Re-engaging My Entrepreneurship in 2025
Re-engaging My Entrepreneurship with a Fresh Perspective
(and a Mentor and Business Friend Who's Been Through It All)
After several years of putting my business on pause during the pandemic and navigating through a depression I couldn’t shake on my own, I’ve felt the craving the clarity, momentum, and purpose I was building pre 2023. Life, in all its unpredictability, happened. And somewhere within that, my business quietly took a backseat.
As my personal life begins to shift again, I’m feeling the spark of that entrepreneurial breath return and I am wanting to lean in. This time though, I am hoping to not chase speed or scale. I want to build more thoughtfully and purposefully… slower. Steadier. Something more sustainable that fits the pace of my life and the family I’m shaping today.
To help reignite this journey, I recently reached out to a longtime contact – someone I’ve known for almost a decade and a person I’ve thought highly of from his intense business, branding, and marketing know-how. Scott Petinga. I’ve always been struck by how he seemed to juggle multiple ventures while maintaining time for mentorship and thought leadership endeavors. After our first meeting years ago, and through a few mentorship conversations over the years, I’ve felt a sense of kindred spirit in him because of our big idea brains and need to do a thousand things at once but with intention.
What began as a simple call, “Should I file a DBA or form a new LLC?” quickly became something much deeper.
What I didn’t expect:
A raw, honest reminder of our humanness, and the power of starting over…not despite the fall, but because of it.
Scott is, by any measure, a force. He’s built companies that generated over $10+ million in annual revenue, employed teams across industries and continents, and led with a people-first philosophy that’s rare. He paid 100% of healthcare costs for entire families (no premiums, no co-pays, no deductibles) and offered 401(k) matches as high as 10% starting on day one. He’s also donated millions to cancer research and other charitable causes.
And still, like so many of us, the pandemic hit hard. On December 31, 2023, he made the gut-wrenching decision to sunset every business he’d built. (Proof that even the strongest foundations can be tested by forces beyond our control.)
But even that doesn’t fully capture the weight of what he’s carried.
He shared something deeply personal with me: last fall, one of his daughters (a freshman in high school) was diagnosed with a brain tumor. She’s now permanently deaf on one side and lives with facial paralysis. She faces a long road of surgeries and ongoing care. Yet, despite the gravity of it all, Scott continues to show up. With honesty. With grace. With a kind of clarity that only life-altering moments can carve into a person.
He’s been on top. He’s had it all. And now … he’s rebuilding from the ground up.
As someone who goes in and out of my own personal imposter syndrome with entrepreneurship and personal growth, this honest conversation with Scott was a needed reminder that I am not alone in the human experience of entrepreneurship. Just like the stock market, success isn’t a straight line. It goes up, and it does come down… but zoom out a little and you’ll see that the longer term trajectory is still upward. (An analogic lesson I heard from a friend of a friend years back.)
The hard-won wisdom Scott shared with me:
Keep your ventures clean and separated. You can juggle many things, but protect them by organizing them into distinct legal and financial entities.
Don’t build something just because you can. My idea may have required more from me than it was worth. Scott helped me see easier, smarter paths forward I hadn’t considered.
Don’t rely on banks as a safety net. When a crisis hits, they’ll call in the debt without blinking. He’s seen it firsthand.
Know when to let go. Hanging on to something too long out of ego can wreck your health, home, and finances.
There’s always a way forward. The future just may not look like what you imagined. No matter where you are in life, there’s still time to pivot, rebuild, and redefine success.
What this means for me next:
I’ve already started acting on a few of the next steps we mapped out, but more importantly, I’ve walked away with a deeper truth: we're human, and it's okay to start over when life unravels.
This is your reminder to reach out. Call your mentors. Lean on your community. We weren’t meant to navigate the chaos alone.
Here’s to new beginnings at any age, in any season, and entirely on our own terms.
(P.S. Scott permitted me to share these personal details because he believes stories like this are meant to be passed on.)