How It All Started
The Short Version
I am a marketing guru with an extensive background in tourism, healthcare, and nonprofit organizations. Today, I manage my own marketing firm to help small businesses thrive, connect and exceed their goals and expectations. Though my business officially started in January 2020, I’ve hustled since 2010 with bartering or taking on “clients” just for fun. It’s an honor to take my best skills and know-how and leverage it today to unlock marketing possibilities that ensure best practices. I’m an entrepreneur at heart, a helper by nature.
I absolutely adore my husband, my three children, and my rescued fur baby. I also feel blessed to have friends I get to call partners in crime that help make up Tustle’s team.
HERE'S THE WHOLE STORY
I’ve always loved marketing.
As early as I can remember, I’ve always loved “marketing” - I just didn’t really understand what it meant. Some of my earliest childhood memories are creating my own version of a newspaper on my grandparent’s typewriter and making copies of it with their scanner. I’d add pictures, do interviews, and even draw in my own adds. Yeah, it was a big deal to me :)
It’s not a coincidence that I received my bachelor's in Public Relations and was a full-time mom in my 20s. I started becoming who I needed to be.
So — my college years were not the same as for most folks. I worked hard, took on odd jobs, and always had some type of internship going on. At the age of 21, I was managing a 60+ vendor farmers market, a full-time student, a full-time mom, a barista at Starbucks at night, and a tourism intern by day. I also started “helping” my friends and family in marketing and design for their small businesses and other projects. Whew. My early 20s were exhausting, but it’s where I did my most grinding.
Arriving at 30
Fast forward through my baccalaureate, I worked for a Fortune 500 company for over 5 years, as well as a nonprofit organization and convention and visitors bureau. Somewhere in the span of 7 years, I also completed my MBA and had two more children, and went through a yucky divorce - but also found my lifetime partner in the end. In the early years of my second marriage, I found I was doing a lot of grinding - and for what? I was “doing a lot of things”, but my helper mentality was never being fully fulfilled.
JUST YOU WAIT
Many of the things I do today where distant dreams I never saw myself achieving “so soon”. I wanted to own my business, be at home with the kids and be a good wife —eventually. I didn’t mean through the aftermath of a burnout, going through the journey of accepting myself, navigating through a pandemic (hello March 2020) and have a supportive husband who says “just go do it!” The road to owning my own business has been a bumpy one, and my story isn’t over. As said best in the musical, Hamilton, “There’s a million things I haven’t done, just you wait!”