I have had a varied career history; from my service in the military to
various customer service jobs. I ultimately went back to school and got a
degree in computer science. After graduating, I was in that great situation
where you can't find a job without experience but you can't get experience
without a job. So, I knew I needed to make my own experience. Little did I
know that over four years later, the business would be going better than ever!

We envision ourselves going through a couple of transition periods. We
started off as a typical web development company taking on a project or two and doing all of the work ourselves. We're now going through our first transition period where we stop doing the majority of the coding work and
have contractors do it for us. We're essentially becoming project managers.
At the same time we're laying the foundation for our next two transitions.
Once we have contractors handling the bulk of our work we will publish
websites for ourselves. Most of these will be designed to be revenue
generators through advertising although some will be subscription based and
others may even be ecommerce. Once we have published these sites we will be
in our next phase where we grow our websites and only accept high margin web
development contracts. This will allow us to keep our margins high while
allowing us enough time to continue growing our own projects. We love to
work with clients but it's great to diversify and not have all of your eggs
in one basket if you can.

After graduating from high school, I had no interest in college at the time,
so I joined the US Navy. I was an arabic linguist for 4 years before
deciding to get out and try my hand in the civilian world. I had managerial
experience so I found myself in a supervisory role at an inbound call
center. This definitely laid the ground work for my customer service
experience. After a couple of years I decided to go back to school to pursue
a degree in foreign languages. I took a programming course as an elective
and fell in love with it and immediately switched my major. It took about 5
years, but I finally finished my computer science degree and the rest is
history!

Things I love: my family, travel, the outdoors, and technology. I've got two
young boys who always are up to something and definitely keep me on my toes.
My ideal weekend is a camping retreat where we hike all day, relax by the
fire at night, all in a campground with wi-fi access of course!!

Balancing work and personal life is not hard for me. I have been doing it all my life. After work, you need to relax - go for a walk on the beach and plan frequent weekend getaways. You need to learn how to relax from the stress of everyday living.

It can definitely be tricky. The great thing about working for yourself is
you can set your own schedule. The times I work span an entire day, but I am
able to go on field trips with my kids or join a soccer team myself. I have
found that you need to really make sure your family and friends understand
what you do and understand your schedule. You need to make time for them but
also make time for yourself! It really takes trial and error to figure out
the right balance for your life. I'm still trying to perfect that!

At this time in my life, I will have to say the flexibility it allows me. I
really admire my friends who are stay-at-home moms and I wish I could do
that; but I can't. So the next best thing for me is to be able to be as
active in my kids life as possible and being an entrepreneur allows me that.
From a professional angle, the most rewarding aspect is launching a client's
website and watching them realize their goals. It doesn't get much better
than that.

Stay on top of the latest technology. In my field, things change rapidly; if
you miss a week, you might as well have missed a couple of months. You need
to continue to learn and teach yourself new things. That is probably the
key.

I have always been a firm believer in "it's not what you know, but who you
know', that gets you in the door. This is true whether you are an
independent looking for a job or a business owner looking for her next
client. The Wild WE was a pretty unique idea that brought women
entrepreneurs together in one place to share stories and offer help to each
other. Plus, where else can you go to find women in similar positions as
you, business-wise, but that have a multitude of skills. I've made some
great connections at Wild WE and am excited to be part of it.

We're just really excited about how brainyminds
is growing. We are continuing to grow our Merchant account website. We have really tried to make that site a great resource people who are looking to accept credit cards either online or offline. We have new features that we are working on which will facilitate that even more! Thanks for letting me be a part of this great group of women!

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