what's up!!

I was twelve when my parents lost our home. Foreclosure, the whole thing, gone. They almost didn't make it through that either, and it took me years to understand how close we came to losing more than a home. I watched two people fight for something worth keeping and win. I decided pretty young I wanted a different kind of life, one where money wasn't the thing deciding everything else. So I worked. From sixteen until I had my daughter, I always had more than one job going. That was just how it was. I didn't know there was another way to do it yet.

My daughter was born in February of 2020. The world shut its doors in March. And in December, I lost my dad. My hero. My best friend. To COVID, in the middle of a year that had already asked more of me than I thought I had.

My dad was everything to me. My hero, my voice of reason, the person I went to for advice on anything that mattered. He was strong willed, stubborn in the best way, and simply the best dad in the entire world.

He believed deeply in this country and the everyday people in it, supporting veterans through donations and causes close to his heart, and speaking up for what he believed mattered, loudly, without apology, whether or not it was popular to say. He didn't have a platform strategy or a content calendar, he just said what he believed and never once softened it to make someone comfortable. My brother calls it humble conviction, and that's the best anyone's ever described him. He was respected by people who didn't agree with him at all, which is rare and getting rarer. Strangers still tell me how much he impacted their lives. That's the thing he actually handed down to me. Not a business. Not an industry. The refusal to perform as anyone other than myself. That's what I bring into everything I teach, showing up exactly as you are is not a weakness in this space, it's the whole strategy.

I'm 33, from Buffalo, and yes, die hard Bills fan, don't test me during football season. I'm a mom, and my family is the reason for all of this, not the thing I'm sacrificing to build it. I also work a full time job that I take seriously and genuinely love, and I'm proof you don't have to hate your job or be desperate to quit it to build something online. Not everyone in this space is trying to escape their life, some of us just want to make an impact in more than one direction. I've had my own pivotal moments in the online space too, ones that shaped how I show up and what I actually believe about building something real instead of chasing a highlight reel. I've still got a long way to go and a lot I want to accomplish. I don't think I'm supposed to have it all figured out yet. But I know exactly why I'm building, and I know success doesn't look the same for everyone, which is the whole reason I do this the way I do.