Dubai: For 13 years, Dutch national Margot Visser Dubai-it and chased excellence by pushing her limits in the advertising industry.
She worked with top international brands and ran successful advertising campaigns in Dubai: “I loved it. I was young and very eager to prove my worth, so I happily gave about 60 hours a week to the job, sometimes weekends included. Let’s just say I’ve seen the sun come up in the office more than once, and I carried that devotion like a badge of honour.”
Until one day, “my body caught up with my ambition and I burned out”. It was around the time the COVID-19 pandemic occurred.
Visser received another piece of news at the same time – she was being let go from her job. “When I was told my job would cease to exist because of the pandemic, it took me all of three weeks to decide: this is my sign… I instantly knew I wanted to be close to my family at a time when travel wasn’t going to be easy, and I had just become an aunt, so I wanted to spend time getting to know my niece, too.”
A change of pace
So, at age 40, she packed her bags and moved back into her parents’ house in the Netherlands. It was going to be a temporary arrangement, but Visser ended up staying for well over a year.
She said the hiatus was “healing” – she slowly disengaged from the grind of corporate life, reconnected with her parents and enjoyed deep conversations, and received a diploma in something she loved – photography.
But the slow life didn’t last long. She said: “Then the agency I had worked for in Dubai posted a role in Amsterdam, and I felt the pull. Maybe living with my parents had made me realise I needed to get back to adulting, maybe I missed being able to call myself an advertising executive – I don’t know. But I applied, was hired instantly, and that was my way back into corporate advertising.”
At first, she was back in her element – it felt familiar and exciting. She loved the buzz of onboarding new clients and making brand decisions. “But very soon, I was doing 60-hour weeks again, and I could feel myself slipping back into the same old habits and patterns. Two years in, I sat myself down for an honest conversation and asked: ‘Is this worth it?’ The answer was a clear no.”
So, at 43, Visser left the advertising industry again – but this time, it was her choice. She didn’t have a plan yet, but she knew she couldn’t go back down the same path she had been on for years.
Visser decided to bet on herself, instead. She started her own photography business, The ReBelle Sessions.
But transitioning into entrepreneurship was a challenge. She often found herself frozen with doubt: “It took a lot of work on myself to figure out who I was without the title, the corporate status or the big brands behind me, and to give myself permission to be who I wanted to be, and go after what I really wanted: a business built around life, and not the other way around. That whole journey forced me to re-examine my definition of success, to grieve the woman I left behind and to fully commit to this new identity.”
Visser’s personal experience, however, gave her an unexpected gift – it allowed her to become a more perceptive photographer: “I focused on female entrepreneurs and personal brand shoots, and before taking a single photo, I made it a point to understand the story we were telling. I noticed that a lot of these women didn’t have an answer to the question ‘What do you want to be known for?’ I saw an opportunity in helping women turn their true story into a personal brand.”
The Dubai connection
While her business took off, Visser reconnected online with Eve Cote – a good friend from Dubai. She said: “Eve and I met through a group of bikers in Dubai. We connected through that rebellious, adventurous side of us. We discovered we had a lot in common, started spending more time together – without the bikers – and built a steady friendship.”
The two women grew close quickly, in the city: “I always say that in Dubai, your friends become your family. Living abroad is like a pressure cooker, and the bonds you form under those circumstances are so much more intense than the ones I have with people I’ve known for a lifetime. That’s what Dubai gave me, and I only fully realised it after I left: friendships that hold, across any distance and any amount of time.”
Cote's trajectory in life had an uncanny similarity with Visser’s. She worked for a technology company in Dubai, and eventually moved to the US, where life’s challenges cost her both her job and her home. Visser said: “After 300 job applications and just as many rejections, [Eve] ended up walking dogs to make ends meet. And somewhere between walking dogs and rebuilding herself, she realised she wanted something very different from the second half of her life.”
Cote became an embodiment coach, helping people achieve personal growth and behavioural change through somatic practices, like movement, breathwork, grounding exercises and posture adjustments. Visser said: “The more we talked, the more we saw how beautifully our work complemented each other. I was helping women build brands from their truth, while Eve was helping them connect to their bodies so they could live from it.”
A new business idea began to take shape – one that helped women like Cote and Visser align themselves to their true north. One where they could Dubai-it on their own terms, using their years of experience and knowledge, and turning it into something they called ‘The Audacity Alliance’.
A second coming
Visser said: “It’s a movement and membership for women over 40 who left corporate to start their own business. Women who dared to question the rules they were raised to follow and the definition of success they were told to chase, and who are ready to reclaim their lives and their authority. Because we never want another intelligent, ambitious woman to think there’s only one version of success, or to doubt whether she can go after hers.”
The co-founders use The Audacity Method to help women build the businesses they truly want, through three phases: Excavate – find out who you are underneath “all that conditioning”, Embody – anchor it into your nervous system, and Express – bring it into the world through your brand.
Visser explained why she believes the message of The Audacity Alliance has universal appeal: “We’d both quit the timeline in our 40s after a lifetime of being ‘good girls’, on opposite ends of the world, and we’d both had to figure out who we were without the corporate title. And if it happened to both of us, we knew we couldn’t be the only ones.”
The Alliance is growing – fast. The group currently has representation from Asia, Europe, the US, and Africa. For now, Visser said, the business is completely virtual and remote, with members from all around the world, but it's one she wants to bring back to where her and Eve's journey started: Dubai.
She said: “The Audacity Alliance simply wouldn’t exist without Dubai. It’s where Eve and I met, where we both spent our formative career years and where we learned that, as women, we could go after anything we wanted. So, Dubai runs through this story from the very first day.”
Visser, who currently lives in France, is planning on returning to Dubai in the near future, so she can start a new Dubai-it chapter – this time, as an entrepreneur – and grow The Audacity Alliance. Currently, one in six of her clients live in the emirate: “Dubai has always been a city where women dream big and go after it, so of course our message is landing there… all these women are saying the same thing: we needed this!”
Her own experience with brands, and with strong, career-oriented women in the emirate, have been instrumental in shaping The Audacity Alliance.
Now, she says she hopes to come a full circle, and help others who were in the same position she was in, just a few years ago: “I got to work with some incredible women in senior positions during my time in Dubai, and it taught me that you can go after whatever you want and achieve it. But it took me until 43 to realise there isn’t one version of success, and that it’s totally okay to go after your own – even if it looks different from what most people consider success.”