Entrepreneurship
is action.

I knocked on the door of a preschool operating out of a church basement in Seattle’s First Hill neighborhood and asked to speak with the Head of School. When she came out, I told her about the Chinook Book, an environmentally focused coupon book that schools and nonprofits could sell to raise funds. She invited me in, we sat and talked, then she put in an order and gave me a hug on my way out the door.

The next day, the owner of the company I worked for came to Seattle from Portland and asked how I was selling so many books. I told him I was stopping by organizations and telling them about our mission. He loved the story of my visit to the preschool and extracted every detail of it from me. No one in the history of the company had ever done “door knocking” before, and, at the time, I didn’t even know that’s what it was called.

To me it was just the obvious thing to do. I believed in our mission to help people use their dollars to change the world, and I wanted more people to be on board with us.

Most everything I have learned to do professionally, I have learned along the way. That’s the life of an entrepreneur. If something needs to be done and I believe in the why, I will roll up my sleeves and get it done.

I hadn’t planned on a career in sales, or really settled on a professional path at all. After graduating from college in 2003, I waited tables and bartended to save for travel. Having lived abroad during high school and studied in India during college, I wanted to see more of the world before settling into a career. After nearly a year traveling through Australia, Southeast Asia, and India, I returned to Seattle in late summer 2005, ready to put my degree in Environmental Studies to work.

I landed a job as a Fundraising Manager for the company behind the Chinook Book. The job came naturally to me. I believed in what we were offering, and that made it easy to tell our story.

When my boss, the Director of the Seattle market, left for Vulcan, the company owner promoted me to Director. I was only a year into my professional career, but because I’d been successful and did my job to the very best of my abilities, I was given a bigger opportunity.

During the next year, I learned about managing people, setting strategic priorities, managing sales, reviewing financials, and running operations. I wasn’t actually good at any of these things yet, but I got exposure and I tried. I had colleagues in the other markets to learn from, and I had a “roll up my sleeves and figure it out” attitude.

It’s almost cringeworthy now to think back on my younger self and how out of her depth she was. I just want to hug her and give her a roadmap and playbook, but that hard earned experience is how I learned.

In 2007, I married my rock climbing partner, Peter, and began helping him on weekends and at night with his young business, then called Treecycle, now Seattle Tree Care.

By the end of the year, I was pregnant with our first child, and we decided to go all in together on Treecycle. I left my Director role to build the business with him. Peter brought the arborist skills and a vision for the brand. I brought business experience and saw an opportunity to build the best local tree care company by bringing greater professionalism to an industry where business practices were often informal. We bonded over marketing and built one of Seattle’s first tree care company websites. We were young, full of drive and ambition, and excited about what was possible. So we jumped right in.

My Aunt Meg lives in Montana and has worked as a bookkeeper her whole life. On a trip to visit her, we sat in her living room and she helped me set up our company’s chart of accounts. Then, using a three ring binder, she showed me how to do payroll, what records to keep, and which taxes I needed to pay and when. A few months later, I processed our first company payroll, exactly one month after our oldest child was born.

There was no alternative. We were committed to creating our business, and there was so much we didn’t know, so we focused on the few things we did know we needed to do, and we did them.

We had two more children over the next few years and somehow figured out how to embrace the chaos of building a business and growing a family. It has been the hardest thing I’ve ever done.

As we grew, we had to figure out how to train the people who joined us. Peter was always good at instilling confidence in employees who were learning our trade. He worked alongside them in the field, teaching them the many things an arborist needs to know. As the company grew, a few other climbing arborists who were natural leaders and skilled trainers passed their knowledge down to newer hires. But eventually we grew past relying on personal training from Peter and a few key people.

One day, I was walking across the Fremont Bridge from our office on the south side to grab a sandwich for lunch in Fremont. I was listening to a podcast interview with a woman who owned a home cleaning business. She had created a training system for her field technicians, from the entry level position all the way to the top.

I was fascinated by how simple, yet powerful, the concept was: show employees where they can grow in your company. A lightbulb went off in my head, and I poured myself into systemizing our training program.

We were building on something we had always done well: training people with no experience to become safe, competent, skilled arborists. We broke the work down into positions, skills, training, and sign offs at each level. It gave our employees a clearer picture of where they could go and helped us build a training system that could grow beyond any one person.

Nearly twenty years after we started the business, we have generated over $60 million in revenue from tree work, invested back into our business, employed more than 250 people, and trained countless arborists in our trade. We’ve also invested in commercial properties that house our business and will hopefully provide retirement income someday.

Shit’s hit the fan more times than I can count, and we’ve failed in so many ways. There have been IRS and state audits, workers’ compensation citations, very unhappy employees, and situations that broke my heart. We’ve faced legal disputes and the threat of lawsuits. Balancing the amount in our bank account with what we owed for payroll caused years’ worth of stress.

Our marriage suffered. I remember being out to dinner with my husband and saying something like, “Look at that couple just sitting there. Gosh, aren’t we lucky that with our passion for business and our kids, we’ll always have lots to talk about?” But we got our priorities mixed up sometimes. We poured so much into the business that we took our relationship for granted. Now, twenty years later, we are learning to put that same effort into each other and to appreciate the peace of sitting together in stillness.

Our kids made sacrifices they hadn’t chosen, and nannies have been part of our family since our oldest was a few months old. I sat at my computer working while breastfeeding our second child, the literal day after he was born.

When we started out, I couldn’t have imagined what building this business and growing our family at the same time would require of us. You don’t know what you don’t know. As we figured things out, what once felt stressful or uncertain became something we knew how to handle. We’d look back at something that had seemed incredibly hard and think, “Oh, that was nothing. Look what we’re dealing with now.” Our capacity kept growing, and being the action oriented person I am, as soon as my sphere of “knowing” grew, I just jumped into the bigger sphere of the unknown. My husband is cut from the same cloth and even more risk seeking than I am. He was usually the one taking the leap, and when it was me, he certainly wasn’t holding us back.

Now I wonder: If I had known everything we would have to figure out, would I have done it? Each day was as invigorating as it was overwhelming. I wasn’t ready for it all in the beginning, but taking action helped me grow into the person who could handle what came next. Those experiences also taught me to be more intentional about how I allocate my time and attention, and what I prioritize. That was my lesson to learn, and I plan to carry it forward.

If there is anything I know I need to teach my kids, it is that they are capable of figuring it out. Having clarity about where they eventually want to go is helpful as a navigational strategy, but they don’t have to see the whole path before they start. They need enough confidence in themselves to take the first step and trust that what they learn will help them find the next one. That’s how they’ll discover what they’re capable of and grow into the full potential of who they are.

That confidence in our ability to figure it out is what Peter and I have shared from the beginning. Entrepreneurship is stepping into the unknown, building something from nothing, and carving out a path, sometimes through sheer will alone. It begins with the courage to take that first step and grows with the willingness to keep taking the next one.