Vanessa Castillo Built a Creative Agency, Then a Whole Mindset Movement Around It

Vanessa Castillo graduated from the University of Miami in 2012 with a degree in Visual Communications and a second major in Art, and spent the years after doing freelance creative work before deciding to formalize it into a real business structure. In 2015, that freelance practice became VCV Agency — Various Creative Visionaries — a Coral Gables-based agency helping brands and entrepreneurs build their online presence through branding, content marketing, web development, and community building.

The agency wasn’t the end of the story. In 2018, Castillo started what began as a casual talk show and, by its third episode, had become The Rich Girl Mindset — now a full movement with curated events, masterminds, a book club, and membership offerings built around mindset and abundance. It’s grown into a genuinely separate brand from VCV, one she runs alongside client work rather than instead of it.

Castillo has been blunt about what she credits for both businesses working: “Being myself. Being authentic always works best. Bullshit reeks like an oil leak.” It’s a plainer version of a lesson a lot of founders take years to learn about their own personal brand.

She’s also been specific about what “rich” actually means in her second company’s name, heading off the obvious assumption: “The ‘rich’ in The Rich Girl Mindset isn’t about monetary richness… the real meaning is that we all realize we are already rich within.” Whatever you make of the framing, the business results are concrete — a decade-old agency and a second, independently branded community built on top of it, both still running.