Meet The Owner

The Journey

College

I graduated from West Virginia University with a Bachelor’s in Accounting & a Minor in Communication Studies as a member of the Delta Sigma Pi Business Fraternity. The big push all through college for us Accounting majors was to try and land a job or internship with a Big 4 Accounting Firm helping with taxes and audits in order to pursue our CPA certification. I knew even then that I was not interested in this path. I had no interest in audits or taxes, I wanted to help a business on the finance side of things on more of a management accounting level. Because of this, I avoided the accounting firms and looked for a large corporation where I could get in on the ground floor and work my way up the corporate finance ladder. After graduating, I got an offer to work for Sherwin-Williams in West Virginia, which wasn’t far from where I grew up in Pennsylvania. I started working there and was content but never really had a clear vision as to what I really wanted out of life except for climbing the finance company ladder. After a couple of years of working there, I was due for a promotion. There was a job board for open positions within Sherwin-Williams and I saw an opening in Colorado. I at this point had never been in that part of the country and did find the prospect interesting, but I had solid roots back home. I was more interested in trying to find a position in Pittsburgh. One day though I decided I’ll throw in an application, why not? They called and put me through a few phone interviews and then asked if they could fly me out to Denver to do an in-person interview. I still at this point wasn’t very serious about leaving friends and family and moving across the country by myself but I said yes and figured worst case I’ll get a free flight to Denver. Once they picked me up from the airport though and I first saw the Rocky Mountains, I said to myself right there that if they offer me this position I’m moving out here. They did end up offering me the position. A month later I packed up a truck and drove across the country by myself to move to Colorado. This was an incredible adventure for me at the time. 

Colorado

My initial vision was to work in Colorado for a few years and then eventually get a promotion to their corporate office in Cleveland to work up the finance ladder. I learned how to hike and backpack immediately and any time I wasn’t working I was in the mountains doing one of the two. I also wanted to take every training opportunity that Sherwin offered because this usually meant flights to different cities and I really enjoyed that. I made some friends out here, adopted a dog and fell in love with exploring this part of the country. Then, one day my friend gave me a book to read that changed the projection of my life. 

The book was “The 7 Habits Of Highly Effective People” by Stephen Covey. The whole book is great but it was one section that made me think in a way that I had never had up to that point. In this section, he talked about envisioning yourself at your funeral at the end of your life, envisioning what you’d want people to say about you, and what you would have wanted to accomplish by then. This really is a simple exercise and something that I regularly do nowadays. But at the time, I had never thought about it before. I was going through the motions of what I was supposed to do, go to college, find a company & then work up the corporate chain from there. I never really thought about my mortality and about what I was actually interested in doing with my life. 

The Mindset Shift

I remember this moment vividly. Sitting in my office reading this section I felt my brain switch gears to a whole different way of thinking. Thinking about my mortality and “beginning with the end in mind”. The three thoughts that poured in right after were so quick and clear that I’m sure they were sitting there in my subconscious just waiting to be heard, but I wasn’t listening. These thoughts were: “I don’t like my job”, “I don’t want to move back to the east coast”, and “I love traveling and adventuring and what I would want people to say at my funeral is that he lived his life intentionally and fully and experienced and saw some incredible things”. I started the path of “beginning with the end in mind” This is something that I still do and think about all the time, almost every day. What do I want to do/see before I die? I knew then that I needed to start taking steps toward this and so I began researching.

The Lifestyle Business Beginnings

I researched many options on how I could intentionally set up my life to support the way that I wanted to live it. I decided to use my accounting knowledge to help others and start a remote bookkeeping business. This was a strange and scary thought because up to this point, I had not been exposed to the idea of small business ownership at all. No one in my family ever did it and in college this was never talked about. After messing up the first step of creating the legal business entity and then figuring out how to fix that, I finally had a legal business entity and Essentially Intentional LLC was born. I utilized in-person networking as I knew nothing about online marketing. I joined BNI & the local Chamber of Commerce and I went to every networking event that I could. Some were in coffee shops before my shift started at Sherwin, some were during lunch, & some were happy hour events after my shift. I did this for some time and started gaining a few clients. I taught them how to use things like Zoom (this was before COVID-19) and other remote tools even though we lived in the same city because I knew that to support my ultimate vision, I wanted my business to be flexible, location-independent and remote. I was creating a lifestyle business well before I ever heard of that term before, despite the pressure from other small business owners I would network with who would try to convince me to rent an office, hire employees, create a sellable asset, etc. 

The Commitment

Once I gained a few clients I decided to go all in. After pacing back and forth for a half hour, I called my boss and put in my two-week notice. I remember the first day. Monday morning, when I would usually be defrosting my car while getting dressed and ready to drive to work, I only had to walk out to my kitchen (the kitchen table was my office at the time) make some coffee and pull out my laptop. It was a strange feeling. I felt excited, I felt irresponsible and I felt an immense pressure of having to support myself financially. I felt up to the challenge and after a while knew that if I could help it, I never wanted a “real job” again. I loved the ability to work from home. I no longer dreaded Mondays during Sunday nights. I was not working for someone else.

The Struggles

Of course, there were some struggles. Many of them stem from trying to learn everything myself. This ended up costing money and time in order to fix. My first mistake was right from the beginning. I didn’t set up the LLC correctly. There was always the struggle of figuring out how to find clients. I still on occasion felt lonely and irresponsible, but ultimately loved the control and freedom. I still to this day continuously fail and make mistakes. I view it as part of the process. However, I’ve learned to try and limit these failures and mistakes by understanding my weaknesses and finding help from others.

I then started taking trips to places like Colombia and Brazil with my laptop and knew that I made the right decision. I had set my business up intentionally in a way that supported the way I wanted to live. It wasn’t until this point that I heard of the term “Lifestyle Business”. I started to meet other small business owners while traveling outside of the local networking circuit and realized that there is a whole community of intentional small business owners like myself who run their businesses in pursuit of personal freedom.

The Crossroads

There came a point where I had to go back to Pennsylvania and live with my dad. I packed my few possessions into my Jeep Grand Cherokee and drove back across the country in December with my dog. We slept in my tent or in the back of the Jeep along the way. It was very cold and uncomfortable, but I loved the adventure and simplicity of it. Wake up, drink coffee, drive all day, find a state park, sleep in the back, wake up, and repeat. I also loved driving through vast areas of the country that I had never seen before. After spending Christmas with my family, I knew I needed to take action quickly. My original thought was to “Digital Nomad” as much as possible using Pennsylvania as my home base. But, at the time that just wasn’t very feasible with my dog. Then, I remembered the prospect of “Van Life”. This would allow me to travel and work full-time and is dog friendly. So, I bought a Cargo Van. My dad and I stripped it out and built it into a tiny mobile home on wheels. My dog and I moved into it and used it to travel the country for two years. This is when people really started asking me how I was able to financially support myself while living this way. I loved helping push them in the right direction after going through all the mistakes of trying to learn everything myself. I wanted others to experience this way of living too if they had the calling for it. This was a very jam-packed two years and I learned so much about myself. My confidence grew in my ability to figure things out as I go and I continually put myself out of my comfort zone. I learned who I am and what brings joy and purpose into my life.

The Van Life

We climbed mountains and volcanos. I trained jiu-jitsu in different gyms all over the country. We traveled to 46 states. We hiked and backpacked all over the country. We van camped everywhere, from deserts to mountains to swamps to truck stop & Walmart parking lots. There were struggles as well. I sometimes felt lonely and felt like I wasn’t making progress and my business was just in maintenance mode. I was grateful that my business was able to support these adventures as I was able to bring my laptop and have electricity and WiFi in the van in order to support all of my current client work. However, I put all marketing on hold for those two years for two reasons: First, I wanted to focus all of my energy on providing great work to my current clients and towards travel and adventure. Second, I studied and knew the concepts of finding potential clients online, but hated it because it always felt disingenuous to me. I tried many paths/niches & always ended up quitting because I’ve found that if something feels disingenuous to me, then I have no desire to continue. 

Back To Where The Journey Began

I had almost reached my goal of hitting all 50 states and wanted to shift my traveling to more international trips, especially once COVID restrictions started being removed. I also knew that I wanted to have a feeling of community again and figure out a way to find people that I can help online in a genuine way in order to have my business support me long-term. I knew that relying on in-person marketing wasn’t going to cut it. So, I rented a small, studio apartment back in Colorado exactly where this journey began, and moved my few belongings inside. Now, this studio in Colorado acts as a home base where I can take trips out of the Denver International Airport and have a comfortable place to come back to. Also, the saved time of having an apartment vs living in a vehicle allows me to put more effort into the marketing side of my business in order to help more people and grow. That is when I started focusing my efforts on helping the community of lifestyle business owners take control of their finances. It is the perfect balance of using my unique skills and experiences to help relieve a common pain point and need in a community that I am a part of and care deeply about. I am excited to see what the rest of this journey looks like and would be grateful if you would join me along the way.