The Pivotal Moment - Saying No, So You Can Say Yes to a Better Life.

I’ll never forget, we were driving over to our favorite breakfast place, The Purple Finch, in Bedford, NH with our baby son in the backseat, and I looked at my husband and said, “I don’t want to do this anymore.”?

Ollie had just turned 15 months and I had missed his first steps because I had been pulling another 60+ hour week running our content marketing agency. Our babysitter was there, and as wonderful as she was, I knew it wasn’t a defining moment in her life. It had been a stressful week, balancing the love of client work with the need to scale a service model company, and I was run down and had enough. I said no. I said no to the comfortable income we had, the 60+ hours per week we were working, and to the life we were building that didn't include our top priority - our growing family.

Just 16 months before that, we lost our biggest client because he found out I was pregnant. He thought that when I had the baby, our agency work would flounder and he would lose the one-on-one service I personally gave his business. He refused to have anyone else take my place, even just for a month or two while I was with my baby, and for the next few years the last words he said to me echoed in my ears,

“Good luck with your baby.”

… strongly spoken, the moment after he fired us.?

This led me to run my business over the next year in secrecy. We kept landing clients and were flourishing, but I never told our clients I was pregnant. Luckily the clients were in California, and you couldn’t tell from the chest up the blessed state I was in.?

When it was time for me to give birth to my son, it took 3 days of labor. We told our clients that “a family emergency” occurred and that our team would handle everything in my absence. The morning after I had my beautiful baby boy, I was on the phone with one of my clients in the hospital chair. The stress was real.

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That day, at the Purple Finch, my husband and I discussed how we would offload our clients to other agencies, and what our next steps would be. It was a pivotal moment, and the unknown awaited us.?

Six months later, we moved to NY, bought a house to live near my brother’s family, and my parents, with ZERO income and a static nest egg. Every dollar we spent was taken from our limited savings.?

I posted in one of my women’s entrepreneurship groups on Facebook and asked, “If you had $X in savings and wanted to earn enough income to stay home with your kids, what would you do?” Of course I received the inspirational, “follow your dreams” replies, until someone said, “start an Amazon FBA business”. I paused. What was an Amazon FBA business?

And so the journey began.? It took courage and it took risk.?

There are many women in the position I was in who were fired because they were pregnant (maybe you’re one of them). The difference was, I owned a business and was able to go out and land more clients even when one fired me. It didn’t take the job search, months of interviewing - I owned my destiny. After a month or so, and a little networking, we had more than replaced the income of that one lost client.?

In my opinion JOBS are more risky than owning a business.

Reread that.

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Fast forward seven years after that moment, I now know that owning an Amazon FBA business is an EASIER and more SCALABLE, solution than 99% of businesses women own today. At the peak of my business, I was working around 4 hours a week. Below is the revenue I generated at the end of year one from Amazon:

Going from $0 to $760,817.52 in 12 months, working 84% LESS hours than when I owned an agency.

I did this WITHOUT using 99% of what I did for my agency clients.??

The reason this is my first post in my series is because it’s important to understand that owning a business, with the right knowledge, is LESS risky than a job. Understanding that YOU can learn these skills and create the life you want for yourself and your family is DOABLE. But what stops most people is the perception that it is RISKIER to own a business than to have a job and they get paralyzed before they even start.?

The approach I’m going to show you will help you set clear goals, take CALCULATED risks, and have a financial and business roadmap in place so you can manage the biggest blocker - your own self doubt and anxiety.

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So far, here are the next few newsletter topics mapped out (still developing the rest):?

#3 Moms Get Help - Build Your Tribe - No, Your Husband isn’t it.

#4 Your Dream Life Strategy: Where are you now, Where do you want to be, How do you get there? NOW IS THE TIME TO START.

#5 CYA or Need to Knows As you Go Along

#6 Identifying Opportunities on Amazon In any Economy

#7 Brand and Product Positioning

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Disclaimer: The steps outlined in the following newsletters will not go into specific details in how I launched the Spark Ink brand, nor will it go into details regarding the greeting card industry. I am under a non-compete/confidentiality agreement with Boosted Commerce for 5 years, that I respect in full (they are a great company to exit with - which we will also talk about).?

I will be outlining the steps, and showing general examples to empower you to learn and have a proven process to follow, maximizing your chances of success.