The drive: What challenges have you overcome?
My greatest challenge would have been my lack of self-esteem.
I finally realised I had 2 options – fight or flight – and I discovered it turns out I’m a fighter.
I jumped both feet into my business and this year alone completed Kerwin Rae’s NISI program multiple times, joined The Doers Inner Circle by Grace Lever, I’ve attended Tony Robins online seminar with a face-to-face one next year and am learning more and more every day on how to be a better business owner, entrepreneur, leader, mother, daughter and business owner and get closer to my BHAG. I continue to develop my personal and professional development every day to ensure I am the best I can be for my family, myself, and also for my clients.
My truly greatest challenge over the last 12 months actually has nothing to do with my business. His name is Drae – he is my 18-year-old son.
At 16, he was groomed by a predator who got him away from his family unit and hooked on the drug every parent fears. For 2 years, ICE stole my beautiful baby, my friend and my son. He was not recognisable to anyone that knew him, not even to himself. He looked like a shadow of himself. I stood on the side-lines waiting for the day I’d either bury him, or hold him as we began to undo all the damage that had been done. Not only to his body, his brain and his self-esteem, but to his relationships with everyone in his life.
10 months on we are celebrating 40 weeks clean. He is now a staff member of Today Tomorrow & Always, taking over our tech department and website as well as starting his own business and looking to a future that 6 months ago he wholeheartedly told a doctor he wouldn’t have past the age of 21. He is clean, heathy, happy and correctly medicated to help deal with long-lasting brain damage this horrible drug caused.
For better or worse: What are the pros and cons of running your own business?
Growing up, I never thought I’d own a business – it was one of those things ‘rich’ people did.
Yet here I am, 2 years in and so extremely proud of myself. I shock myself daily with how far I’ve come since launching this business and I can honestly say I’m a completely new woman now.
There are definitely pros and cons of running your own business though.
Some of the pros are:
- Being able to be a mum on ‘work days’. If one of my kids is sick, I can be at home working while they’re sleeping it off in bed.
- Setting my own hours – I can work around life things such as being available to help at my kids’ school, canteen duty, and sports carnivals, as well as being able to be on hand for Grandma duty when needed.
- Making decisions on all aspects of the business and not having to answer to anyone is nice too.
- Being able to change the world in my small part.
- The comfort I can give to grieving families as well as turning the most special moments into something to hold in your hands is a pretty huge high.
- The looks on clients’ faces and the messages of love and gratitude I receive warm my heart and give me the warm and fuzzies.
Some of the cons are:
- The set-up costs – I had someone in the industry tell me the start-up costs were quite low, however they were huge and just kept coming. I really had no idea how huge the capital would be to run it the way I thought it deserved to be run, but once I hit a certain point, there was no turning back and I just had to jump in feet first.
- Not having a steady income. This makes it really hard when it comes to budgeting for the business or for personal expenses.
- Having to work into the early hours because you had to spend the day getting other things done.
- Having all the pressure of business success or failure on me.
- Having to learn a little about a lot, from website backends to marketing and social media right through to packaging and all the other things needed when running a business – learning as much as I could, enough to get things moving until I could afford to outsource.
- I also sometimes dislike not having someone to talk ideas through with – having someome to tell me an idea is just plain ridiculous before I invest 10+ hours into it would be super helpful.
- Time and funds I take from my kids. Covid hit us hard, to the point I had to inject some more capital into the business to keep things going from my family budget. It means sometimes fun stuff and holidays have had to be put on hold
- The frustration of being just a one-man band. The limitations that places on my ability to get the word out and spread our message. I know there are so many more families that need our services yet they don’t know I exist or how I can help them.
Hopes and dreams: What next?
The future is so bright, I need sunglasses.
While I will personally continue to expand my education and skills within this incredible artform and expand services to those worldwide who need our keepsakes, ensuring wait times are low while quality is kept at a level of excellence you’d expect when crafting with such precious inclusions is of high importance.
We will continue to focus on our Phoenix collection allowing the gold from a grandmother’s ring to create a new ring containing her ashes or reusing the rose gold and diamonds from your mother’s engagement ring, working with our team to design an incredibly unique custom ring you love and giving it the ability to house an additional stone made from the breastmilk of the grandchild she never got to meet – these are the stories of families we craft for; this is how we bridge the generational gap.
The planning process of launching our charity is taking a lot of time, care and passion but I KNOW my dream for what it will offer is something that bereaved parents need and they need now. Nothing like this is being offered to them and that is in no way OK in my book.
We want to expand our Forever collection and offer truly custom wedding bands that can hold the ashes of a child no longer earthside or the umbilical stump of a baby who never got to take their first breath, right through to a limitless possibility for customisation both with and without DNA.
Honestly, while my future with Today Tomorrow & Always is focused on educating people, building my brand and awareness of the DNA industry as a whole, my future plans also must include taking weekends off and spending more time with my kids. Launching Today Tomorrow & Always has been extremely rewarding and has taken quite a bit of money and time meaning my kids have missed out on quite a bit. I owe it to them to be present now that things are more stable and I want to be involved in my brand-new grandson’s life too. This means outsourcing certain tasks and hiring staff to ensure I balance work/family life better than I have been.
We have partnered with Helping Hands and other charities this year to ensure we are supporting not only our community, but those who need us no matter where they are.
We WILL do all of this because this isn’t just a business; it’s a legacy of a truly wonderful man.
Head to the Today Tomorrow & Always website to find out more and follow their communities on Facebook and Instagram, as well as joining their Facebook group. You can also find them on Pinterest, YouTube, LinkedIn and TikTok.
