Now, her business brings in over $100 million a year after quitting her job at 24 and starting it from her parents' garage in Australia.

As a child, Jane imagined starting her day by donning a power suit and heading to a prestigious corporate finance job in a towering city building.

The CEO of Showpo, an online fashion retail company, is a 38-year-old who generates over $100 million in annual revenue, as per CNBC Make It's review of documents.

Lu, who runs a nine-figure business and is a judge on "Shark Tank Australia," has a following of almost 400,000 users across her social media platforms. However, her journey to success was not straightforward.

Humble beginnings

As the sole child in an immigrant family, Lu was raised in a household that had recently relocated from China to Australia at the age of eight.

Lu, upon her family's arrival in Australia, was unable to communicate in English, necessitating her parents to work multiple odd jobs in order to establish their new life in the country.

"You don't realize you're poor until someone points it out," she said to CNBC Make It. "My mom, who works as a cleaner for some of the families of the kids at my school, made me realize my own financial situation."

She was the only non-English speaker at school and couldn't use the bathroom on her first day because she didn't know how to ask for its location.

Feeling different from her peers left Lu with a chip on her shoulder.

5 to 9 after the 9 to 5

Competitive and driven by nature, Lu has always been an overachiever.

In her first year of university, she secured a job at KPMG, one of the "Big 4" accounting firms. She worked there for approximately two and a half years before transitioning to a corporate finance role at Ernst & Young, all while managing her academic responsibilities.

In 2009, one of Lu's friends presented her with a business idea: a pop-up store concept called "Fat Boye Group."

During the day, Lu worked in her corporate finance job, while she pursued her business in the evenings.

"She would set up and pack down the brick and mortar pop up store on a daily basis, which required a lot of manual work," she explained.

She utilized her parents' garage as a storage space for business supplies and spent her free time distributing business cards with her partner, promoting their pop-up concept to suppliers, and managing the store.

Quitting her corporate job in secret

As she discovered her love for running a business, Lu also started feeling increasingly unhappy in her corporate job.

""I used to view my corporate job as a source of financial security, but now I see it as a prison sentence," she said."

During the height of the global financial crisis, Lu's workload increased as her managers were being let go.

In June 2010, after facing numerous challenges, Lu decided to leave her corporate job. The final straw was spending half a day fixing a circular reference in an excel sheet that caused the document to crash.

She said, 'I'm like, "Oh my god, you have one life and now I'm three hours closer to death, and what have I done? I've done something so meaningless as to remove this circular reference,"'.

"I couldn't reveal to my parents that I had left my job to run a temporary clothing store," Lu admitted.

For months, Lu would wake up early, put on a suit, have breakfast with her parents, and commute into the city with her mom as if she was still working in her corporate finance role. However, after her mom went to work, Lu would sneak off to spend her entire day working on Fat Boye Group.

Hitting rock bottom

One month after Lu left her job to focus on the company, her business partner returned from a trip and decided that she was no longer interested in the startup life.

Lu stated, "I don't want to continue with this anymore, I don't want to be poor anymore, I don't enjoy the startup lifestyle. I've been job hunting while away and I'm returning to work."

In July 2010, Lu shut down Fat Boye Group because she lacked the confidence to run the business by herself.

"A month ago, I had everything my parents and I had worked towards: financial stability, job security, and a great job," she said. However, she is now facing $60,000 in debt due to student loans, business losses, and other financial challenges.

Lu was devastated because he failed, felt embarrassed and ashamed, and couldn't find another job due to the global financial crisis.

From $60,000 in debt to $100 million a year business

Two months after being unemployed, Lu sought employment and contacted her only friend who owned a business. However, instead of providing her with a job, he suggested connecting her with someone in the online fashion retail industry.

Lu met up with an unnamed girl and they hit it off immediately.

After a few too many glasses of red wine, we came up with a name and concept for the store during our third meeting with her. The next night, I came home still drunk and built the website.

In September 2010, the new business partners chose the name "Show Pony," which was later shortened to "Showpo." They completed their first photoshoot and found suppliers that weekend. Within one week, they made their first sale.

At the time, Lu was still in debt, so they couldn't afford a traditional supplier or traditional marketing and had to get creative.

Lu stated that traditional marketing for the first business depleted its funds, leading to the need for social media marketing for Showpo, which ultimately contributed to its success.

The fact that Fat Boye Group was a brick-and-mortar business, I realized it wasn't scalable, and that's why Showpo was online first," she said. "That's the best crash course in business — when you actually fail at something, because I think that's when you really learn.

Sales began declining after about fifteen months, and Lu's business partner decided to leave.

""She was running her own business, which was doing better and growing, so she decided to tap out by the time the sales started getting worse and worse," said Lu."

In December 2011, Lu bought out her business partner and became the sole owner of Showpo. In the first month of running the business alone, Lu was able to double the company's sales to $9,000 a month, and two years later, Showpo hit a $1 million run rate.

Revealing the secret

Lu concealed from her parents that she had left her corporate finance job while building Showpo for the first two years. However, as the company expanded rapidly by 2012, she felt compelled to reveal the truth.

"Lu recounted the time they had half a million dollars in stock and thought, "Okay, worst-case scenario, I can sell it all and start another business," which was a "pinch me moment" because it meant no matter what happened, they had shifted the trajectory of their career."

On Father's Day, Lu took her parents to a renowned restaurant in the Sydney landmark, Center Point Tower, and announced the news.

Lu stated that they would purchase their coworkers a new car and pay off their mortgage, as they had only owned secondhand vehicles up until then.

"They were stunned to learn that Lu had been pretending to work at her corporate job, when in reality, she had quit years ago," she said.

"They said it's impossible. You were leaving home to work, and it took a while to convince them," she said, but when the shock passed, they were very happy.

Lu is a mother of two, and her husband has joined her in working on Showpo full-time.

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