Every business taught me what the next one would need.
I started my first business at twelve. My first licensed one at twenty. Everything since has been some version of the same work: look at what is broken, build the system that fixes it, then teach somebody else how to run it.
The first company was construction. Seven years subcontracting for national builders, DR Horton, Ryland Homes, America's Home Best, learning what it costs to be the only woman on a job site and to still be the one they call back. Then trucking, fifteen years and two companies, one of them built specifically to put women behind the wheel, twenty trucks running nationwide. Between the two industries I built roughly $9.5 million in combined revenue before MiRAjO ever existed.
Technology came into every one of those businesses before it was fashionable to say so. That is still the through line. Today I mentor and facilitate at BŪP Innovation, sitting with founders at hackathons who are building the thing they cannot yet explain to anybody else. And financial education has run underneath all of it, teaching business owners the practical version of what most people are charged a fortune to learn badly.
I am eighteen years into my second marriage, flaws and all, which is precisely why I built a course for couples in business together. I am the mother of five daughters, two still at home, and a grandmother to one. I hold a Florida real estate broker license and an active Commercial CDL-A, because I have never been interested in talking about work I have not done.
I built MiRAjO Collective in 2023 without knowing exactly what it would become. It found its shape by my being in the rooms that needed it: Women Impact Network, Tampa Business Club, the Tampa Bay Latin Chamber. Two books later, and a set of courses built on the frameworks I actually live by, the work is the same as it was on the first job site. Build something that holds.
