What Happened When I Started a Business With No Plan
Part 1: How a Risk Became a Turning Point
How I Stumbled Into My First Business
Most people know me for the work I do now. What they usually don’t know is how it all started. I’ve rarely talked about that chapter because it feels so far away from my life today. But the truth is, everything I teach now was shaped by what happened almost thirty years ago.
So this is the beginning. It’s the part of my life that set the path for every business I’ve built since.1
Part 2 will get into how this experience connects to your work today. Right now, I just want to tell the story.
The Leap I Never Saw Coming
In 1996, I was 37, living in Los Angeles, and had a job that felt like a placeholder until a better opportunity came along. I wasn’t unhappy. I wasn’t lost. I was just bored. I knew I wasn’t growing, and there wasn’t anything ahead of me that felt exciting.
Then two things happened at the same time.
I fell in love, and an unexpected door opened.
My boyfriend owned a remote farm in rural Ontario, Canada. We were both in big transitions and talking about what we wanted next. R. had the idea of starting a business coaching practice together. It made no sense. I had just bought a condo in Los Angeles. I had a solid job with benefits. I had a life I understood.
And I walked away from all of it.
I made a life-changing decision without thinking it through. I moved to a hundred-acre farm in the middle of nowhere with a few hundred dollars in savings and the belief that “we’ll figure it out” would be enough.
No Plan, No Money, and a Very Long Winter
When I say we had nothing, I mean nothing.
No niche.
No market research.
No idea if business coaching was even a thing in Canada.
No services mapped out.
No safety net.
We weren’t naive. OK, maybe we were, and we were caught up in the excitement of doing something bold. Looking back, I can see how reckless it was. But I can also see how it shaped the rest of my life.
We arrived in Canada in the Fall, and Winter came early that year. I was born and raised in Southern California. That first winter was very long and very cold.
We had one phone line and dial-up internet.
We learned as we went. We learned by trying things that didn’t work and things that surprised us. We learned what people responded to and what they didn’t care about at all. We learned how to build a business because we didn’t have the luxury of waiting until we felt ready. We needed income, so we created offers. We needed clients, so we started talking to people. There wasn’t time to overthink any of it.
That stretch of time taught me things I didn’t have the words for back then. I carried those lessons with me long after the farm, and long after I started over again. Here’s the short version for now. I’ll expand on these in part 2.
1. Planning isn’t what gets you started. Beginning is.
We didn’t have a clear plan. We took the first step anyway.
2. Having no safety net creates a level of focus you can’t fake.
It pushed us to keep moving even on the hard days.
3. A chapter that ends can still shape everything that comes next.
What felt like an ending turned into the training ground for my future work.
4. Real growth comes from doing the thing that feels unlike you.
I never saw myself as someone who made bold moves, until I did.
5. The work changes you long before the results show up.
That first business built a steadier, more confident version of me.
These are the threads I didn’t see until much later, but they shaped every business I built after that one.
The Strange Mix of Fear and Confidence
There’s something complicated about having no backup plan. It’s scary, but it’s also clarifying. There is no drifting when you know you can’t rely on anything else. We didn’t have a Plan B, so we kept moving forward.
At the same time, I carried a confidence that steadied me through all of it. I knew if everything collapsed, I could go back home, get another job, and start again. That doesn’t sound like much, but that mix of fear and self-belief held me together. It pushed me through long days, long, cold winters, and the reality of trying to educate a market where the only coaching anyone recognized involved a hockey stick.
Against the odds, over about 6 years, we built a six-figure practice. It wasn’t smooth or simple, but it worked.
The Ending I Didn’t Expect
The business grew, but the marriage didn’t survive. When I eventually returned to Los Angeles, I came home with more than heartbreak and a stack of lessons. I came home with a new sense of myself.
During four years on the farm and two years in Ottawa, I learned how to build a website, create an email list, talk about what I offer, and run a business with my own hands. Every skill I leaned on in the years that followed started there, in that cold farmhouse, trying to figure out how to make a business work.
The story didn’t end the way I imagined, but it set up everything that came next. I didn’t know it then, but that first business was the training ground for the work I do now.
A Different Version of Me
Before Canada, I was comfortable letting other people take the lead. I was happy being the person behind the scenes. I didn’t see myself as someone who could build something from scratch.
By the time I came home, that had changed. I knew I could create something on my own. I knew I didn’t have to wait for someone else’s plan or permission. I had already done the hard thing once, and that shifted something deep inside me.
That change has stayed with me ever since.
Why I’m Sharing This Now
I’ve held this story close for a long time. Maybe because it feels personal. Maybe because it was messy. Maybe because it didn’t follow a clean arc, but this chapter explains a lot about how I work and why I teach the way I do.
Part 2 will walk through the connection between this early chapter and your own visibility, your confidence, and the way you build or rebuild your business today. The tools have changed, but the fundamentals haven’t.
If you’ve ever stood at the edge of something that felt too big or too strange or too uncertain, you’ll see a lot of yourself in what comes next.
What’s a belief you have about being a solo or small business owner that runs counter to the conventional wisdom?
Some of this article is based on a chapter I contributed to, Trust Your Heart: Transform Your Ideas to Income, in 2011.
Thanks for sharing this, Denise - hindsight often holds riches we need to explore not just for ourselves but for others. "The story didn’t end the way I imagined, but it set up everything that came next." The belief that guides me is that everything makes something else possible. And we don't always get to know right away what that is - but believing in that does make all the difference.
Great story!
Love these lines:
4. Real growth comes from doing the thing that feels unlike you.
I never saw myself as someone who made bold moves, until I did.
5. The work changes you long before the results show up.
That first business built a steadier, more confident version of me.
We need to "become" the person who deserves, and can even handle, our dreams, goals and wishes.
Just wanting something doesn't mean we're ready for it.
And, "becoming" isn't usually pleasant or fun all the time (or ever. LOL)
The irony is that it took time (likely years or even decades) to become who we are now... like it or not... so it's going to take time to become who we want to be next.
And, only very few are willing to do it... which is why we hear about the 1%.
And, the other 99% wonder how they did it...
Well... it's because they put in the time to "become" who you see. :-)