stands in a Starbucks in line, and while you're ordering your coffee, you're striking up conversations with the people in front of you or behind you, they might be your first clients. If you are not that person, don't think you need to do it. Use your mouth for your first level marketing and just talk to the people you already know. Tell them what you're thinking of doing. Tell them what you're excited about. Tell them why someone should say yes. And then see if they say yes or if they know someone else who would want it. That's it. You'll make your first sales that way. It's so true. Yeah, And another thing that people think as well. Oh. I know I'm very much in the social media side of the things. People think that if they launch an online business that it's going to be easy. And I say,, I'm gonna go online and there's just, I'm just gonna make so much money. And then they get so disappointed. Because if they have, obviously if you talked about earlier on that misalignment within their strategy and then they're throw, they're throwing spaghetti on the wall and they're doing all of that, and then it's not working. So people have this misconception that it's easy if you're online. And another thing people get very surprised about is when they do launch. And then they come back and they go, but the people who signed up, I already knew. And you're like, yeah, I'm not surprised. I expected that. The people who respond first are always the people in your inner circle. So I love that piece of advice. Don't be afraid to look around your inner circle and say, this is what I'm looking to do. Are you interested or do you know anybody who would be, what a great place to start that. That is how you start. You wanna start a business with no money. That's how you start. And I have a training we teach also. Like what kind of ideas are valid ideas? Ideas for me is another acronym. I know we don't have time to go into it today, but there are some other pieces of this puzzle, but it's not complicated. To just start and you overcomplicate it. Now when you're ready to start making it a real thing, now we have a whole other layer to add on, right? You can start any business with no money, but you don't grow a business with no money. And I think that's another misconception, right? Okay. I can start. I've had so many people come to my trainings and they want to learn how to grow their business with no money. That's not how we grow a business. When you already have something operational and it's earning money, we take a percentage of that and invest in growth. You don't need to pull that money out of nowhere. It's coming out of the business and you don't need to take all of it. Right. That I've seen against some of my students. We get them, they're going, they're earning, and then they take all of their earnings and they try to invest it in new growth. Also not that, right? So neither end of the spectrum, neither all of your money and neither, none of your money, a percentage of your money in growth. But yeah, there's definitely so much out there of like point click, website dismiss and it's just not, it's not true. What's so interesting is that there was a moment in time, there was this like in every trends, right? People sold Beanie Babies for thousands of dollars in the nineties for three days, right? In every trend, there's a moment in time where tons of people can jump in, win big before the whole thing collapses. So was there a moment in time that people could just get online and it was easy and they earned big money? Yes. Is that boom still here? No. No. It's very long. It wasn't a very long time. It was like no one really knows about this. No one really knows about this. Couple people are doing it, couple people are calling it, oh my God, everyone can do it. This is amazing. We're earning so much money. I'm driving Uber. That is what that looked like. And I have lost count of the amount of Uber drivers I have struck up conversations with that had online businesses that are no longer working. Listen. Listen to people that are listening in. Listen to this advice because it is so true. Doesn't mean you can't make it work. It means that moment in time of I just put this out there and it works. That's gone. Businesses have always been around. There are foundational principles that make a business work. Otherwise, how could you have people who have success after success? If there wasn't a science to it, it wouldn't be replicable. So there is a science to it and there is an art. The art is that you uniqueness, that unique calling for my belief is that business is one of the ultimate forms of self-expression. In this reality we live in, unless you were born with a trust fund, you need money. And so if you have something, a gift you wanna share with the world, not only are you likely to need money to live and be able to carve out the time to share that gift with the world, whether it's product or service, but also people don't value things that they don't pay for, right? And they don't pay. They don't pay attention. And there is a space, obviously for nonprofit and for charity and for gifting those less fortunate. That's a different model. That's a business also, right? Because you're still marketing to the donors and the funders, and if you wanna build a self-sustaining nonprofit, there's a certain amount of input that you need from the people you serve as well. And you need buy-in from the middle tier. All of these have scientific structures. It is something that you can learn. It is a skill people go through. Training programs, whether it's how to build an online business or how to become a chiropractor, or how to become a coach, or how to become a construction worker, like it doesn't matter. They learn a thing, doesn't have to start with C, and then they're like, all right, now here's a 30 minute class on marketing and business development. And they're like, oh, I'm ready. Not. You spent six months to 16 years honing your craft. Yeah. Start learning how you build a business. I took a training on online business. No, you took a training on online business opportunities. You took a training on things that you can sell online. No one taught you what marketing strategy looks like. No, I know. Because all of you become my students. It takes you six months, takes you six years. You come back and you're like, I figured it out. I don't actually know what I'm doing. I'm ready now. Thank you. You can also start here and not waste your time and money. I know. Or people say, I've invested so much money in, in upskilling myself and I have no money left for marketing. And you're like where are you gonna find your customers? I put all this money into systems and programs and ads. And now what? Now? How about you learn how it really works? Exactly. Okay. We live and we learn. Esta you have a gift for, and I'm sure anyone tuning in is gonna wanna get their hands on this gift. Tell us how can they get, how can people get their hands on this gift? Okay. So I have a three day marketing success challenge. You can have it for free, probably. If you go to es. C star.com/free gift. So E-S-T-I-E-S-T-A-R r.com/free gift. At the moment, there's a three day marketing success challenge there. It is a paid program, but we leave it free sometimes. So if you go to the free gift link and it's not there, there's something else. Cool. But depending when you hear this recording. There will be a free three day marketing success challenge, and it will take you through a lot of the stuff I've talked about today and a whole bunch of stuff that I did not talk about, like how to craft a sales pitch that is not salesy, that feels good and genuine, but also persuades and convinces from that authentic place. Or what are the different kinds of marketing help available out there, and how do you choose and how do you know which things you need and all of that good stuff. Excellent star com slash free gift. Fantastic. Just say that again. Estee star.com/free gift. Fantastic. And if people want to make I spell my name, that's all. And what about on social media? Do you hang out there? Where can people find you? I do. Sometimes I'm at SD Star on LinkedIn, on Facebook, on Instagram, on. I guess we call it now like it was Twitter. I don't really hang out on Facebook or Twitter much so you can find me and you can see my face. It's there. Instagram and LinkedIn are my main platforms that we check out. Esther, you have been an amazing guest. I have thoroughly enjoyed this conversation. Thank you so much for coming on and sharing all your advice so freely. Thank you so much for having me. It's been a pleasure. Oh, thank you.