Former Loose Women star Andrea McLean opens up about the failed business venture that led to her losing her home, her savings, and her stability.
The life of Andrea McLean, once a prominent face on the ITV daytime show Loose Women , took a dramatic and unexpected turn that led her from the heights of television fame to the depths of financial desperation.
For thirteen years, McLean enjoyed a successful career as an anchor, earning a six-figure salary and maintaining a high profile in the media industry. However, her desire to pivot toward entrepreneurship led her to leave the show in 2020 to launch a business venture with her husband, Nick Feeney. They created a company called This Girl Is On Fire, which began as a life-advice blog and a shopping platform dedicated to female-owned businesses.
Driven by passion and a belief in their vision, the couple decided to forgo external investment, choosing instead to fund the operation through personal savings, loans, and the remortgaging of their home. This decision set the stage for a financial collapse that would eventually strip them of nearly everything they owned. The emotional weight of this decline was captured in a poignant moment two years ago when McLean discovered an old wallet containing sixty pounds.
For a woman who had once earned hundreds of thousands, this small sum felt like a windfall, leading her and her husband to treat their children to a Chinese takeaway, a simple luxury they had been unable to afford for years. This experience highlighted the stark reality of her new life, where bank accounts were not just empty but existed in the negative.
As the business evolved, McLean and Feeney attempted to transition their blog into a subscription-based app that offered masterclasses on confidence, sleep, and parenting. Despite having a large existing readership, the technical execution of the app became a disaster. The couple poured twenty thousand pounds of their own money into the project every month, while Feeney sold off his property portfolio to keep the venture afloat.
The breaking point arrived in August 2022, when the app was rejected by the Apple App Store because the team had failed to comply with updated privacy label requirements. This failure was compounded by McLean contracting long Covid, which created a bottleneck in the company's operations and rendered her unable to work effectively. By March 2023, the business folded. The financial fallout was catastrophic.
McLean describes a period of ignoring unpaid bills until bailiffs eventually arrived at her door. To settle the staggering debts, which amounted to hundreds of thousands of pounds, she was forced to sell her Surrey home for one million pounds, cash out her pension early, and sell off almost all her personal belongings, including clothes and furniture. Most heartbreakingly, she sold two engagement rings that she had intended to leave to her children in her will.
The road to recovery was paved with professional rejection and personal hardship. At fifty-three years old, McLean found herself virtually unemployable in an industry that had quickly moved on. Despite her previous fame, she faced a cold reality where brands dropped her and former industry colleagues suggested that her star had faded. In a desperate attempt to find any source of income, she applied for a job at Starbucks, only to be rejected.
This period of invisibility and struggle left her feeling isolated and ashamed, sitting in the dark and hoping that her financial ruin would remain a secret. However, she eventually decided that the only way to move forward was to be completely transparent about her experiences. This resolve led to the publication of her book, Shameless, which details the intricacies of her financial downfall and the lessons learned from the collapse of her business.
Today, McLean and Feeney live in a rented apartment in southern Spain, having finally settled their debts by 2025. Her journey serves as a cautionary tale about the risks of over-leveraging personal assets in the pursuit of an entrepreneurial dream and the resilience required to rebuild a life from scratch after a public and private fall from grace
Andrea Mclean Financial Loss Business Failure Loose Women Shameless Book
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