The Family Business

I grew up watching a family business grow from someone's home into a real, incorporated company. I didn't know it at the time, but I was learning what it actually takes to build something — the unglamorous, day-to-day work behind it — long before I ever thought about building anything of my own.

Learning How Businesses Actually Run

Retail taught me visual merchandising and inventory — how a space is built to work, not just look good. Nearly ten years as a barista trainer taught me systems, pace, and how to bring someone up to speed fast without losing the customer standing in front of them. And building a business through direct sales taught me how to sell, how to build relationships with customers that actually lasted, how to work inside someone else's system, and what it takes to create your own momentum instead of waiting for it to show up.

"Nobody was going to create momentum for me. That part was always on me."

Six Months in Cairo

I spent years as a professional Polynesian dancer, and one chapter of that career took me to Cairo — a position I had to audition for and earn. I lived and worked there for about six months, performing alongside four other dancers, all of Tahitian descent. Two were from Tahiti itself. Two didn't speak English at all, and for two others, English was a third language.

Communicating and working well together meant navigating those differences every day, on top of adjusting to life and work somewhere so far from home. Six months living and working in Cairo put that adaptability to work every day — communicating across differences, adjusting to an unfamiliar environment, and still showing up professionally for the job I'd auditioned for.

When It Stopped Being Professional

My first son spent 14 weeks in the NICU. I became a single parent in the middle of it, without the luxury of a traditional maternity leave. Years later, I was back in the NICU with my second son for 9 weeks. I didn't learn to keep things moving through any of that — I already knew how. What changed is that it stopped being something I only did for other people's businesses. It became something I had to live, every day, for both of my sons.

What Scale Teaches You

Most of these events ran 250+ guests, and at that size, there was no room to figure things out as you went — timelines, sequencing, vendor coordination, catering flow, handoffs, anticipating what needed to happen next. None of it was an abstract operations concept. It was just how the event worked, and it only worked if every piece stayed connected to every other one.

That took real calm under pressure — it still does. But the bigger thing this chapter gave me wasn't composure. It's that systems and workflows stopped being optional for me. I wasn't thinking about it as operations at the time. I was just doing what the scale demanded — and looking back, that's a big part of why this way of working feels so natural to me now.

The Thread Through All of It

None of these chapters looked alike on the surface — a family business, a retail floor, a coffee counter, a business built through direct sales, six months living and working in Cairo, a NICU room, weddings for hundreds of guests, and a preschool classroom. But looked at together, the same thread ran through every one of them: noticing what needs to happen next, adapting fast, managing the moving pieces, and taking care of the people in the room — usually before anyone had to ask.

Golden Thread is simply the metaphor I chose for that role — the one I naturally tend to play. Not because of one defining moment, but because it's the truest way I could describe what I actually do: connect the pieces, notice what needs attention, keep things moving, and hold everything together, usually from somewhere behind the scenes.