March 11, 2025

From Burnout to Balance: How Tina Tower Built a $2M Business—Without Breaking Herself

Show Notes
Guest Profile

This week, I talk with Tina Tower, founder of Her Empire Builder, a membership community helping women start and scale online course businesses. Tina’s journey to success has been anything but straightforward. She launched a tutoring center at 20, built a franchise that nearly broke her, and sold it in a deal that taught her some tough lessons about business and burnout.

We dive into what she learned from scaling too fast, how to avoid the potential pitfalls of selling a company, and how she transitioned from a high-stress business to running a wildly profitable $2 million-a-year company—with less stress and more joy than ever before. If you’ve ever wrestled with balancing wealth, meaning, and a lifestyle you truly love, this conversation is for you. Let’s get to it!

In this episode:

(00:00) - Intro
(02:52) - How a toy bear became a symbol of Tina's entrepreneurial journey
(04:29) - Tina's chaotic childhood and leaving home at 14
(06:58) - Discovering Tony Robbins and rewriting her story
(13:00) - Tina's mindset shift from survival to entrepreneurship
(16:05) - “If you can dream it, you can achieve it”—or can you?
(19:00) - Hustling to stay afloat
(22:19) - Hitting rock bottom and facing failure
(31:00) - Scaling too fast—when growth becomes a trap
(36:00) - When success feels like a burden
(39:43) - Selling the business—a deal that was too good to be true
(46:10) - Running away to find herself again
(52:05) - Accidentally starting a seven-figure business
(01:01:00) - What it’s like running a $2M/year business without burning out
(01:04:20) - Letting go of overworking
(01:09:00) - Choosing success without sacrifice
(01:13:00) - When ambition clashes with contentment
(01:18:00) - Realizing success doesn't mean burnout
(01:23:45) - Barrett's approach to coaching
(01:34:36) - What makes Tina world-class?
(01:34:54) - Tina's most beautiful future
(01:35:47) - Who Tina is becoming

Key Takeaways

Your Struggles Can Fuel Your Success: Tina’s challenging upbringing, including instability, emotional abuse, and constantly changing identities, shaped her resilience and drive. Rather than letting these difficulties define her negatively, she used them as motivation to build a successful life on her own terms.
Entrepreneurship is a Journey of Trial and Error: From starting a tutoring business to launching a toy store, then franchising and licensing, Tina’s career illustrates that success often comes through experimenting, failing, and learning. She emphasizes the importance of adapting and pivoting when things don’t go as planned.
The Stories We Tell Ourselves Matter: Tina was deeply influenced by personal development figures like Tony Robbins, adopting the mindset that success was within her control. However, she also had to unlearn harmful messages from her past that made her feel unworthy of success or fearful of “getting too big for her boots.”
Scaling a Business Requires More Than Just Hard Work: While Tina built a franchise with over 40 locations, the emotional toll and operational challenges of scaling led her to a breaking point. She realized that just because you can grow fast doesn’t mean you should—sustainability and personal well-being matter just as much as ambition.
Wealthy Women Change the World: Tina is passionate about helping women build financially successful businesses because she believes that when women have wealth, they invest in their families and communities in transformative ways. The Her Empire Builder program empowers women to scale online businesses in a way that aligns with their goals and values.

Quotes

”A boring business is a profitable business. And I've tried really hard not to break it.” ~ Tina Tower

”Everyone has their breaking point. I couldn't remember a time where my hands weren't shaking. I couldn't remember a week where I didn't have a headache. I couldn't remember the last week I didn't cry at some point. I was drinking every second day. It was just bad.” ~ Tina Tower

”I got into the trap of working 12-hour days. My kids were still young. [My husban] Matt had stopped working when the franchise took off, which was fantastic. But I became this crazy worker bee, which is not the person I wanted to be.” ~ Tina Tower

”Wealthy women change the world. When women have wealth, they make decisions that affect their families and communities and they spend it in a way that is generally more impactful than the way men have traditionally held and spent their wealth.” ~ Tina Tower

“ I think I'm becoming the person that I've always wanted to be, that I didn't think was ever going to be attainable, or the person that I had kind of put off until I was old and successful and had made it. I'm trying to embody more of her now.” ~ Tina Tower

Links