When I started my company two years ago, I had no idea the journey I was about to embark on.
That’s probably a pretty common line to hear coming from an entrepreneur, but stay with me
here.
I look at my life in three sections.
- Pre-drug use & heavy drug use days
- Giving up heroin & other drugs
- Starting my business.
I started doing what I do, now, which is find people interviews on podcasts – out of necessity.
See, if you had found me back in May 2014, at 23 years old, you literally wouldn’t have recognized me. I was heavily addicted to intravenous heroin, trimming weed for dope money, bouncing around from junkie’s house to junkie’s house as I continuously wore out my welcome.
I wish I could say that quitting heroin was a no-brainer for me at the time, but I fought that shit. I had basically surrendered my life to it, & openly admitted to myself & others that I wasn’t sure I’d be able to quit, ever. I did things I hate thinking about, to feed my addiction. See, just the act of
doing intravenous heroin & being around those types of people is traumatizing. What often happens after the fact, is even worse.
I fought to quit so hard I almost lost my life, three times over. After the third OD experience & waking up in the hospital, I had a serious “come to God” moment, & realized I didn’t want to give up my life on this thing. I’m a stubborn person, I can admit it. I was so stubborn that I wouldn’t quit opiates, up until the point of IV H use because I simply didn’t want to. But once that decision was made, that flip was switched. That was iT.
I couldn’t let something like this take me out, what was I thinking almost giving myself up?! Quitting was tough. I often described my situation as being a self-inflicted terminal illness, that only I had the ability to cure – & I had to do it with my mind. It was Courtney-built cancer that
would inevitably take my life (sooner rather than later), if I let it.
I don’t remember much of the withdrawal period, something I’m grateful to my subconscious for blocking out, but from what I hear it wasn’t pretty. I was blessed with angels in my life, who helped me to heal & accepted me for who I was at the time, withdrawals & all. Not all addicts in
my position are so fortunate as to have people who selflessly give so much for another person’s well-being simply because they care, something I will be forever thankful for.
Once I was clean for a few months, whoops! I got pregnant with my daughter, at 24 years old. She was the biggest blessing I’ve ever received, & I believe if she hadn’t come along I would have dealt with a relapse or two. Becoming a mother was the single greatest thing to ever happen to me, and was a transformative part of who I have become. Not just because I have a new person to love, & life to care for – but because having her forced me to think outside the box.
Quitting drugs left me with a lot to deal with on the mental health front. A lot that I had been suppressing & numbing with drugs was coming to the surface, & it was a really wild ride for a while for my family & me. I was living in trauma & PTSD on a daily. I developed an eating disorder. Depression & anxiety. Post-Partum nightmarish hormones that triggered everything into a tornado of darkness.
So, all this going on, brand new baby & all, I sort of went “well, the situation being what it is, I don’t think I’ll be getting a ‘real’ job anytime soon…”
So I got to work on the only thing I had, my $400 laptop. It was a rough go in the beginning, I won’t lie. I gave freelance writing a go, didn’t really work. Thought about joining an MLM. Started a blog about natural health (which I still believe in).
Eventually, my dad decided to hire me to help him with some lower-level stuff that needed to be done for their business, write articles for his websites, and… find his interviews on podcasts. I did this for about a year and a half, & it was great, I’ll always be grateful to my dad for keeping
me working & for helping me nurse this idea to life.
After a year and a half, I decided to branch off onto my own.
I put together a very nicely written email offering people my services, made up some package prices for what I was offering, and gave it a go! On the very first week, I made more than I did in two workings for my dad. It was at that point, I knew I was on to something big. Very big. In the beginning days of Zippy Content, I was kind of shooting in the dark trying to figure out what I was doing.
I didn’t understand how to run a business (still learning, bear with me people), I didn’t understand the benefits of my services, I didn’t understand the value, & I didn’t understand the internal processes it would take to make the thing work.
I had a lot of people email me telling me I was a spammer, that what I was doing was insane & ridiculous & there was no way I was going to be successful. I had people report my emails as spam & have them totally shut down in the middle of a huge outreach campaign for a brand new
client. I had people try to scratch my name on social media because I fucked up and sent them an email by mistake. Shit was BUMPY in the beginning. I kept doing the thing. Zippy was all I had. I had to keep going. “Fuck the haters”, I would say.
Eventually, I found my tribe, my people who saw what I was doing, saw the value in it, & invested in ME, & shamelessly promoted me. Once I hired my team, everything changed. We started to get GOOD at what we do. We dialed in every single little aspect of our internal
processes one-by-one by, & turned a cheap online podcast service, into a top-dollar luxury brand that only works with the finest. (By the way, without Samantha, my right hand, my company would NOT be what it is today. Or should I say, OUR company <3 Thank you FOREVER)
I guess the moral of the story is. It really doesn’t matter what your past consists of. Shame, fear, those things can’t hold us back from a bright future, if we don’t let them. Take a baby step every single day. Getting out of the creek-bed is slow, & can look impossible to get to out of
when you’re looking up from the rocky bottom – but if you just keep pushing, step by step, you KEEP GOING – eventually you WILL end up at the top of a mesa overlooking the entire AZ desert (personal experience).
More often than not, it happens much faster than we ever thought possible.
