I grew up in the a spa business.

Mom and I are very similar.

We have passion. We’re super loud. Opinionated and stubborn. Great traits for the business world, but we struggled to work together. The yin and yang of our relationship weren’t in balance, and we didn’t grow DeStress Express faster because of it.

We didn’t have a roadmap.

Then I invested in my first business coach – something Lynn was totally against at first. But suddenly, things were clicking into place. DeStress Express became so popular we had to double our size in 2011, something no one was doing. I continued to grow the company, taking full control for a time while Lynn had to take care of her aging parents in Florida.

When she came back, DeStress Express was no longer a small massage studio but a business.

Then I finished my degree from the University of Virginia and Lynn came back to work full time. I left to pursue a career in marketing for a large real estate company. Lynn continues to run DeStress Express using the systems and processes I created and developed.

But, I wasn’t happy working in a corporate environment where I wasn’t in control. I loved working with the real estate agents and coaching them on their careers and businesses. But that wasn’t my job. Like my mother twenty years earlier, I needed a change. I discovered podcasting and online business and was working towards creating my business.

Then the unthinkable happened. My husband James died in 2016 from a stroke. Overnight I became a single mother of two kids under the age of 10. My mom was my rock. I moved into her house, and she and my stepfather gave me a safe place to recover. During this time, my business mentor Chris Ducker gave me the idea to use my experience running day spas and turn that into a company. We named it Spapreneur®, and I bought the website name that very day.