The Book Every Ambitious Woman Should Read This Year
Success stories often arrive neatly packaged, polished and simplified in hindsight. What makes How to Make Your First Million by beauty entrepreneur and mother of two, Maria Hatzistefanis feel refreshingly different is its honesty. This is not a manifesto promising overnight wealth, but a practical, energising guide built on risk, resilience and reinvention.
Hatzistefanis — founder and CEO of cult skincare brand Rodial, creator of NIP+FAB, British Fashion Council patron and investor on Dragons’ Den Greece — built her business from a basement studio flat in the late 1990s without external investment. Her journey includes rejection, near-bankruptcy and constant recalibration, experiences she shares here with surprising candour. The result is less a traditional business book and more a modern playbook for ambition.
Strategy Over Shortcuts
At its core, How to Make Your First Million argues that wealth is rarely built from a single breakthrough moment. Instead, she champions a multi-layered approach: diversified income streams, visibility as currency and the confidence to remain visible even when outcomes feel uncertain. Real life examples including partnerships with big brands and names including Kylie Jenner that Rodial have experienced are neatly translated to founders operating at perhaps a less glamourous level but with the same confidence and practical approach to achieve results.
For readers accustomed to polished entrepreneurial narratives, her openness about failure is particularly compelling. Missteps, stalled growth and moments of doubt are positioned not as detours but as necessary stages of building something meaningful. It’s practical advice delivered without illusion — success, she insists, is cumulative.
Visibility, Confidence and the Modern Career
One of the book’s strongest themes is visibility. She makes a persuasive case that professional success today is tied not only to skill but to presence — showing up, speaking openly about achievements and learning to occupy space confidently.
For many women, particularly mothers returning to or reshaping their careers, this message feels quietly powerful. The book acknowledges ambition alongside real life, recognising that building wealth often happens alongside family responsibilities, evolving identities and shifting priorities. Rather than advocating relentless hustle, she encourages strategic bravery: being willing to feel uncomfortable, take calculated risks and say yes before certainty arrives.
Practicality That Makes It Stick
Each chapter ends with a concise “playbook” — actionable steps that translate big ideas into realistic next moves. The book concludes with 100 practical tips, covering everything from networking and negotiation to diversification and long-term financial thinking.
It’s this structure that makes the book unusually usable. You finish chapters feeling not overwhelmed, but energised and equipped with small, achievable shifts rather than abstract motivation. She repeatedly emphasises that the first million rarely comes from one source alone, a perspective that feels especially relevant in today’s portfolio-career landscape.
Why It Resonates Now
What makes this book particularly timely is its tone. There is glamour here which is unsurprising from a beauty industry founder but it’s balanced by grit, realism and a clear understanding that confidence is often built alongside fear, not in its absence.
Reading it feels less like being instructed and more like being encouraged by someone who has already navigated the uncertainty many readers are facing. By the final pages, the prevailing feeling isn’t pressure but momentum.
You close the book wanting to start — or perhaps restart — something which is the often the hardest part.