On Entrepreneurship

One of the biggest things entrepreneurship unlocked in me was realizing I’m wired for it. Not in a “everyone should quit their job and start a business” way, because entrepreneurship is not for everyone. Some people thrive in structure, stability, and clear roles. The world needs those people. I just learned, over time, that I’m not one of them.

What I didn’t anticipate was how much running a business would reshape the way I think about everything. My brain doesn’t turn off. I’m constantly scanning for opportunities, inefficiencies, connections between things that don’t obviously belong together. I probably come up with a new business idea every three days. That instinct has shaped how LVPR works too. We’ve never approached PR as just “getting press.” I’m always thinking about the bigger ecosystem: affiliate, retail, partnerships, social, AI search, founder storytelling, consumer behavior. How do we take one good idea and make it work harder across every channel? That’s a big part of why, ten years in, we operate as an omnichannel marketing business rather than a straight PR shop. The industry evolved, and we evolved with it.

But here’s what I think about most on this anniversary: if LVPR went away tomorrow, I’d be okay. Not because I’m cavalier about what we’ve built, but because entrepreneurship gave me something hard to put a price on. It taught me how to find a problem and find a path forward. Whether that means taking equity in an emerging brand, consulting, thought leadership, or building something new entirely. There is always a next move when you’ve trained your brain to think this way.

That’s the contrast I keep coming back to. Someone who has spent ten or twenty years inside a corporate structure, excelling at one defined role, and then has to start over? That’s a terrifying position. Not because they aren’t talented, but because figuring it out, building from scratch, tolerating uncertainty long enough to find the opportunity inside it, that’s a muscle you only build by using it.

Entrepreneurship gave me that muscle. Ten years later, that feels like the real gift. Not just that I built a business, but that I built a version of myself that knows how to keep building, whatever comes next.

And if I’m being honest, the through-line across all of it is this: I’ve learned to trust my gut. I’ve made mistakes, a hundred percent. But I’ve never regretted leading with my instincts, whether that meant believing in myself, leaning on my network, or making a hard call I didn’t want to make but knew I had to. That confidence is something I couldn’t have had at the start, and even when I had flashes of it, it didn’t matter because someone else always had final approval. Entrepreneurship gave me the authority to trust myself. That might be the most valuable thing it’s given me.

So here’s what I want to know: What has a big risk, a career pivot, or a leap into the unknown taught you about yourself that you never could have learned playing it safe?