june 23, 2025
When The Wind Gets Knocked Out of Your Sails…And, You Run A Business?
As a service-based business owner for 14 years, I was able to say that I finally reached one of my dreams last year, in 2024. It was something I worked towards, saved towards, and intentionally planned for many years. I was able to take a sabbatical/satellite office time in my favorite city, since I was 16 years old: Paris. It was everything I was hoping it would be, and then some. It was a pinnacle of success for me, reaching this goal. I was on top of the world…until I wasn’t.
I was back stateside after my three month stint in Paris, and only about a week and a half in, when I got the bone chilling, soul crushing news…that my baby sister passed away, suddenly, from a heart attack at age 45. No warning, no signs.
Pai cpa Pllc
Nesha Pai, CPA
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NESHA PAI, CPA
PAI CPA PLLC
This call came in as I was sitting on the beach, relaxing with my summer book. I was there because it was the day before my son’s 25th birthday, and we were on our annual golf beach trip celebrating this joyous occasion. The news knocked the wind out of my sails in a way that I wanted to be swallowed up by the sand that day. I will never forget that moment in time, as it is frozen in my memory.
Being that my sister was the caretaker for my elderly parents, lived right behind them, and had two young children, it was very overwhelming to help pick up the immediate pieces. I live 3 hours away from them and had to drive back and forth all summer long, splitting the weeks with my twin brother. I lived on auto-pilot mode, treating the tasks of everything from her funeral to changing all of the legal documents as a project. Three months into this arrangement, I was about to taper off and come back to my home in Charlotte to be able to rest and grieve on my own. I wanted to take the rest of the slow summer to dive into my work and stay busy to keep moving forward and not get sucked down into a black hole of grief and sadness. The very last week I was at my parents’ home, I received another blindsiding phone call…I learned that I had been diagnosed with (stage 1) Invasive Ductal Carcinoma (breast cancer).
I went from one tragic event, to another. I remember walking into my parents’ family room delivering the news. I will never forget the look on my poor parents’ faces and how my dad told me, crying, “We can’t lose you too.” There I went, putting my grief on hold to turn cancer into a project. I immediately created a spreadsheet of what I needed to do to beat this. And, by the grace of God, I was able to fight it and beat it within 4 months. Getting cancer is like having a full time job, and I was one of the lucky ones to have caught it early enough that my treatment was not as heavy as the later stage ones. I rang the bell on December 23, 2024. Cancer took up the rest of my year.
I am fortunate to have a fully remote business with a remote staff. I was technically a pioneer in outsourced bookkeeping back in 2011, when I started my firm, and I wanted to create a company that offered me flexibility in hours and location. The truth is, I couldn’t afford office rent. At the time, I had no idea how insanely valuable this business model would be for all of life’s curveballs.
The key to overcoming adversity as a leader is to first notify your team of what has happened. In both situations, I immediately contacted my staff. It is imperative to let your staff know what is going on in your life, so that they can not only be compassionate and understanding, but also know that you need to lean on them more than ever in those situations. Being open and vulnerable is the key to having your team’s full support.
In addition to letting me team know, I also let our client base know. Being real really gets buy in and trust with your clients. In letting them know what I was personally going through, I comforted them in knowing their accounts would still be handled and that I would be available as much as possible for any needs.
I was able to keep the company running with me being away a lot over the course of last year. We already had documented processes and software with workflow tasks set up and it is imperative to have both of these in place. Using software to leverage any kind of automation or workflow is key. It provided for seamless service and nothing changed in our service and production. Make sure you have your processes documented and that you use software to assist in making things efficient. I also have an excellent team. That makes all the difference. Your team can make you or break you. My team picked up any slack and made sure they protected me.
Most importantly, other than your business, you have to focus on and take care of you. You have to give yourself grace and love through any hard moment. You must believe in yourself and know that whatever you are in is temporary. It is important to focus on the life vision you have created for yourself. It needs to be on the forefront of your mind when any big life storm comes (and they will), so that your storms won’t shake you. They will detour you, but they will never break you. This also applies to having faith. Your faith needs to be rooted firmly (whatever that is for you), so that the storms can’t shake you.
A coach once told me, “You can go there (have a pity party), but you cannot stay there”. So, allow yourself the downtime to process and heal, but know that your life is worth so much more than any obstacle that comes your way.
June 17, 2025
A Tale of Woe, Show Dogs, and Great Lighting.
I think everyone here knows this, but my day job is working as a Communications Director for the Knoxville Entrepreneur Center. Emails, content calendars, lots of Canva, and always running out of business cards when I meet 75 people a week. If you go to the website there you will find a large picture of me and my team awarding a startup $10,000 because they were voted “best idea” from our pitch competition earlier this year. In that photo I am making the silliest face of all time. It is my job to edit our site and honestly maybe I should choose a different photo, but that is exactly how I feel about entrepreneurship.
I love the feeling we all get in our tummies when we have a genuinely good idea that could actually work..?…. and also, make enough money to eventually support ourselves and our family?…?.. and EVEN potentially support others as well??!? That’s an exciting feeling. Especially the making money and being able to support ourselves part huh?
musician
Kelsi Walker
listen to her new album!!
kelsi walker
MUSICIAN
published in conjunction
with her Substack
And yet..
I am..
An artist.
Woe is me.
Dramatic and reader, I kid you... It is actually the freaking best. I BELIEVE in something. So much so that I will probably do it even if I don’t make money off of it because the highs are HIGH. Don’t get me wrong- I’ve made ~some~ money (shoutout to every Dolly Parton cover gig I’ve ever done), but when you break it down the numbers really harsh your vibe.
I’ve learned during my 2.5 years working with small businesses that the more money you have accessible to you, the more options you have, and the faster you might be able to grow. So… Woe? We shall see.
What does an entrepreneur with their back against the wall do?? With not enough resources, exposure, or money??.. We get inventive baby! Which brings me to my album release show a couple weeks ago.
If you didn’t know I released an LP Record. 12 pretty songs! Making music is my night job.
I had been planning an album release show for years and all of a sudden it was time to decide actual decisions like time and place?...yikes. And I was thinking small. I was thinking of things I’d already done and playing it safe. My partner asked me why I wasn’t thinking bigger and to be honest I was scared to believe in myself. Most days I do and every day I believe that art can still heal us all and make us a better, more empathetic society, but believing in myself enough to invest in myself?… terrible. But she was right. I wasn’t trying to grow I was trying to survive. I told her I would commit to something bigger if she helped.
p.s.
this is why you surround yourself with people
who see how big you are
and push you to be even bigger than that.
So began the production of the Here and Here Before Album Release Show or as all of our calendar invites read, HAHBARS. Luckily for me, my partner, Emily is a trained badass actor with years of production under her belt. She was our executive producer, trailed by myself and we were able to get the best in the game on our team.. our friends. Zooming in from London to help with ticket sales and logistics, Ethan Graham with First Take Co. Our friends Chris and Sarah joined the team and immediately hopped right into the mix. If you click on any of these names you will notice they are all theatre people… Hire theatre people! They literally are trained in making magic happen.
I had produced Chris’s solo show, Hot Nostalgia, last November and we had assembled a very similar team for that show and had recorded it live like a comedy special. Chris started asking why we weren’t recording my show and it was a great question. I knew that my reach as an artist in my local scene is good, but I have so much room for improvement beyond that. I needed to use this opportunity to highlight what growth in other markets could look like. Also, as a Comms Director I fully know the price of having go-to content in the bank. We decided that recording the show live was a worthy investment to make, but I really wanted to capture the best, so that took hiring the best… and the expenses were adding up, but I was thinking big and ~DREAMING AGAIN~ As a team we worked on hypotheticals, budgets, and ticket margins. We needed to continue being crafty and DIY minded.
I constantly take on odd jobs to pay for making music (my afternoon and weekend jobs?…idk they fit in somewhere I guess). The week before my show I worked 19 hours stage managing a festival and between that and doing a fundraiser earlier in the year I had a budget to work with that would pay for everything even if no one bought a ticket. The craftiness got us to “let’s try to recoup” instead of “how the hell will this happen?”….. If you have thrown any ticketed event you know that is actually awesome! It was going to happen. We could build it in the “If we build it they will come” scenario.
I booked a local ironworking warehouse. They had done some shows there before and they scoot their stuff out of the way and partition it off with caution tape, creating a kind of hallway in their space. They charged me by asking if I could supply them with a lot of paper towels and toilet paper. Very punk and very cheap. Emily had a vision for turning the space into something beautiful and I’d trust her with my life. No one has ever produced so much white fabric with such a little budget (RIP Joann’s and good timing). Dogwood Arts let me rummage through their warehouse for things to borrow and tickets were being bought. so. very. slowly. but. surely.
The week before the show I wasn’t sleeping well, I was too nervous. I kept waking up with at least 17 thoughts at one time and one thought made me laugh so hard it made me feel better. I decided we would sell hotdogs, call them show dogs, and that show dogs could be found at my merch table. Emily was also at the same state of nerves and sleeplessness so when I shared the dream with her I had my first early adopter of show dogs… but more importantly we had an inside joke to rely on and laugh at when things got stressful, which was often.
We were at the end of our budget but someone brought up lighting design. Something to know about me, I am a DIY rat. I have done shows in the worst of scenarios. Once, I played between two candle sticks in 29 degree weather at an official Yelp event for exposure, my first show I ever played was next to a trashcan and a bathroom door, I have played in an apartment to 7 people sharing one couch. The bar has been low and when you are starting out it truly is… So when I was approached with a need for more of a budget we didn’t have it was hard for me to get out of my old “Let’s just make due” mindset. But I wasn’t just starting out and my inner circle was calling my bluff. I had already invested so much- they quite literally demanded that I make sure people could see what I had brought to life.
We hired a grad student from UTK. He was perfect. Cheaper than he should have been and on the other side of feeling the stress of a tight budget, I have gorgeous pictures from the event I am most proud of from my entire life.
Programs were printed and 400 personal invitations went out via email and text and DM. We were able to get into the space 24 hours before the show started and I think we worked on the space for a solid 14 hours of that. Chris and Sarah and Emily were on high ladders using binder clips to hang white fabric and bistro lights, my best friend Jocelyn who owns two of the classiest bars in town got on her hands and knees to scrub the bathrooms, Ben and Care showed up with a van full of sound equipment and to run door. The friends we hired to run merch were trained on beer and how to serve show dogs, which ultimately was the very most important part!!!
We were ready.
Want to hear more? Follow my substack for my thoughts on the show itself. Next post will deep dive the topics of religious trauma, grief, redemption, community, and being affirmed in your work in the world. I post 1-4 times a month and it is a hoot to follow probably. I’m also excited to announce a new series starting later this summer. It will be cute and make you feel warm. Promise.
Things I learned from this part of the process:
- Surround yourself with people who think you are big and who want to see you grow even bigger.
- Ask for help when they push you to grow.
- Look for inside jokes along the way. (sell hotdogs when you shouldn’t)
- Listen to those who you asked for help from… the bar is probably higher.
I have so much news right around the corner. Thank you for being here. To those who have listened to my record, THANK YOU. Let me know what you think. To those who haven’t, do you hate me? HEY! Just kidding!! I KID! But it would be super cute if you listened and shared it with 10 friends. Here are some of my favorite photos from the album release show, snapped by Holly Rainey. What a magical night. The lighting looks so good.
When initially asked about success in the group setting, I immediately thought about how crucial it is in business planning to outline what your definition of success for that enterprise looks like and what you would like your exit strategy to be. With writing, or any project we take on, it makes sense to determine from the outset our methods for measuring its success.
But what about life? How do I identify what an accomplished life will look like? I know the ultimate exit will be death, but when I reach that milestone at some unforeseen time, will I be able to evaluate my life as a successful venture? What I wrote yesterday listed a few metrics that revolved around personal and professional achievements, but the more I thought about it, those didn’t feel like the right barometers for measuring a successful LIFE.
Many of us grew up in classrooms and on athletic fields where we were taught that the metrics for determining our success were based upon comparisons with our peers, like class rankings, scholarship offerings, and starting positions on a team or in a musical group. We graduated adolescence and as adults have continued striving for “success” sometimes without stopping to evaluate what that means for us personally. We have been comparing ourselves to our neighbors and colleagues in terms of material possessions, relationship statuses, and notoriety. Social media hasn’t helped. It feels as though there has been a societal reckoning, especially after the pandemic, that climbing to the top of the corporate ladder may not represent the pinnacle that we once thought we were supposed to summit. But have you thought about what it is you want to strive for instead?
I remember talking to my therapist about wanting to make others around me feel uplifted and cared for. I wanted to put others’ needs ahead of my own, because that was the role that was modeled for me by my mom. That’s how I would define a successful life on my deathbed. My therapist pointed out that I am not my mom. My reasons for aspiring to be “that person” to others were probably not in alignment with my innate personality, abilities, or calling. I do want to help others feel seen, but not at the expense of my own self-fulfillment.
When my dad died so suddenly, there was an immense sense of loss for our entire family. My mom’s grief was all encompassing. I know that a big part of her grief was over the physical loss of my dad and their relationship. They had been married almost 33 years at the time of his death. She would tell anyone he was her best friend, and to lose him in a way that felt like he had kept a huge secret from her (planning his own death) was too much to bear.
I truly feel that the onset of her dementia was triggered/exacerbated/discovered because not only had she lost my dad, her life partner, but she had lost the sense of who she was. She had identified herself as a caregiver her entire life. You can read about the many ways she exemplified this role here. With my dad’s death, my mom no longer had her parents, her in-laws, her children (by then adults), or her spouse to take care of. She was no longer serving in a teaching role, but an administrative one as the Vice Principal of an elementary school. The last person who “needed” her was gone. She had defined success as the level to which she could take care of others. When there was no one left relying on her care, her self worth and identity were as lost as those people who had grown up or passed away.
After witnessing my mom’s heartbreak and hearing from others who have lost a large sense of self due to circumstantial changes in their own lives or in the life of the businesses for which they worked, I am not sure how I want to define success for my life, but I am recognizing the need to do so. It is so tempting to create a list of to dos which I can check off, but I think it is more ambiguous than that. I think it needs to be something a little more amorphous to allow flexibility in times of loss, to not be so tethered to a role we play.
May 28, 2025
Success Isn't a Checklist
“How do you define success?" That was a question posed to a group of writers including myself yesterday.
The speaker was asking us to determine what success meant with our writing journeys, specifically. I was proudly telling some of the other writers in the group that I challenge myself to publish 2 blog posts per week, just to put something out there, even if I don’t feel like each one is my best work. I don’t want to get so caught up in editing for perfection that I fail to post at all.
I went home and started writing this post, fully intent on publishing it yesterday. In fact, I hit publish. I immediately realized I didn’t love what I had written, not just a few words or commas, but the overall narrative. So I took it down, and I’m publishing it today instead.
I was so focused on meeting this arbitrary definition of success I had given myself that I was about to publicly share something I wasn’t proud of and that didn’t accurately capture my thoughts. Maybe it is time to rethink my definitions.
surseen
Anna Wiggins
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BY Anna wiggins
surseen
originally published here
Long story shorter, I made moves. Big ones. I had tough conversations and took scary leaps, eventually leaving Corporate America in 2017. Let me tell you—terrifying. And I’ve done some scary sh*t.
That last corporate position opened my eyes. I realized small businesses needed someone who wasn’t just trying to sell them a marketing product or service but someone to talk to about their goals. So many businesses create a marketing plan, set it, and forget it, with no strategy to revisit and check their progress.
Enter Czech Yourself Marketing. (Yes, there’s a story behind the name—check my website if you’re curious.)
Now, where does Aught come into this? I’m getting there...
In 2019, my husband and I sold our first home and moved into an apartment, ready to spend 2020 traveling. (Feel free to laugh again—life, am I right?) Almost immediately, I realized working from the dining room table-slash-kitchen-slash-living-room was not it.
I started researching office spaces, but $800+ a month for rent wasn’t in the cards. That’s when a friend mentioned Erika Biddix and her new coworking space, Aught. One tour of the OG West office on Ebenezer Road, and I knew. As soon as I stepped through the door, I could feel it. This was the place.
From December 2019 to December 2020, I was a full-time desk lessee. When we moved back into a house in November 2020, I set up a dedicated home office but kept my Aught membership for client meetings, trainings, and—most importantly—the community. The women at Aught were (and still are) my support system on the tough days. Now, I use the monthly coworking membership to stay connected.
Let’s say it together: Entrepreneurship is lonely. We don’t talk about this enough. So many of us feel like we have to do it all alone or we’re failing. We put on a happy face and say how great it is—because if we don’t, we think we’re failing. But the truth is, the only way we fail is by not asking for help.
Help with advice. Help with skills we think we should know. Help to get through the hard days.
For me, Aught is the place where I find that help. It’s where I find connection. It’s where I find the community that lifts me and my business.
Oh, and by the way—spoiler alert—I got myself a damn corner office before 40.
Mic drop.
Sparkle Responsibly,
Halee Sprinkle
May 13, 2025
Spoiler Alert: I Got the Corner Office—
Just Not the Way I Planned
There once was a 22-year-old woman with sky-high dreams for her marketing career. She saw herself climbing the corporate ladder, skillfully dodging internal politics, and earning the admiration of everyone she met. Her goal? To be a C-suite leader on an incredible marketing team by 40, with a corner office and the respect she’d built over 18 years of hard work.
Go ahead, let out a big laugh. I still do!
Not because my dreams were silly—they weren’t. But looking back, I had no clue what the corporate world was really like or what twists and turns my career and life would throw my way.
czech yourself Marketing
Halee Sprinkle
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by halee sprinkle,
czech yourself marketing
