This was a hard one to write but God has been stirring it around in my heart for the past 2 weeks so I am just going to let that pour out here. It may not make a lot of sense but I  hope that someone can relate and He can use the Holy Spirit to direct it where it's needed.

Business gets hard when we fail. Really Hard. And harder as a Christian woman in business.

Let me tell you a little bit about my business. As some of you know, I work in Social Selling, its the new hybrid between old school direct sales (yes think Tupperware and Mary Kay) with a little bit of network marketing thrown in on top of this whole new sales world we live in called Social Media. I started in this field in 2008. My baby boy was a year old and my husband had just come home from a year long deployment. He was supposed to come home and walk into a new job with the military...well that didn't happen. Our income was drastically cut down as he returned to a manager position in retail sales and I was working a solid 50+ hours a week as a Wedding and Event Coordinator. Let me tell you, everyone thinks that is a really fun exciting job until they do it. Give up your weekends and holidays for 4 years and  then let me know how you feel about it! But I had DREAMED of this job...and landed it at the age of 22 fresh out of college. Somehow the real life version didn't match up with my favorite movie.



When Rob got home, suddenly we made way less money yet we still had a full time daycare bill and I knew I needed to do something extra. He was going back to school on top of working full time and drill so him adding another job wasn't feasible. We already had a crazy schedule so we needed something super flexible. I didn't care about titles or how cool my job sounded...I needed to pay my car payment. Enter Direct Sales.

Yes I was one of those people who swore I would NEVER EVER do sales like that. First of all, I am not a good salesperson. I am not pushy and the thought of hard selling people on buying something from ME made me cringe. I had seen a friend start a successful sales business and thought, "Good for her, but I would NEVER do that!". Well things change when you need to pay your bills and there is something right in front of you. I had that gut feeling...which for me is usually the Holy Spirit knocking at my door. I spent $185 to get my "kit" for a product line I had NEVER tried...I just knew that I could work hard and make it work. If I could make at least enough to make $250 a month I could pay our car payment, and take that burden off my husband. In 2 months I had sold over $3000 worth of product and built a little team of 3-4 people. I was hooked. I wasn't terrible at this after all. Suddenly I saw that this could be the way out of a job that I hated...and a way home to my baby boy.



When Max was born I stopped caring so much about what my job title was and how cool my job SOUNDED and I started caring a whole lot more about being home at a decent hour and not dropping my baby off at 5:45AM to make it to work on time and picking him up as the last kid there at 6pm. I had to get OVER myself and my own prejudice against direct sales to make it happen. I had to swallow my PRIDE. Turns out I wasn't too good to do direct sales after all.



One year later, I quit my full time job to stay home with Max and work this "work from home business" Our budget only had a $50 cushion each month. I worked that business for 4 years and learned A LOT. I wasn't the best consultant out there. I wasn't extremely successful. I never made a full time income. But I was able to stay home with my babies (and 3 more came over the course of those 4 years) and I was forever changed. I had discovered a better way. Why spend over half my take home income on childcare to be miserable? Life wasn't easy and money was getting tight but now we had 4 small children. Daycare would eat up ALL my income if I were to go back to work in the same or similar field. I wasn't sure what the future looked like but I knew that going back to the traditional working world wasn't the answer. Little did I know what would happen next.

To be continued in Part 2...