From Corporate to Entrepreneur

In a nutshell…joy.

I vividly remember very early on in my career sitting at my desk and telling my project manager. “I’m not going to be here long ya know.” She was another sassy black woman whom I had gotten pretty close with. Obviously, I knew I could share such a bold statement with her without fear of being fired. At that time, I was most certainly NOT ready to lose my consistent income. If I were ever going to actually leave, it would be on my terms… so I planned.

My young daughter at the time had taken a liking to acting, and she was pretty good at it. We would travel the country auditioning, taking classes, and she even got a chance to film a few major projects. While I sat at my office day to day, I had plans of moving away with my daughter. “We’re moving to L.A.! You just wait!” is what I would tell my boss. While she was supportive of my daughter, she responded, “Ok girl. Well until you do, get back to work.”

I never really felt like my purpose was to work a 9-5. It’s just something about that structured routine EVERY SINGLE DAY that just did not sit well with me. After working a few part-time jobs while in school, I also knew that I didn’t want to work holidays and weekends, so retail likely wasn’t it either. I wanted to make money, and lots of it! I also wanted freedom. When I was a kid, I imagined myself wearing power suits and carrying a briefcase to work like the boss black women I saw on TV. When I got older, I still wanted to be a boss, but not behind a desk.

I’ve always had a passion for performing arts and entrepreneurship but didn’t have a clear idea of what that looked like for me. I love going to live performances or restaurants where they have a live band. I remember early on trying to create lyrics to love songs. It was then that I felt like I had a gift in writing. Ultimately, I don’t know how I ended up as an engineer.

Actually, I have an idea about that. My older sister was an engineer. She went to a high school for engineering and majored in Mechanical Engineering in undergrad. She’d finished her studies, moved away, and had a great job in her field. She would always look out for me as her little sister, and even got me my own phone line in high school. Oh baby, you couldn’t tell me nothin! I thought my sister was RICH! I said whatever she’s doing, I want to do it. So here I was, graduating from my performing arts middle school, and enrolling in that same high school for engineering. I graduated and followed her footsteps to college majoring in, you guessed it, Mechanical Engineering. I even tried to convince myself that it was such a broad field, I could pursue any career with that background. Yet I was hired for my first internship for a major company as an engineer.

I lost sight of whatever else I was interested in after having my daughter the summer before senior year in college. My focus was to get out and get to work. That’s exactly what I did too. I had a job waiting on me when I graduated, and I’ve been in corporate ever since.

Over the past 17 years, I’ve worked in corporate, and I’ve always told myself this would be the seed to my entrepreneurial life. I in no way will ever criticize or regret a corporate job as it has afforded me a great life for my family. I just think I got side-tracked and lost sight of the end goal, which was to get out. Over the span of my career, I’ve experienced two lengthy layoffs. In hindsight, I believe those were doors that were closed to get me back to my goal. However, I beat them down to no end until I landed another corporate role. Many times, I wonder where I would be had I channeled that energy then to entrepreneurship. I tried a few things on the side, but nothing really motivated me leave corporate.

At the height of the pandemic, shortly after we had been sent home to work remotely, I lost my grandmother. I spent a great deal of time grieving, but also reflecting on her spunky attitude and just the importance of living a fulfilling life. One of my top goals was always to be a mom and have the flexibility to be home with my children. I decided to start a YouTube channel to document our lives and have home movies to look back on. I always thought it was super cool when I’d see people watching old family videos. I began shooting activities of my family around the house. Then I thought, ok now what? Who is going to watch this? How can I tell my friends about this? That led me to creating an Instagram account.

I had no clue what I was doing, but a friend of mine told me there was lots of money in blogging. I created a business account and searched for successful black influencers who I could learn from. As a mom of 5 and already almost 15 years into my career, I didn’t have time to play around with my brand. I wanted to do two three things well:

1. Grow my community
2. Make an impact
3. Make money

I caught on quickly with working with brands for exchange opportunities, but I wanted to make money. I began monetizing through affiliate marketing, sharing links via social media, my blog, and sending them directly to friends and family. By Q4, I was starting to make money with brands.

In 2009, I wrote down a goal to retire by age 40. In 2019, I had no idea how that would even be possible. By the end of 2022, through prayer and faith, I did (and continue to do) all of 3 things I set out to do with my brand. Now, at the age of 40, I’m home; living dreams manifested over a decade ago. It took over a decade reach financial goals in corporate that I’ve surpassed in a year of walking in my purpose. Not only am I receiving the freedom that I prayed for, but I’m able to work with my family. A dream deferred but not denied.

My Amazon storefront contains a few books that I’ve collected along the way which have been pivotal in my journey.

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Special thanks to my husband, family, and friends who have supported me along this journey. I absolutely would NOT be here without my tribe.

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