Paige Wilhide was running businesses before most people finish middle school — elementary school art classes, makeup parties for other kids — and started acting professionally at age nine. That early comfort with both commerce and performance shows up directly in the two very different things she’s built as an adult.
In 2015, she founded a video marketing agency that has since helped hundreds of entrepreneurs grow their online visibility — straightforward, results-driven client work. Alongside it, during a personal recovery program for love addiction, she wrote Breakup Addict, a one-woman show built from her own lessons about romantic relationships. She’s since performed it 26 times at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, one of the largest arts festivals in the world — a genuinely rare crossover between marketing-agency founder and touring solo performer.
Both sides of the work feed a coaching practice she runs on top of them, helping clients live more expressed, fulfilled lives. Wilhide has described her own approach to building all three at once plainly: “I am constantly finding creative solutions to problems, pivoting, trying things out, seeing what works.” It’s the same instinct whether the problem is a client’s ad funnel or her own second act on stage.
The payoff, for her, isn’t really about ticket sales or client retainers. It’s what happens after a performance: “When someone comes up to me after a show and tells me they saw their story in mine or feel less alone — that is the reward for me.” For a founder who’s spent her whole life comfortable running a business and performing on a stage at the same time, that’s less a contradiction than the whole point.