She Raised $4 Million in Four Weeks. Then Her Own Board Locked Her Out.

Yas Grigaliunas didn't set out to build a company. She set out to raise money for cancer research without asking anyone for money — a garage sale, in 2013, fuelled by a spare bedroom's worth of her daughters' outgrown clothes and toys. It made $15,000 in a day. By 2017 it was $150,000 in a day, and she quit her job with no plan B to build it properly.

She called it the World's Biggest Garage Sale. She called the bigger idea underneath it Circonomy — a word she mashed together years before "circular economy" became a term anyone outside a sustainability conference had heard. Officeworks became a strategic investor and roughly 21% shareholder. The company diverted more than four million kilograms from landfill, built stores in Brisbane and Melbourne, and gave Yas the title of Australia's inaugural Chief Circular Entrepreneur. In late 2021, working from what she called her "capital raise cave" — a cheap COVID-era rental apartment she'd moved into as her marriage ended — she raised $4 million in four weeks.

Then, almost in the same breath, she was locked out of the company she'd built with her own hands. For nine months.

The raise, and the fall that followed it

The timing was brutal by any measure. The $4 million landed in the bank in early 2022. Within 60 days, Yas had moved out of her marital home. She took her first real block of leave since founding the business — two weeks, to get her daughters settled into a new life. When she went to come back to work, an interim CEO had been appointed in her absence, and she wasn't allowed back into her own company.

"I got completely blocked. No, there's the team — no, that you're not good for the company, you're too assertive and aggressive and, you know, the business — like, you need to step back from this now."

She was told, in her words, to "prove her value" — working from home on B2B partnerships while the interim leadership rebuilt the brand, hired a costly technology platform she was never consulted on, and let go of neurodiverse staff she had deliberately built her team around. She wasn't allowed to attend a family barbecue planned to launch the new brand name she herself had registered five years earlier.

It was her fifteen-year-old daughter, overhearing one of the calls, who named it first: "Mum, that is bullying and he is not speaking to you properly." A friend, hearing the situation over drinks, put it more bluntly and handed Yas a lawyer's number on the spot. What followed was the process of a founder proving, with a shareholders' agreement and legal counsel, that she still owned the thing she'd built.

Two truths at once

Yas doesn't tell this part of the story as a simple villain narrative, and that restraint is part of what makes it land. She holds two things as true simultaneously: that she was, by her own admission, not always her best self under that much pressure — and that the people who blocked her almost certainly believed, in the moment, that they were doing the right thing.

"Two truths can be true at the same time... I feel like at their core they thought that they were doing the right thing to support me by giving me a little bit of space to manage a big life change. But what happened in that is it wasn't space, it was a big displace."

Eventually, with legal support and her rights as founder-director, she got back into her seat. But the nine months had cost real money — she estimates roughly a million dollars of the $4 million was spent on decisions she wasn't part of, including three different marketing agencies commissioned to design a logo for the rebrand before she was allowed back in the room.

The $6,000 phone call

The company traded on. A new CEO was appointed — on a salary Yas didn't agree with but was overruled on — and the first year, by her account, went well. The second did not. It ended with a fractional CFO calling to tell her the company, which had turned over half a million dollars the month before, had $6,000 left in the bank.

What followed was a scramble familiar to anyone who has read a Safe Harbour report: a CEO going AWOL for four days and returning with a board paper proposing to remove the founder and the chair; a termination; an interim 100 days where Yas, back as managing director, worked from 5am to midnight rebuilding the business from its core while simultaneously being formally investigated over a complaint filed by the CEO she'd just helped remove — an investigation her own major investor's legal counsel offered, for free, to run.

A twenty-million-dollar partnership with a major global retailer was on the table. A $200,000 government grant had just landed, ten days before the end. None of it was enough. The liquidator who eventually took the company gave her one piece of advice she still carries: the best business owners stay, and the worst disappear. She stayed for another 30 days after liquidation, making sure every remaining staff member was paid, and left the Brisbane warehouse "spotless, empty, and perfectly clean" before handing back the keys.

What she didn't lose

Yas rang every investor by phone, personally, before the liquidation notice went out publicly. She lost her marriage. She lost the company. She is still, four years on, paying off the legal bills from fighting to get back into it.

She landed at Videopro — the company she'd worked at two decades earlier, whose current CEO she'd hired as a junior when he started. He heard, secondhand at a gym, that "everything is fucked," and told a mutual friend there was always a job for her. No negotiation, no pitch, no proving her value twice.

"I lost my company, but I didn't lose myself."

It's the line she's built her second act around — on stage, in the corporate role she now holds, and in the two-part conversation this piece draws from. Her advice to founders who find themselves staring down administration or liquidation isn't a five-step framework. It's smaller and harder than that: if it doesn't feel right, it probably isn't. Know that your real trust circle is a fraction of the size you think it is. And the version of you that shows up under maximum pressure is not, on its own, the whole truth about who you are.