Scaling Up Business with Bill Gallagher 074: Maria Sipka - What Does a Meaningful Life Look Like?
This week’s episode explores Maria’s personal journey and discovery over the years. An entrepreneur at a very young age, she gave up the boyfriend, the oceanview property, and her business for a deeper meaning. Through traveling the world and finding her life’s purpose, she ended up creating a billion-dollar company in return. Find out how by listening in.
Maria Sipka created her first company at the age of 19 and by 21, it was a $2 million dollar business. What seemed to be the ‘perfect life.’ Maria gave it all up to search for deeper meaning. In 2005, she co-founded XING, which is now worth over a billion dollars. Maria later moved to San Francisco and Co-Founded Linqia, a company that aims to educate and inspire marketers.
Maria’s childhood sweetheart, a high-performance athlete, encouraged Maria to attend a Tony Robbins’ seminar at the young age of 16. She is forever grateful for going to that event at such a young age because it really opened her eyes to the world. She came out of it a changed person.
At the age of 17, Maria’s parents gave her $20,000 of what was supposed to fund Maria’s future wedding party to use as an investment instead. She took that money and invested in real estate. She was then hired as a marketing and communications specialist after she finished high school. And before she knew it, she had her first business at 19 and she was completely out of her league.
After hiring staff, Maria’s business was doing well, hitting a couple of million dollars in revenue within the first few years. However, what changed for Maria was when her childhood sweetheart introduced her to his personal trainer, and that’s when she found out he owned over 100 properties.
How did a personal trainer own so much property? She found out her way of investing was all wrong. She went home that night and put a spreadsheet together using his formula. She was able to work out that by the age of 40 she could own a billion dollars worth of property using his example. While following his model over 8 years, she acquired 50 properties by the age of 27.
Despite waking up to oceanfront views, she decided it was time to close this chapter and find a bigger purpose in her life. So, she left her business and her boyfriend behind in Sydney and went on a 10-day retreat to restart herself.
After the retreat, Maria later traveled the world for two years and met inspiring and amazing entrepreneurs along the way. Since then, Maria looks at her life like a storybook and tries to completely change, update, and rework her story and entrepreneurial journey. For the last 15 years, she has picked yearly themes that help her grow and live a more meaningful life.
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