I've never had one straight career. Every time my life needed something different, I rebuilt around it instead of forcing the old model to fit.

Where it started

I started as a pediatric speech-language pathologist, until a move to the mountains of western North Carolina meant my license didn't transfer, and recruitment was what happened to be available. I ended up the first recruiter a small tech consultancy had ever hired, seven employees, under $3 million in revenue, so I built the systems for that department from scratch. My CEO noticed, pulled me into the rest of the business, and by the time I left we were 28 employees and over $5 million in revenue. Somewhere in there, I became COO.

Where it broke

Then I had my daughter, and none of it held.

I was still COO when she was born. I went back to work assuming I could perform the way I always had. I couldn't, and it took me years of burnout to understand why. I hadn't built the infrastructure, for myself or inside the business, that I needed to show up in the capacity I was actually in now.

The part that took me longest to accept: I wasn't the founder. I could see exactly what needed to change, and I still couldn't reshape the whole business around what I actually needed. Somebody else owned that decision.

So I left, and built my own thing, one that let me pick my daughter up from school instead of around a version of me that stopped existing the day she was born. Once I was doing that for myself, I saw how badly other moms needed the exact same thing.

Postpartum is brutal for high-achieving women in a specific way. We go back to work assuming we can perform the way we always have. We can't. Once you actually accept that, the real question shows up: what's next?

That's where I come in.

The thing nobody told me: my business and my life were never two separate problems. They were one system, and I'd only ever built infrastructure for half of it.

I ran my business like nothing had changed for longer than I want to admit. That's exactly why I build the roadmap now, for both sides of it, before you have to find out the hard way too.