The little decisions in life often turn out to be the big ones. You just don’t know it at the time.
For me, it started with my mom saying yes to a neighbor who needed help cleaning a few homes. With nine kids to raise, work was never just work. It was responsibility, survival, and love all wrapped together. She teamed up with her sister and called the business “Sisters in Grime,” which still makes me smile. Even now, the name feels like a snapshot of that season.
I helped in high school. Then more in college. Somewhere along the way, it stopped being helping and started becoming my world. When Annie and I got married in 2005, my mom and aunt began easing back from the cleaning work they had built over the years. A handful of clients remained, and I continued cleaning them myself. When Breanna was born the following summer, my perspective shifted. Supporting a family sharpens your focus. It changes how you measure risk. That’s when I began expanding what already existed, growing it carefully over time, one decision at a time.
Over the years, the business grew. At any given point, we had more than twenty employees, many part-time, coming and going as the work demanded. We expanded into cleaning churches, temples, and eventually nursing homes, where reliability mattered even more. Some clients stayed with us for fifteen years. Being invited into someone’s space is surprisingly intimate. You see routines, messes, milestones, ordinary life unfolding. You begin to understand people without many words. That kind of trust is not something I ever took lightly.
While cleaning, I listened to audiobooks. Hundreds of them. One book in particular, Built to Sell, stayed with me. I wasn’t listening because I planned to sell. At the time, I couldn’t imagine doing that. I remember thinking, “Sell? I’m never selling this.” It felt like my identity. But the book wasn’t really about exiting. It was about building something that could stand on its own. The idea that a business could be designed intentionally rather than simply endured unsettled me in a good way. I didn’t act on it then, but the question lingered.
As the business grew, many clients began to feel like family. Letting go of those relationships was one of the hardest parts of even considering a sale. The business had been my world for eighteen years. I gave it everything. I rarely took a real vacation. The only true breaks were camping trips in the Boundary Waters, mostly because there was no cell service. It turns out forced silence is an effective way to hear yourself think.
By the early 2020s, I knew something needed to change. Not because I had fallen out of love with the work, but because I had given it everything I had to give. Managing people was meaningful, but it carried a cost for my family and for me. Growth always demands something in return.
Then one day, I received a call from a man named Manny. He asked whether I had ever considered selling the business. I didn’t take it seriously at first. But the conversation stayed with me longer than I expected. It felt less like a sales pitch and more like a door quietly opening.
Selling something I had built over eighteen years was not a decision to rush. Manny understood that. He had once owned a cleaning business himself and knew the work from the inside out. He helped organize my financials, clarified the process, and answered every question, even when fear made me ask the same ones more than once. Doubt followed me closely through the process. There were many moments when I was convinced I was making a mistake. Courage does not always feel strong. Sometimes it just feels steady.
In May of 2023, I finally said yes. Within a month, the business was sold. It moved quickly, but it did not feel careless. It felt deliberate. And when it was done, it felt freeing. In time, I understood it was the right next step for my business, for me, and for my family.
Some clients had become friends along the way, and one of them was Dave. We stayed in touch after the sale, not as business owner and client, but simply as people who had shared a long chapter. When he later suggested I explore publishing, I listened. I’ve learned that the right opportunities often arrive through familiar voices.
So I made another decision that felt larger than I was ready for. I purchased the franchise rights to launch Maple Grove City Lifestyle in this territory. There was no existing publication waiting for me. No staff. No systems. Just a blank page and a deadline. And a quiet belief that it was worth building.
Buying the rights and building this publication from the ground up was far scarier than selling my business. There were months when I genuinely did not know whether all the work would ever make it to print. Now, one year later, that doubt is what makes this issue so meaningful. Making it past year one matters. It means the leap held. It means the work compounded.
That lesson fits naturally with this month’s Investment issue. The most meaningful investments are rarely obvious at the start. They are built slowly, tested by doubt, and rewarded by patience.
Looking back, I can say this clearly. That chapter only closed because I had the right guidance at the right time. Manny from Sunbelt Business Advisors did not just help sell a business. He helped me move forward when fear was loudest. Behind him was the broader Sunbelt and True North team, including more than forty professionals supporting the process with experience and care every step of the way.
Sometimes the things that scare you most are the things that bring the greatest return.
And sometimes, the right guide makes all the difference.
Sunbelt Business Advisors | 1300 Godward St NE #6000, Minneapolis | www.sunbeltmidwest.com
Sometimes the things that scare you most are the things that bring the greatest return.