Leonie Dawson’s dad was a farmer. Her grand-dad was a farmer. And her great grand-dad was a farmer. When it came to career advice for his daughter who was desperate to become an artist, her dad, AKA ‘The Wild Bushman’ was very clear on some do’s and don’ts:
Do get an office job, it’s safe and stable.
Don’t earn over the highest tax bracket because you will pay too much in tax.
Don’t start a business because most small businesses fail within 5 years.
Don’t become an artist because all artists starve.
And so Leonie buried her dream and decided to focus on landing her second favourite career choice – becoming Prime Minister of Australia. At 20 she moved from the farm to Canberra for a political career and she worked her butt of climbing the public service ladder. Which she did pretty quickly.The trouble was that her heart wasn’t really in it. Much of what you need to make it in politics – eg., the ability to work every hour god sent, the ability to press the flesh of 1000s of people a day, the ability to shake off criticism – did not come naturally to a young woman with autism and sensitive energy levels – I knew it would crush me, I don’t have thick skin, I have fucking paper-thin skin.
(At this point I have to pause the interview as I am laughing so hard and it feels like Leonie is describing me, not her.)
And so Leonie returned to the farm to tell her dad that she was going with Plan A and that while she recognised that artists don’t make money, neither do farmers, making her a 4th generation dreamer.
Today Leonie is sitting on a business empire which has generated over $13million. As an artist and a dreamer. She refuses to niche, works 10 hours a week, and has built a business – which she describes as a beautiful behemoth – to fit around her family. Despite all of her dad’s lessons it is clearly great being in small business, artists can make money, and it is brilliant earning above the highest tax bracket.
Like all really successful business ideas, Leonie’s most successful product, her annual goal planner, was something she initially just created for herself because there was nothing else on the market. She loved it, she popped it on facebook and within 2 weeks she had sold 1000. Today she has sold over half a million.
I push her on the whole ‘niche’ thing, because I too don’t have a niche and feel enormous pressure all the time to niche, find a niche, talk to a niche, niche the niche. But Leonie is adamant – I have never paid any attention to having a niche. My niche is personality driven. Whoever likes me, ding ding ding. If you don’t like me, no drama at all. I am women and non binary centric I guess. I say vagina a lot.
I love this so much and feel an immediate release of pressure to conform to the whole niche deal.
Leonie has created a super fan base and with that comes the trolls from time to time. She recalls presenting at a women’s event where a group of husbands had bought a table and decided to heckle her – I was really shocked. It was this whole 1950s little woman should be in the kitchen bully boy vibe. I decided to use the word ‘labia’ and that shut them up. Perhaps they felt uncomfortable being under represented in a room of woman, but that’s OK because I wasn’t there to talk to them and it was also Ok because they got to experience what it’s like for women every day being in rooms where they are under represented.
The best thing Leonie has created in her business is actually her family. She has crafted the business to fit around her focus of having a great relationship with her husband and crafting a gentle and peaceful home life – my business is amazing and it is a blessing and a joy, but it is not my highest priority.
Friends in and outside of business are also a big priority for her. She has a business accountability group of 7 and she describes their energy as ‘magic’. She also has her group of besties who recently took 3 days out to celebrate Leonie’s 40th birthday at a chalet in the mountains – it was like schoolies. The husbands had to come and pick us up because we couldn’t drive home and it was like, Sweet Jesus, what have the women done?
Like me, Leonie’s word for 2023 is EXPANSION – how magnificent. She has been in retreat mode for a few years, describing the recent years of mothering as years of ‘contraction’. Today she is loving the energy of her expansion and she is excited to see what wants to be created next – I never plan it, I just wait to see whatever download I get from the angels.
We end our discussion in a reflective mode, talking about the loss of my ex-husband to cancer and the death of her brother at 14 – In your 20s you can pretend that life is in your control. Post that, not so much. Big and hard things will happen and those things aren’t your fault and really have nothing to do with you – you haven’t caused them. My focus is to ensure that those things don’t make me jaded or hard. I want my life experiences to soften me and deepen me. Like being a river rock so tumbled around in the river of life that you come out smooth and polished. All the women in my family have lived well into their 90s, and they have done so with joy and laughter at the heart of their being. I want to be like that. Especially when life sucks.
Now I want to be a river rock.
