Vanessa Bamford Strategic Mentor

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Adelaide, SA
Vanessa Bamford Strategic Mentor

Helping entrepreneurs build legacy, wealth & freedom — without burnout, guilt or losing themselves. My approach is direct, strategic, and human-first.

Watch my FREE masterclass Properly Paid Woman by clicking the link in my bio 💜 I help ambitious business owners simplify financial strategy, make confident decisions, and scale sustainably — without burning out or losing control. After growing up in a family business and building a career in financial strategy and advisory, I saw firsthand how overwhelming leadership can feel when you don't have the right support or clarity around your numbers. Today, through mentorship, education, and speaking, I work with business owners who are ready to move beyond the hustle and into real leadership. I’m not here to overwhelm you with jargon or cookie-cutter advice. I’m here to give you real-world strategies, clear action steps, and the confidence to take control of your business and financial future. Whether you're ready to finally understand your numbers, scale with clarity, or build a business that gives you back your time and freedom, I’m here to guide you.

🔹 Strategic Mentor for Business Owners
🔹 Speaker on Financial Confidence & Leadership
🔹 Founder of Vision Beyond Advisory
🔹 Co-Founder of Business Like A Girl

Ready to lead powerfully and grow sustainably? Let’s connect.

15/10/2026

If you have a team, this one thing will either help you grow a business that doesn’t need you or will trap you in it.

Do you have team who have clear roles and processes OR do you have people who your rely on what’s in their heads?

I often use McDonald’s as an example, the reason why McDonald’s can be ran by 13 year olds is because every role has a process, expectations and responsibilities and everyone knows what they are. It’s why a new person can start on Monday and be making burgers by Tuesday.

Obviously your business will have its own standards, values and needs and we don’t need to be clones of McDonald’s, but when your business relies heavily on what’s in your teams head (or worse yours) you’re creating a business you can’t grow.

Build roles and processes and put the right people in them, don’t let your people walk away and take your business down with their departure.

15/10/2026

Do you ‘help’ your people or are you in fact just ‘rescuing’ them?

If you’re doing the latter, you are not only killing your businesses growth but you are also killing your team members potential to grow too.

Think of it like this:

If you can see someone is struggling in a swimming pool, they aren’t drowning or in any immediate danger, they are able to swim, but they just need a little bit of help. Do you hand them a life raft and ‘help’, or do you dive in, drag them onto the life raft and swim with them to the side?

I know at times you think that if you ‘rescue’ someone that you’re actually helping them, but when you do, you are actually totally disempowering them. Rather that giving them the raft and showing them they are capable to get to safety themselves, when you rescue them, this kind of leadership style doesn’t create an empowered team, even though it’s not what you meant to do.

You just end up with a team who come to you for everything, who don’t trust their own judgement, and eventually you have created a huge challenge to being able to grow your own business, because everyone needs rescuing all of the time.

If you want to develop leaders and have a business you can grow and one day step out from, then next time someone needs help, ask yourself next time am I helping or rescuing? (Empowering or disempowering them?)

14/10/2026

“It’s too expensive to work with that person, why would you pay that much money?”

I’ve heard this sentence in my life more times than I can count.

I could tell you all the reasons it’s expensive to pay for an expert but I’m more inclined to tell you all the reasons it’s too expensive not to.

My thinking has always been long term. I invest now into myself and my business and in building strong foundations so I can continue to build solid, successful and sustainable businesses.

I don’t regret a cent I’ve paid to coaches, experts and coaching programs (only the ones I didn’t interview or research properly), because when I’ve invested in an expert with integrity, I’ve actually also been making the quiet decision each time to back myself.

Each and every time it’s paid off in more confidence in me and growth in me and my business, especially recently when I did some work with Annelise McCarthy on confidence, speaking and communication.

So what’s the thing you’re telling yourself is ‘too expensive?’ And how expensive is it to not do it?

10/10/2026

What if that thing that you keep telling yourself was a failure or your biggest regret was exactly what you needed to learn to get you closer to exactly where you wanted?

Hear me out... this is a belief I have developed over the last 8 years and I can see the pattern clearly now everywhere.

When | look at the tough moments, when I’m in the middle of some of my most challenging times I remind myself that everything I’m experiencing or have experienced is just giving me the lessons I need to get to exactly what I want.

The bad relationships, the ‘failed’ attempts, the mistakes that were so hard to handle at the time, each and every one of them gave me a lesson, and if I ignored the lesson I kept on being presented with it again and again, but when I realised what the patterns were showing me I started to find the lessons quicker and move towards what I wanted faster, it’s become my biggest hack to growth.

It’s no ditterent to an athlete, they work out what went wrong during their training and keep course correcting to make their performance better, it’s no different in life if you treat it the same.

I challenge you to ask yourself ‘if this were trying to show me something, what would that be?’

Let me know if you see the pattern too

10/10/2026

What if that thing that you keep telling yourself was a failure or your biggest regret was exactly what you needed to learn to get you closer to exactly where you wanted?

Hear me out… this is a belief I have developed over the last 8 years and I can see the pattern clearly now everywhere.

When I look at the tough moments, when I’m in the middle of some of my most challenging times I remind myself that everything I’m experiencing or have experienced is just giving me the lessons I need to get to exactly what I want.

The bad relationships, the ‘failed’ attempts, the mistakes that were so hard to handle at the time, each and every one of them gave me a lesson, and if I ignored the lesson I kept on being presented with it again and again, but when I realised what the patterns were showing me I started to find the lessons quicker and move towards what I wanted faster, it’s become my biggest hack to growth.

It’s no different to an athlete, they work out what went wrong during their training and keep course correcting to make their performance better, it’s no different in life if you treat it the same.

I challenge you to ask yourself ‘if this we’re trying to show me something, what would that be?’

Let me know if you see the pattern too

08/10/2026

Mindlessly drawing in my sketch book many years ago, I drew a picture with a ‘+’ and ‘-‘ with the word ‘choice’ written in the middle.

I was pretty fed up with my life and my choices at this point.

As simple as the drawing was it was also confronting. I realised I was hitting the ‘minus’ sign in my life most of the time, and my choices were taking away from me. They were taking my energy, taking away time, taking away memories I wouldn’t get back. I’d been living on autopilot forever allowing it to just go by, and I hadn’t even realised where life had taken me.

It made me seriously start to look at my life, my beliefs, my decisions, and the choices I was making.

There’s something pretty confronting and equally as powerful when I realised that the choice IS always mine to make.

I didn’t instantly flip my life around, but the decision to ‘choose’ has always stuck with me ever since.

BUT, the choices I’ve had to make along the way have not always been easy. I still struggle to make them especially when sometimes they can feel like I don’t actually have one to make at all, but even in those moments, I know I even have the power to choose how I see things.

So why am I sharing this?

Because every day I see and speak to people choosing on autopilot the life they don’t want, complaining they don’t have what they want, or believing they can’t have what they want.

If this is you, I want to ask you, if you had a choice to choose the ‘+’, what would it be and how different would life look? Because you are in fact far more powerful to change things than you think.

29/08/2026

In utter silence, without knowing, I was judged, taken down and collectively a group of women decided they didn’t like me anymore.

What did I do?
I don’t know.
What did I say?
I don’t know.

My role in their lives was to offer support, give value and guidance. I did all of those things.

But then at some point they surrounded themselves with like minded people who began to talk about what they didn’t like about me and my choices and so one by one they disconnected from me.

And you know what…

So what?

So what if that happened, so what if they don’t like me, so what if they are speaking bad about me, so what if all of what I gave them was disregarded and forgotten.

I’m sharing this because I get to choose what this means. And to me this means ‘so what’.

And I’m also sharing because this s**t happens all the time to all of us. This is the world we live in.

But I’m also sharing because these are the exact circles and environments I can no longer be part of and why I continue to grow business like a girl for women who are also looking for a space where this is not the standard they surround themselves with.

I value people who will come to me and communicate if I’ve upset them, I value people with integrity and who value not judging others on things they haven’t experienced for themselves, I also know I’m not everyone’s cup of tea and that’s ok, because if I lived like that mattered I wouldn’t be where I am now and i definitely wouldn’t make it where I’m going.

But I value women who can be in a room with me, who can be curious, be compassionate and have huge levels of self awareness. That’s my room, that’s my space, that’s my way.

And that’s lonely, because I remove myself from a lot of spaces. I say no when I mean no to meeting people, events and relationships that don’t serve me.

Did it hurt to hear that people didn’t like me for a reason I had no idea of? Of course, I’m human, but what I choose after that hurt is up to me, and I know this is always more of a reflection of someone else than it is of me.

Choose your circles ladies, because it will either:
Lift you up
Pull you down
Or keep you exactly where you are

💜

Address

South Australia
Adelaide, SA

Website

https://www.businesslikeagirl.com.au/properlypaidwoman, https://www.businesslikeagirl.com.au/, https://www.aph.gov.au/e-

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