Passports, Profits, and Pixie Dust with Purpose: How Lindsay Dollinger Found Her Tilt

Entrepreneur: Lindsay Dollinger

Business: Passports, Profits, and Pixie Dust

Tilt: Empowering women to level up and streamline their travel businesses 

Primary Channels: Instagram (9.8K), TikTok (3K)

Other Channels: Facebook (4.1K), YouTube (148), podcast, newsletter, blog

Time to First Dollar: 1 week

Revenue Streams: The Travel Agent Marketing Studio, masterminds, retreats, courses and one-on-one coaching, podcast, travel agency

Book: The Dream Big Business Planner and Tracker

Our Favorite Advice: 

• Don’t be afraid of a narrow niche: After building a broad audience, Lindsay decided to narrow her niche, meaning all her content would work for her target audience, but new content wouldn’t work for all of her audience. The strategy worked.
• Set and stick to boundaries on your work hours: Lindsay is a full-time high school teacher and a content entrepreneur. “It’s really easy to get sucked in and be like, ‘Oh my gosh, it’s 2 a.m.,’ that quickly leads to burnout,” she says. 
• Publish regularly for credibility: Audiences look for signs as to whether your business is legit. “If [you] don’t have something or [your] last post was six years ago, I don’t know if I’m going to trust you. It’s going to take longer to build that trust,” Lindsay says.
• Build your brand with flexibility in mind: Lindsay’s evolved her business mission and names, but her brand is consistent because she built everything under her name. However, if you aim to sell your brand to another creator, don’t build everything in your name.  

---

The Story of Lindsay Dollinger

Lindsay Dollinger is a high school Spanish teacher. This may seem like a non sequitur or an irrelevant detail for a story about an entrepreneur, but it’s a key element in Lindsay’s story. As she talks through her brand journey and experience, her motivations and inspirations, even the skills she’s developed, her teaching career weaves through the narrative. 

But of course, that’s only one part of it. Lindsay’s also a mentor and coach, a lead-generation expert, a podcast host, and a world traveler. She’s on a mission to help empower and educate other women entrepreneurs, and she’s built her castle brick by brick. 

Passports: Sharing travel experience

Lindsay always knew she wanted to be a teacher, and she knew she wanted to travel. She combined both dreams when she studied abroad while pursuing her master’s degree in Spanish, spending summers in Spain, Peru, and Guatemala, all while sharing her experiences online. “I’ve always been a big fan of social media,” Lindsay explains. “I always really openly shared about my travels, and people were always either asking me about Disney or international travel.” 

Before she ever knew what a lead magnet was, she put together her travel recommendations into Google Docs and sent them to anyone who asked. Eventually, she started a blog to document her travels, though she didn’t know yet how to monetize her content. 

Her introduction to brand building and marketing started somewhere else entirely. 

Profits: Developing businesses from ground up 

Since 2015, Lindsay has founded lucrative success in three network marketing organizations. By her third time building a business from the ground up to the top 1%, Lindsay knew she was doing something right. She had friends and followers asking for advice and guidance on how to do it, and she had both the interest in teaching others and the experience to help. 

So in 2020, Lindsay launched the Social Selling Sisterhood, the first (but not last) iteration of her podcast and her brand. She started a membership community, hosted retreats and masterminds, and offered one-on-one coaching, all with the goal of supporting other women entrepreneurs. 

As she grew her community and her content, Lindsay realized what she loved about the network marketing businesses wasn’t necessarily the products; it was helping women have more time, freedom, and control. In 2022, Lindsay left her final network marketing venture and shifted her focus toward her memberships, coaching, and retreats. That same year, she rebranded as Purpose, Profits, and Pixie Dust; still speaking to women entrepreneurs but narrowing her content tilt and pivoting away from network marketing. 

Pixie Dust: Disney roots grow business

The certified mouseketeers among us may have noticed, but for the uninitiated, a sprinkle of pixie dust appears in every element of Lindsay’s brand. While her interest in travel and cultures has taken her around the world, she’s returned again and again to one (Disney) world in particular. And Disneyland. And Disneyland Paris. And Disney cruises. 

The Disney love manifests itself in big and subtle ways across her brand, from hosting retreats at Disney World to sprinkling references through her product lines and brand names. It’s a strategy that sometimes works and sometimes doesn’t. We laughed about one version of her website that had the landing pages all labeled with Disney references — a naming convention that made perfect sense to me but, Lindsay admits, often confused her clients who weren’t Disney nerds. 

But there are also times when something as simple as carrying a Disney-themed purse can be a conversation starter that leads to a new client. Lindsay’s love of both travel and Disney, combined with her years of sharing Google Doc recommendations and blog posts, could only lead to one thing: becoming a travel agent. 

In case you haven’t noticed, Lindsay doesn’t seem to do anything by halves. While she specializes in planning trips for Disney, Universal, and cruise lines, she also has a team of travel agents working with her to help clients imagine their dream vacation to pretty much anywhere. 

And don’t forget her passion for teaching. As she built her agency and networked with other travel agents, Lindsay couldn’t help but notice big gaps in the community … gaps she could fill. “If some of the people that I was talking to knew how to market themselves better, knew how to make a better brand, were not pushing sales all the time, were educating, they could make sales so much better and so much easier,” she says.

Moving ahead: Taking a narrow risk

Even as Lindsay refined her focus and slowly narrowed her content, she still hadn’t blended her interests. She had the travel agency arm that, while separate, connected with her focus on women-owned business growth. Many of the women in her communities were also interested in travel, or Disney, or both. 

But Lindsay struggled to speak to such a broad audience. “I felt like I was talking to so many groups of people,” she tells me. “I would sit down to create something, and I would have these ideas, and I’d be like, ‘OK, how am I going to word it? What am I going to say?’” 

Of course, narrowing down can be a risk. Though her existing content remains relevant to her target niche audience, just at a broader level, her new content isn’t always relevant to her existing broader audience. “It was really scary for me, because I’m excluding 85% of the people I’m already working with by doing this,” she says. 

So was the risk worth it?

Passports, Profits, and Pixie Dust: Small world works

“I realized as I was talking more about it and making it really clear that travel was important to me, and other cultures were important to me, and things like that, that I was attracting more of my ideal clients,” Lindsay tells me. “It’s so much easier when you’re talking specifically to one group of people. I found that it was more natural, and I came up with content easier, and I had conversations that I really enjoyed with women who shared my values of just wanting to travel.”

I’ll take that as a yes, the risk was worth it.

Luckily or shrewdly, Lindsay set herself up for success by building the business on a personal brand. All of her content, website, and social media are under the name of Lindsay Dollinger, not the Social Selling Sisterhood, Purpose, Profits, and Pixie Dust, or the Magical Membership for Women Entrepreneurs. So as she’s narrowed in on her ultimate content tilt over the years, she’s done so on the foundations she already built rather than starting over each time. 

Today, you can find Lindsay teaching travel agents and travelpreneurs under the banner of Passports, Profits, and Pixie Dust. The niche blends her years of entrepreneurial expertise and her passion for travel. 

Plus, narrowing her focus gave Lindsay the freedom to create more content and products that speak directly to the audience she wants to support. This year, she launched the Travel Agent Marketing Studio, her latest membership program to fill the gaps she saw in her travel agent communities. 

Helpful Resource: How To Build an Online Community Around Your Work

Making the most of the magic

To recap: Over seven years, Lindsay worked her way up through three separate networking marketing organizations, managing her own clients as well as her own team. She launched a blog, podcast, and newsletter, and is active on multiple social media channels with Facebook groups, videos on TikTok, YouTube, and Instagram. She hosts membership communities and retreats, offers multiple courses, and provides one-on-one coaching. In the last year alone, she published her own business planner, launched the Travel Agent Marketing Studio, and hosted her new event, Purpose, Profits, and Pixie Dust Live. 

And yes, she is still a full-time high school Spanish teacher. 

No, I don’t understand when she has time to sleep either. 

What I do know is that Lindsay makes it all work. She explains that she’s diligent about her time management; she sets dedicated business hours to work on her brand and maintains strict boundaries for her school work hours versus her brand work hours. She implements systems and routines, invests in software that helps automate as much as possible, and believes strongly in planning ahead. 

Lindsay also leans into her strengths. She loves in-person events and conferences, and finds networking opportunities in events both within her niche and tangentially, or not at all, related. The connections she makes at those events turn into collaborations, such as podcast guest appearances or livestreams on social media.

“I really think there’s so much power in people getting to know the real you,” Lindsay explains. The authenticity of hearing or seeing someone speak about their passions goes a long way in building relationships. Lindsay finds ways to build trust with her community, and they reinforce that trust by sticking with her as she pivots and niches down into her perfect content tilt. 

Helpful Resource: How To Ask for and Use Testimonials From Your Audience

Because ultimately, no matter what work boundary she is following, Lindsay is a teacher – passionate and inspired, and enthusiastic about educating and uplifting everyone in her community, no matter how broad or narrow her niche is. 

“I just really want to empower the women out there that it is possible, with the right systems and the right strategies, that you can create the life that you really love. If I can do it, you can do it. It might look different. It might take you less time, it might take you more time, but it is possible.”