Our mission

My name is Holly Eve. For nearly a decade, I ran Madame Lemy, a seven-figure body care company I built from the ground up. I've worked as a creative director, ghostwritten for Fortune 500 companies, and spent more than six years writing for Forbes. I've spoken at Princeton and USC, and my journey as a founder became the subject of a Harvard Business Review case study.

But somewhere along the way, the work that became most important to me had very little to do with business.

I became a mental health advocate.

In 2018, three months after launching my company, I went through a divorce I never saw coming. Years of unhealed trauma came to the surface, and I spiraled. I attempted to take my life and ended up in a psychiatric hospital.

Nine months later, while walking my dog Violet, I was hit by a distracted delivery driver. Violet survived, and so did I. I spent nearly a month in the hospital with multiple broken bones and a traumatic brain injury.

Lying in that hospital bed, I couldn't stop thinking about the irony of it. Less than a year earlier, I had been in a hospital bed because I didn't want to be alive. This time, I was incredibly grateful that I was. I decided then that I was going to talk about it.

I started using my company, my writing, and my voice to talk openly about suicide prevention and mental health. Writing about my own experience eventually led to my role as a Forbes contributor covering entrepreneurship and mental health. My struggles with mental health were included in the Harvard Business Review case study about my company. I received distinguished speaking awards from the University of Southern California and was invited to Princeton to speak to incoming healthcare professionals. At the same time, Madame Lemy was growing.

We sold through major retailers and hospitality partners including Anthropologie, Macy's, and Four Seasons. We were featured on the Today Show and Oprah Daily. We reached seven figures in sales and accomplished things I had once only hoped for.

But growing the business was never a straight line. Our packaging was lost at sea. We had a manufacturing contamination, then another one. We sold out during COVID and struggled to replenish inventory. Costs kept climbing, and eventually tariffs became the final blow.

After nearly a decade, I closed Madame Lemy with an enormous amount of business debt I had no way of paying back.

The suicidal thoughts returned.

The difference was that this time, I knew what to do. I called 988. I reached out to my therapist. I knew how to ask for help, and I had people and tools around me that I hadn't had the first time.

I was losing my business. I didn't have to lose myself with it.

Not long after, The New York Times contacted me. I ended up on the cover of its Business section in a story about the closure of my company and the realities of small-business failure due to tariffs. I asked them to include what was happening with my mental health because I knew I couldn't be the only founder going through something like this behind closed doors.

I wasn't.

After the story came out, I was flooded with messages from founders and business owners who were overwhelmed, burned out, in debt, ashamed, scared, or wondering how they were going to keep going.

I couldn't stop thinking about those messages.

There are endless resources telling entrepreneurs how to make more money, run ads, raise capital, scale a team, or become more productive. There are far fewer places talking honestly about what building a business can do to the person building it, especially when things don't work out the way you planned.

That was the beginning of Bad Entrepreneur.

I wanted to create what I wish I'd had. A place to get practical business advice, work with trusted experts and creative talent, access mental health resources, and talk honestly about what entrepreneurship actually looks like.

I also wanted to tell the truth about my own story. I built something successful, and eventually that business failed. I filed for bankruptcy. There is no shame in saying that. My business failed, but I didn't.

I wanted Bad Entrepreneur to be a place where we could talk about all of it: the wins, the money problems, the mistakes, the fear, the burnout, the failures, and the starting over. A place where people didn't have to pretend their business was doing great when it wasn't, or suffer in silence because they thought everyone else had figured it out.

And I knew I didn't want to build it alone.

Carol is my best friend and the person who helped me grow Madame Lemy into what it became. She was there for the wins and the disasters and saw firsthand what it took to keep a business going when things kept going wrong. She also brought years of experience working as a marketing executive for major companies and had seen another side of the problem: small businesses spending money they couldn't afford on agencies and services that didn't always deliver what they promised.

We had both seen what was missing, just from different sides of the table.

So we decided to build it together.

Bad Entrepreneur isn't about teaching people how to become perfect entrepreneurs. Neither of us believes that person exists.

It's about giving people practical resources, experienced people they can trust, and a place where they can be honest about what they're going through while they build something.

For years, I believed success meant keeping my business alive at all costs.

I don't believe that anymore.

Your business matters. Your ambition matters. Your dreams matter.

But your well-being has to matter more.

We're happy you are here!

Xoxo,

Holly Eve