Welcome to How Can This Be Easy: This is My Origin Story

I programmed a VCR at 16 and accidentally terrified my mother. Turns out, that was just the beginning.

I want you to imagine it’s 1986.

My mother is downstairs in our 1970’s 3-bedroom bungalow dusting around the TV cabinet while I’m in high school and in the middle of her perfectly normal stay-at-home-mom afternoon, the VCR suddenly springs to life.

If you had a VCR in the late 80’s, you’ll remember the aggressive powering up and internal shuffling of tape like it’s preparing for a takeoff. It genuinely sounded like a small aircraft starting its engine in the living room.

She screamed because as far as she knew she was alone in the house, calmly cleaning away, when the VCR roared to life as if it had been activated by a ghost with a very specific viewing schedule.

What she didn’t know was that I had programmed it that morning to record General Hospital (my favorite soap opera) while I was in class. I didn’t mention that small operational detail. In my defense, I wasn’t considering the noise it would make AND that she’d be standing next to it when it started. I was only thinking about Robert Scorpio and Sean Donely and Frisco Jones. IFYKYK.

So while I was sitting in math with Mr. Elliott, feeling hopeful my experiment would be successful, my mother was downstairs experiencing what felt like the opening scene of a science fiction film.

When I got home, she dramatized the afternoon at the supper table telling us the VCR had turned itself on. Between hysterical giggles, I informed her happily that it had not.

It had done exactly what I told it to do. She was rattled and a little freaked out that I could do that. I was delighted. I think my Dad was secretly amazed and cheering me on but not saying anything because he could see how upset my Mom was.

That was the beginning of my love affair with technology. There was no going back.

I became a teacher after high school. I left teaching to work part time while my daughter was young. I quickly discovered I wasn’t meant to stay at home OR work for my then husband. I got certified as a professional coach. I started my first business and realized I needed a website (so I figured that out too by searching around on the internet) and then all my coaching colleagues needed websites and they came knocking.

I realized I liked tech WAY more than I liked listening to women cry so I skilled up as a graphic and web designer. Opened my first online support school with a gal in Colorado where we taught women all over the world how to code. Closed that in 2018. Left my 25 year marriage in the fall of 2019 with nothing. I rebuilt my life and pivoted my business. DURING a global pandemic. Got StoryBrand Certified. Soared to 100K years. Pivoted into digital courses. It’s funny what you’ll do when you’re a single mother.

Fast forward 40 years.

In the past two years, I’ve sold over 4000 digital courses and had over 350 women join my memberships. And I made enough money to pay cash for my BMW in 2024. All on my own.

I’m not saying this to impress you.

I’m saying it because there is a straight line from programming a VCR in 1986 to pressing publish on a digital course in 2024 and watching Stripe notifications come in.

It’s the same brain and the same refusal to be intimidated by a machine when many women of my generation still add two spaces after a period because we learned to type on typewriters, not screens (you need to stop with the two spaces, by the way but that’s for another post).

Somewhere along the way I stopped just liking tech and started understanding business.

Offers. Messaging. Sales pages. Buyer psychology. The sequence that has to happen before someone takes out their credit card. The difference between visibility and revenue. The difference between marketing and sales.

AND, because I have a background in education, I’ve learned that I’m really good at breaking things down into practical steps that even those of us who have trouble updating our iPhones can follow with ease.

Women over 50 are building businesses at record rates and most of them have more experience in their pinky finger than the twenty-something online bro yelling about funnels on YouTube.

You need to understand what you’re building and why it works.

So I’m here on Substack because I want to talk to more of you.

Not in captions or 60 second reels or fighting an algorithm.

On this platform, I am looking forward to sharing with you:

• tech that actually makes you independent instead of dependent

• mindset tips that matches the stage of life you’re in now, not the one you were in twenty years ago

• strategy that is broken down so that you’ll not only understand the how - but also the psychology behind it

I call it the “How Can This Be Easy” approach and it isn’t about pretending business is effortless.

It’s about looking at what you’ve built and asking whether you made it harder than it needs to be. It’s about sequence, alignment, and understanding how the pieces fit before you try to scale them.

That’s what I’m known for: seeing the gap, breaking it down, simplifying it, and empowering you to feel confident and capable of executing it on your own, all without ever making you feel stupid in the process.

If you’re building something real, and you’re serious about revenue, and you’re willing to look at the structure instead of blaming the surface, you’ll probably like it here.

And if you remember the sound of a VCR powering up like a jet engine in your living room, then we already speak the same language.

Welcome!