Courtney put the flier back into her desk drawer and smiled as she turned her chair around to admire the cityscape.
The phone rang.
“Hey, I’ve got a flat tire. Can you please pick up Emma from daycare. I can text you the address. Just take her to your house and I’ll get her after the roadside guys get here and fix my tire. Can you please?”
“Of course, on my way!”
“Thank you!”
Courtney hung up, grabbed her purse and ran out of the office to pick up baby Emma.
In the car, she thought about that flier and how things started.
At first, most of her clients were family friends or someone her husband would refer to her from his job. They would meet with her for a free consultation to discuss their design plans, review her fees, and sign a contract if they wanted to work with Courtney. She was a one woman business which worked well for her at first. Jobs were coming in slow and never overlapped until a few months before she put in her notice at work. Six large jobs came her way in one month and she had to make a decision between her job and business because this would require her full time attention in order to make this work. Her husband reassured her that leaving the corporate life behind was best, “It’ll always be there if you need to go back,” he told her the day she signed the contract for the sixth job that month. The money from those jobs were more than what she was getting paid; it was a risk but she was going to go for it.
Courtney was the risk taker of the family. When she was in grade school, her teachers offered a program that allowed children to go to school and live with a family overseas. She begged her parents to let her participate when she was just 10 years old. Worn down by the begging, they let her do the 2 year program in Switzerland. After the program, Courtney couldn’t stop thinking about the woman’s home she stayed in. She was an interior designer and allowed Courtney to spend most her time with her when she wasn’t in class. Courtney helped the woman, acting as her assistant, and learned how life could be designing spaces for a living. This was the first time she had seen a woman own her business and live her life on her own terms. She made her own schedule, chose the clients she worked with, and negotiated her own pay.
When she got back home, her focus all the way through the rest of school and into her first job was to someday have a life like the woman she watched for a few months in Switzerland. Although the woman was the polar opposite of Courtney from the outside looking in, she could see herself in the short skinny pale blond haired, blue eyed woman who put so much more thought into her designs than her own fashion. Courtney’s dark skin and tall curvy frame was an asset to her that she used to set herself apart from others in her field. In college, she would present her designs with tall poster board and strut back and forth as she described each part of her work as if she were telling a fascinating story. You would think there was music playing behind her as the rhythm of her words fit perfectly with the beat of her heels clicking against the floor as she switched to different parts of her design presentation, back and forth she walked in front of her admiring class. She used her body and sound to draw people into her work which no one else was doing at the time.
Courtney has been talking about this dream since she met Tiffany and promised to bring her into the company when she made enough to do so. Like everyone around Courtney, Tiffany wanted to just be apart of the big plan because the vision was too clear and specific to not happen. Her passion for design wasn’t as strong as Courtney but she learned how to be extremely organized and business oriented from her community college courses . Marketing, economics, and finance were Tiffany’s favorite classes so Courtney felt like she was the perfect person to work with because they complemented each other.
