I thought I'd be a bedside nurse until retirement

I thought I'd be a bedside nurse until retirement. That wasn't a plan I let go of. It ended, not by my choice, right around the time I had my son, and I had to become something else fast.

My dad moved out when I was five, and my mom raised me. Money in our house was feast or famine. Sometimes help would come from my grandad, who lived a couple of hours away, and the fridge would suddenly be full. Then it would be empty again. I remember my mom collecting pop cans and returning them for five cents each so she could put gas in the car. I grew up hearing that a long shower cost two dollars, that a load of laundry was too expensive, that driving me somewhere would cost ten dollars in gas. My mom did her best. I don't think she knew how deeply those words would settle in me. Nobody ever showed me how money was made. I just learned to be afraid of it.

As a teenager, I partied, I worked, I made choices I'm not proud of, and I was always broke. When a paycheque or a tax return came in, I'd get so excited that I'd spend all of it, usually on one thing. Nobody had taught me what money was worth, how to manage it, or how to make it grow. Feast or famine wasn't just how I grew up. It became how I lived. Honestly, it's still in me. Even now, running a business, the urge to spend the second money lands is something I deal with every day. It's almost like a demon I carry around. The difference is that I know it's there now, and I've learned to catch it. But it's a battle I'm still fighting.

My brother had it worse. I was seventeen when I started watching him struggle with addiction, and later homelessness. He went in and out of treatment centres. Every time, I let myself believe this was the one, that he was finally getting better. Then he'd relapse, and it would break my heart all over again. It was the most painful part of my life. Eventually I had to cut him out for the better part of a year to protect myself, my family, my son, and our mental health. It's one of the hardest things I've ever done. Loving someone with an addiction is a kind of grief I still can't fully explain. You grieve someone who's still here. You hope and you brace for the worst at the same time, and you never really get to stop. I'm grateful every day that he's alive and sober now. We came out of the same house and went in very different directions, and I don't take that lightly.

Getting through nursing school was the first time I proved to myself I could change direction. Becoming a nurse and working for Fraser Health felt huge back then, and I was so proud of myself. But I never liked working for someone else. I always had this burning desire to be an entrepreneur. I tried everything: MLMs, selling Cutco knives, beauty products, anything that might get me there. None of it stuck. Looking back, I hadn't healed my relationship with money yet, and you can't build something when part of you believes it was never meant for you.

So when nursing ended, it didn't feel like the universe was taking something from me. It felt like a push.

I started my business in the tiny bedroom down the hall while my son napped. A shelf of skincare, a facial bed, a little trolley with my supplies on it. No clients, no money, no one to hand any of it to. Just a lot of hours nobody saw.

My husband works out of town and is home two weekends a month, so most of it happened alone. That's not a hardship story. It's just the actual shape of how it was made.

Having my son lit a fire under me I didn't know I had. Everything I build, I build for him. He will never be told he can't have a shower because of what the hot water costs. He will never learn to be afraid of money. I'm a cycle breaker. That's the root of all of it.

I outgrew that bedroom fast. In less than six months, I was renting a room in a storefront. From there I moved into two more spaces as the business kept growing, and eventually I bought my own clinic. Not bad for a girl who could have gone a very different direction.

By year two, I was bringing in six figures on my own. No doctors, no staff, just me, investing in new devices as I grew. Only after that did I start building a team. And when people tell me that's amazing, I still downplay it. “Well, it wasn't all profit. I had overhead.” Which is true. But in a single year, I brought in over $200,000 on my own, as a solo, woman-owned business that started in a bedroom with no money. That's fucking insane. I don't know why I still make it smaller than it is. Probably the same old wiring that makes me want to spend it the second it hits my bank account.

If I could talk to the girl in that bedroom, I'd tell her to keep going. Do it before you feel ready, because you won't ever feel ready. Growth doesn't happen in your comfort zone. It happens when you do the thing that scares you the most.

For me, that thing was education. I'd wanted to teach since the start of my career in aesthetics. It was always in the back of my mind, and I kept telling myself someday. Then I stopped waiting. I built my first digital product in a weekend, but what's inside it took years: my own time in the treatment room and the continuing education I've invested in along the way. I share it openly, without gatekeeping, because I remember what it felt like to be the practitioner who was left to figure it out alone.

In three short months, my digital products have made over $57,000. More than 400 practitioners in over 30 countries have chosen to learn from me, from the UK and Australia to Singapore, Israel and Egypt. My personal brand is growing faster than my clinic ever did, in revenue and in audience, and it's closing in on six figures in a fraction of the time it took me the first time.

I get messages every day from people telling me how others in this industry talk about me and how much they respect my work. I still don't know what to do with that. Part of me is always thinking, “Wait, me?” But I've been a little delusional this whole time to get where I am today. I made vision board after vision board and pictured all of this as if it had already happened. Every single thing I put on those boards has come true.

Now I'm an aesthetics educator and a skin clinic owner, and I'm going to say this without downplaying it: I'm really fucking good at what I do. I'm growing my team, building new offers, and the clinic is growing right alongside it all. We're building something that lasts: wealth, a bigger family, a legacy my son gets to inherit instead of overcome.

But the money was never really the point. Working for myself gave me time. I drop my son off at school every day and pick him up. I can take time off whenever I want. I can be there for every event and every moment he needs me. To me, that's the truest form of wealth. Being pushed out of nursing was a blessing I'd never have chosen, and it gave me both kinds of freedom: financial and time.

Everyone has a hard story, and this isn't meant to be a sad one. But writing it down, I've had to stop and look back, and it's been more emotional than I expected. My husband, my best friend, and the people closest to me remind me all the time how far I've come, and I usually brush it off. Given where I started, I probably shouldn't be where I am. I'm here anyway.

It all started in a tiny spare bedroom in my house, as a first time mom with nothing but a dream and a facial bed. Now thousands of clients trust me with their skin, practitioners all over the world are learning from me, and my son is growing up with a mom who isn't afraid of money. I'm not on the other side of anything yet, but I know exactly where I'm going.