It started the way most important decisions do. Quietly, in the middle of something ordinary.
My husband Dave and I were making the bed one morning in early 2007 when I told him I wanted a new gig by October. I didn’t know what it would look like. I just knew I was ready for something different. The corporate job was good. Flexible, well-paying, senior enough that I’d earned real standing. But it was pulling me away from my family more and more, and somewhere underneath all the travel and the polished PowerPoints, I knew it wasn’t where I was supposed to land. I wasn’t looking to reinvent myself. I was looking to plug myself in to something real and go.
A lunch changed everything.
A woman I knew showed me a compensation plan over sandwiches, and I nearly fell out of my chair. I took it home, showed it to a trusted colleague (a CFO), and he told me it was the best earnings structure he’d ever seen. Earning directly according to your own effort, he said. No ceiling. No politics. Just work.
So I went to a meeting.
And I saw real people with real stories. I saw transformations that didn’t look airbrushed. I saw a PowerPoint with a typo in it, and as a marketing executive, that kind of thing used to make me cringe. That night it made me lean in. These weren’t performers. They were just people who had found something that worked, and they were sharing it without pretense.
Something shifted that night. I’d already been using the products for over a year. I’d registered as a distributor early on just to get a discount, which was the only option at the time. But standing in that room, watching real people tell real stories, I stopped being a customer who happened to have a distributor number. I became someone who was all in.
My plan was simple: start part time, learn the business, grow steadily, and eventually leave the corporate world on my own terms. I even drew the vision out on paper.
Six weeks later, the universe had other ideas..
The agency where I worked lost a major client. In the reorganization, I lost my job.
I had a severance package, time I hadn’t planned on, and suddenly… a running start.
That October, I signed the lease on my first shake shop. We opened the following February.
Over the next 12 years, I built something I’m so very proud of.
A second location. A team that became like family. Customers who came in for a shake and stayed for the community. Kids who grew up watching their mom figure out what it meant to build something from the ground up. The wins, the hard days, all of it.
I got to be home more than not. I had car conversations with my kids during drop-off and pick-up that I would not trade for anything in this world. I watched people get healthy. I watched people discover they were capable of more than they’d believed. I watched a business model that most people misunderstand quietly change lives, including mine.
And then, 2020 came.
In May of 2020, I learned I had leukemia.
I’ll let that sit for a moment, because it still sits with me.
I spent most of the rest of that year and into 2021 in the hospital. My kids, Audrey and Matthew, stepped in to keep the shop running. Their friends helped. A dear team member held things together. The people on my distributor team kept doing what they’d always done, because they didn’t need me to run their businesses. They just needed me to get well.
And Dave… Dave has always been the person who supports my ideas and ventures without flinching. During that season he was the numbers guy who made sure the lights stayed on, and more importantly, he was my anchor. The reason I could put everything I had into getting well was because everything else was in his hands.
So I focused on getting well.
I came back part time in April of 2021, about 75 days after a bone marrow transplant. Full time by June.
The day I walked back through that door, I felt something I didn’t have a word for at the time. I’ve thought about it since, and I think it’s the simplest thing:
I felt like I had come home.
That experience changed how I talk about this work.
Not because I want to lead with struggle. I don’t. But because when someone asks me whether this business is real, whether it holds up when life gets hard, whether the community is genuine… I know the answer in a way that lives in my bones.
It held. The people held. The model held.
And I came back to it not because I had to. Because I wanted to.
Today, I work with people who are looking for something.
Better energy, a healthier body, a business of their own, a mentor who will be honest with them. Sometimes they know exactly what they’re looking for. Sometimes they just know something needs to change and they haven’t found the right door yet.
I’m not here to sell you on a program. I’m here to help you figure out what you actually need, and then walk alongside you while you build it.
My approach isn’t one-size-fits-all, because you aren’t. We talk about nutrition. We talk about mindset, habits, faith, fitness. We talk about the whole of it, because that’s where real change happens.
I’ll instill belief in you until you can hold it yourself.
I’ll be a straight talker. A friend. Someone you can trust.
And I’ll show up. Because that’s what this work has always been about.
If you’re curious about what a conversation with me looks like, start here. Take the NewStart Navigator assessment. It’s a simple way to understand where you are right now and what your next step might be.
Or if you’re just browsing, welcome. Look around. There’s no pressure here, just real talk about wellness, life, and what it looks like to build something worth building.
I’m glad you’re here.
— Mary