Tiffany Uman spent thirteen years climbing L’Oréal from the inside, and she was very good at it.
Seven promotions in under ten years, finishing as a senior director with work spanning Canada, the United States and France.
She loved it there. Staying until retirement would have suited her fine.
Then in early 2020, on maternity leave with her second child, she started building something on her laptop that would end her corporate career for good.
By 2024 it was doing $1.1 million a year, teaching other women how to make the same climb she’d made inside the corporate world.
Close to a million people have taken her courses on LinkedIn Learning, many of them at their desks, on company time.
Most of her clients land the promotion they came for. And Microsoft now pays her to coach its own employees on how to move up the corporate ladder internally.
What has made her business a success is something she’d already been giving away for years inside L’Oréal, before it ever crossed her mind that it was worth money.
Seven Promotions And Nobody To Thank
Uman joined L’Oréal fresh out of McGill and walked into the same wall every ambitious junior hits.
She wanted to move up, but nobody could tell her how moving up actually worked.
The company had review cycles and competency frameworks and all the official machinery.
But the real decisions happened somewhere else, in rooms she wasn’t in, by rules nobody had written down.
So she started working them out herself.
Her first real breakthrough came from a gap. Her boss went on maternity leave, and the company left the seat empty.
Uman treated the empty seat as an open door.
For six months she did her boss’s job on top of her own. She took her work directly to senior leaders who had never heard her name.
By the time her boss had returned, the people upstairs knew exactly who she was.
The promotion followed. Then another.
Seven promotions in under ten years, each one adding another piece to the system she was mapping out.
And then somewhere along the way, the ambitious climb up the corporate ladder stopped being the driving force.
As a senior director she had teams of her own now, filled with people staring at the same wall she’d once stared at.
She started handing them the map – what to say in the meeting, how to make your work visible to the person two levels up, when to push and when to wait.
She’d walk out of those conversations more energized than anything else in her week.
Watching her people rise became the part of the job she loved most.
For the eight or ten people lucky enough to report to her she was the coach she’d never had.
But a manager can only develop the people the org chart hands her.
So in early 2020, pregnant with her second child, she decided to find out how many people she could reach without the org chart in the way.
Her maternity leave became the runway. Her rule for the year: “Do this as if you don’t have a job to go back to.”
She posted career advice on TikTok while the baby slept.
The videos pointed to a free masterclass, and the masterclass sold her first one-on-one coaching clients.
In January 2021, with the business clearing multiple six figures, she resigned from the job she loved.
What she couldn’t see yet was the flaw she’d built into the middle of it, one that would take her three years to solve.
The Bucket That Wouldn’t Stay Full
The first version of the business was Uman selling her hours.
One-on-one coaching, client by client, the same trade she’d have made as a consultant.
And within months she noticed the same thing every good manager notices: everyone was asking the same questions.
So she packaged up the answers and the map became a curriculum.
The curriculum in turn became a program, and the program became the Career Success Fast Track: six months long, priced at $7,500, delivered through structured lessons and live group coaching.
The machine that brought clients in was simple enough to describe.
Free resources sat everywhere she published.
An interview guide, fifty communication scripts, a salary negotiation training, courses on LinkedIn Learning that a million people have taken.
Every free resource pointed to her email list.
She built her list after deciding social media was rented ground. “I wanted to deplatform,” she said, “and build something I could control.”
She paid for growth through newsletter referrals at under three dollars a subscriber, and the list grew past 27,000 readers.
She rewrote the emails themselves to deliver real value, reading like training sessions instead of promotions (over half her list opening any given email).
From the email list, readers flowed to a free live masterclass. It ran as a dated event, one hour long, held a few times a year.
After the masterclass, her team offered each woman a free one-on-one call. And on that call, one offer: the Fast Track.
You might have noticed the jump here. She moved straight from high value free resources to a high-ticket coaching program at $7,500, with no low or mid-tier in between.
On that call, one offer did the work, and enough women said yes to make it the engine of the whole business.
And for three years, that was the whole story.
The business cleared multiple six figures in each of its first two years, and by the end of 2023 it had crossed a million dollars in total sales since launch.
But the system had a flaw.
She was selling one offer, and that offer had nowhere to go once the client secured their promotion.
She’d built what she now calls a leaky bucket, and the more she tried to grow the business, the harder it became to continually fill it.
So in 2024 she rebuilt the business around a different promise designed around the whole career climb.
The rebuild touched all three stages of the business – how clients arrive, what happens in their first month, and where they go once they’ve won.
The arrival came first.
The one-hour masterclass had been asking women to make a $7,500 decision about a coach they’d known for sixty minutes.
Some said yes, but plenty of them arrived only half-sure, questioning the purchase before the work had a chance to land.
So she stretched the sale across a month, with four weeks of teaching before each masterclass.
This gave the women booking the call time to learn from her, long enough to stop wondering whether she was worth it.
The masterclass gained a job of its own as well.
Each woman now fills out a scorecard on her own career during the session, grading herself against the sixteen levers in Uman’s framework.
Most find gaps they didn’t know existed.
The one-on-one call that served as the sales call now became a review of that scorecard.
The prospect arrives holding a list of her own gaps, in her own scoring, and the Fast Track is the plan to close them.
Then she rebuilt the first thirty days of the $7,500 program around one goal: get every client a visible win fast.
A conversation handled differently.
A boss responding differently.
A micro win that delivers proof inside the first month that the method works.
A client who sees results in thirty days stops watching the clock on her six-month purchase.
And at the far end, where clients used to fall out of the bucket, she built the next stage. Because the promotion isn’t the finish line, it’s a step on the ladder to the next position.
New stakeholders, bigger rooms, a steeper version of the same game.
So a client who wins their promotion now rolls into renewal and alumni paths aimed at the next level up, guided by coaches who have operated there – former VP from Walmart Global Tech, a leader from a Fortune 5 company.
She summed up the whole shift in one line: pain brings them in, possibility keeps them.
By the end of 2024, the business did $1.1 million in a single year.
Around a hundred women had said yes to the Fast Track, roughly three-quarters of a million dollars on its own and seventy cents of every dollar the business earned.
And 92 percent of clients were renewing.
More than 1,100 women had now been through her coaching, with over $5 million in combined salary raises to show for it.
Around the program, two more revenue streams now run.
LinkedIn Learning pays her royalties every year.
And companies, Microsoft among them, pay her to bring the coaching inside their walls.
Career coaches and employers are supposed to sit on opposite sides of the table, but the back end of this business says otherwise.
The Manager Who Never Left
Typically a career coach works for the employee.
But when an employer like Microsoft starts writing her a cheque, it looks like a company funding the other side of its own salary negotiations.
It makes sense once you see what Uman actually built.
Inside every company there’s already a person who is paid to do what she does.
A good manager develops her people.
She tells them what the employer is looking for that the review form leaves out, coaches them through the conversation they’re going to have with the person two levels up, and pushes them toward the stretch project before they feel ready.
She’s essentially teaching them how to be so good at their job they deserve a promotion.
But when one of her people lands the promotion, the conversation keeps going. The subject just changes to the next job on the ladder.
Uman lived on both ends of that relationship at L’Oréal.
She climbed through seven promotions without a manager who could explain the unwritten rules. Then she became the manager who explained them to her own team.
Today she plays that role for women across every company.
Seen that way, the whole 2024 rebuild was one move, not three.
She stopped selling what a recruiter sells, a single placement, and started selling what a manager provides, a career development relationship that rolls forward with every win.
It’s why the move from a single sale to a recurring model has worked so naturally. Nobody thinks their manager is upselling them when the conversation moves to the next level.
And it’s why the employer’s money arrives without friction.
Microsoft invests in staff development every day of the week through its managers.
By hiring Uman, they get that same focus on staff development, backed by the thirteen years she spent developing teams at L’Oréal.
Her clients’ ambition gets pointed up the ladder instead of toward external offers from competitors and the sharpened work stays with the company.
LinkedIn Learning is the same purchase at scale. A corporation buys the course library as staff development and hands it to its people.
A million learners later, Uman is being paid to coach more employees in a week than L’Oréal could have put in front of her in a career.
Four Moves Worth Copying
Uman’s rebuild holds four valuable lessons that are worth taking on board.
1. High ticket pricing needs more time and value up front.
Uman sells nothing between her free content and her $7,500 program, which is unusual.
Typically you would find a low to mid-priced product that ascended the prospect before they were approached with the high ticket product.
Uman found that asking someone to make that jump after a one-hour masterclass was too much, too fast.
So she spread it out.
Four weeks of free teaching now run before the offer appears.
The audience gets real value from her, week after week, before anyone asks for money.
By the time the offer shows up, the buyer has seen enough of her work to know what the program will be like.
If you sell something expensive with nothing underneath it, look at how much value a buyer receives from you before the ask.
If it all has to happen in one hour, the jump is probably too steep.
2. Have them diagnose themselves before the sales call.
Inside the masterclass, each woman fills out a scorecard on her own career, grading herself against Uman’s checklist.
By the end, she can see the gap between where she is and where she wants to be, written in her own scoring.
This way, when the prospect goes to jump on the sales call, the selling is mostly done.
She walks in having already diagnosed the problem, and the call simply reviews her scorecard.
The program is the fix for the gaps she found herself.
Build a way for your buyer to assess where they stand.
A person who finds their own gap doesn’t need convincing that it exists.
3. Use micro wins to cover the gap between payment and result.
A promotion can take months, which can be challenging when someone has just dropped $7,500 and wants to know that they’re getting their money’s worth sooner rather than later.
So Uman rebuilt the first thirty days of her program around micro wins that deliver small results weeks before the promotion happens.
Look at your own offer and find the stretch between the day they pay and the day the real result arrives.
Can you build micro wins into that stretch?
Each one makes the buyer feel the money was well spent while the bigger outcome is still on its way.
4. Turn a one-off sale into a recurring one.
Uman ‘s original model was to sell the prospect on getting a promotion.
Each client won, then left, taking Uman back to zero and forcing her to continually find new clients.
Then she reshaped the offer around the whole career.
This promotion, then the next level, then the one after.
It’s the same shift a software company makes when it stops selling a product once and moves to a subscription.
The customer stays for years, lifetime value climbs, and 92 percent of her clients renew.
The recurring frame also opened a second market.
A coach who develops staff over the long term fits inside corporate budgets, because companies already spend money growing and keeping their people.
Losing a good employee is expensive, so keeping one is worth paying for. Microsoft now pays her to coach its own staff.
Look at what you sell as a one-off and ask what the recurring version would be.
The longer timeframe is worth more on its own, and it can align you with buyers who only spend on long-term outcomes.
Uman spent thirteen years learning how careers actually work, and the lesson she took into business was the same one she taught her clients: the win you just landed is the start of the next climb.