The year Stella was everywhere and I was barely breaking even

Two words explain how both were true at once. Visibility is how many people can see a business. Solvency is whether that business can pay its bills by the due date. An audience grows for free, and every page, copy and show that feeds it arrives with an invoice, so a magazine can climb on the first metric while it slides on the second.

Readers were sending me photos of themselves with Stella from Goroka, from Japan, from Europe and from the Middle East, some carrying it on their travels and some subscribing from the other side of the world. One long-time reader, an American who has spent twenty years studying and working in Oceania, packed her issue for New York City on a trip to meet Haudenosaunee women, whose confederacy influenced the early American suffragettes.

A close second came from much nearer to home: two men on a veranda in Port Moresby, one at the barbecue and the other leaning against the wall nearby, reading Stella Modelling agencies from Australia, New Zealand and across the Pacific were sending me their look books, hoping to book their talent for our next cover.

The magazine had doubled its pages and its print run by 2015, as I wrote last Monday. I ran RUNWAY three times, from August 2014 to 2016. I worked with talented curators and trained models. We rehearsed the shows to perfection, and we folded breakdancing, weaving, art and culture into the spectacle. Sponsors and partners paid to stand beside it, ticket sales filled the seats and designers paid a fee to show. In the later years RUNWAY and sponsorship together brought in about half of Stella's income.

RUNWAY opened doors for designers and models. The Australian High Commission funded a scholarship for a designer to connect with and learn from the experts at Raffles in Sydney, and a modelling agency in Cairns sponsored a modelling scholarship. I was so busy holding those doors open that I forgot to walk through them myself. The scholarships found their sponsors. I always wanted more sponsors for the show itself, because RUNWAY was also designed to help pay for printing the magazine.

The invitations started early. Organisers asked me to speak at events for small business owners, and they asked me as a woman who had built something. In November 2012, with two issues out and the third in production, I was at the Pacific Women in Business Forum in Fiji. In 2014, in the same week, I gave a keynote at ANU's State of the Pacific conference in Canberra and joined the World Bank's Praxis Discussion Series in Sydney.

In 2016 I flew to Saskatoon, Canada, for the World Indigenous Business Forum, with a stellar group of Melanesians kicking goals and taking no prisoners. This is the trip I remember best. I watched First Nations people take part in a pow wow, and I saw the same nations owning and running their own casinos. Culture and business stood side by side, and the contrast was extraordinary.

The organisers paid for every one of those trips, and none of them paid me to speak. Each invitation drew me away from my magazine, and from my means of making money. Every day at a conference was a day away from scheduling an issue, selling advertising, chasing subscribers and planning the next cover. I paid for those stages with my time, and my time was the thing the magazine ran on.

I would do it differently now. I’d ask what a room was worth to the business before I said yes, and I’d count the production days a trip would cost before I booked a flight. I'd say yes to the rooms with advertisers in them, and I'd build the trip around the business, with the afternoon on stage and the next morning in front of two advertisers. And I'd ask for a speaker's fee or ask the organiser to buy a page in the next issue.

Behind all of that, I lived extremely frugally. I bought the cheapest groceries, kept wearing sneakers I needed to replace, and kept working on a laptop that was due for retirement. I started teaching English again to pay my everyday expenses while I worked on signing up more advertisers and outlets. I took on some editing as well, and stopped once the sums stopped making sense. When I asked a bank for a loan, the bank wanted the same value again in cash as security, and everything I could find was already going into production. A Facebook page full of followers counted for nothing at that desk.

Anyone who has been introduced as a success story in a week they were counting the days until an advertiser paid knows the feeling of standing in two places at once. The room sees the business, and the founder sees the bank account.

Visibility paid Stella in introductions, goodwill and the next sponsor meeting, and those things mattered to a magazine that lived on advertisers. Attention came first and money came later, on a sponsor's or an advertiser's timetable. Solvency wanted cash by the due date, however many copies were sitting in shops that week.

For now, the pace was still fuel, and I ran on it. The burnout came later.

Being seen and being paid are two separate jobs, and that year I was doing both.

What working for yourself does to your retirement, and the employer’s share that goes missing.

Best

Amanda

P.S. What’s your view on today’s newsletter? Did I miss something out that you’d like to share? Write to me, [email protected]. I may not get back to you, but I will try to read what you send in.

Wild Money is general information only, drawn from my own experience and research. It isn't financial advice, and nothing in it is a recommendation to buy, sell, hold or manage money in any particular way. What worked for me won't necessarily suit you. Please seek advice from a licensed financial adviser before making decisions about your own money.