She Nearly Sold Her Business. Now It’s the Best Year She’s Had.

Chanelle Le Roux built Ninki Content Marketing from a $25-a-blog Fiverr hustle into a full-service agency. Then burnout nearly made her give it all away — and the decision not to sell changed everything.

Chanelle Le Roux has been in marketing since she was 19 years old, working for companies across Cape Town, Buenos Aires, London and eventually Adelaide. She founded Ninki Content Marketing in 2018, and in the years since has grown it from a one-person copywriting operation into a Meta and TikTok creative agency with a coaching arm, workshops, and an online academy.

But the growth nearly broke her.

Burnout, drinking and the near-sale

A few years in, Chanelle found herself servicing US clients through the night and Australian clients during the day. The only thing that helped her nervous system settle was alcohol. She describes it openly: the vicious cycle of working exhausted, drinking to unwind, waking up hungover, and doing it again.

“I call my business my beautiful monster — I love it and the life it’s given me, but it’s also an absolute beast.”

It got bad enough that she engaged an exit strategist, got her numbers together and had genuine interest from other agencies. She came close to selling. Then she didn’t — and instead made the structural changes she’d been avoiding for years: closing the office, moving to a contractor model, shrinking the team. Less revenue. Far more profit. And the best mental health year she’d had in business.

The employees vs contractors debate

Chanelle doesn’t pretend the contractor model is perfect. With employees, you can set KPIs, build culture, and have proper performance conversations. With contractors, you’re their client, not their boss — and you can’t install the diligence and reliability you could hire for. But for where she is now, the leaner model works. The lesson isn’t “contractors are better.” It’s that the model you run needs to match the business you actually want to have.

South Africa as an outsourcing destination

While most Australian businesses default to the Philippines or India for outsourced knowledge work, Chanelle makes a strong case for South Africa — a market she knows from both sides, having worked there herself early in her career. First-world skills, strong English, cultural proximity to Australia, and a work ethic shaped by economic adversity. The main constraint is time zone: South Africa sits roughly seven hours behind AEST, though many contractors work early shifts specifically to service APAC clients.

AI, copywriting and what’s actually safe

Ninki lost its copywriting inquiry volume to AI — enough that Chanelle had to make her copywriter redundant. She’s not dismissive of the disruption: she thinks it’s happening faster and at greater scale than the industrial revolution, and she’s honest that it worries her. What she’s less worried about is the coaching and consulting side. Human empathy, real business context, and the kind of support that makes clients cry — with relief or with stress — isn’t something a tool replaces easily.

The one piece of advice she keeps coming back to

Perfection kills progress. Chanelle coaches business owners who agonise over a single social media post, and her message is consistent: nobody is obsessing over your content the way you are. Ship it. Fix it. Move on. Done is better than perfect — and the flow of business moves better when you stop waiting for conditions that never quite arrive.

Connect with Chanelle

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