She had the corporate dream.

Corner office, Chicago skyline, a marketing department with her name on it.

Carolyn started her career the way most ambitious people do: with a plan. Marketing specialist in healthcare. Moving up. Working toward a well-known department, a recognizable title, the kind of career your parents could explain at dinner parties. She was good at it. She knew she was good at it.

And then her boss slammed a door in her face.

Literally. Half an inch closer and it would have hit her. That same boss told her, in those exact words, that no one wanted to work with her. So the next day, Carolyn put in her two weeks. And at her last team meeting, she stood up and apologized to her team, since apparently no one liked working with her. 

The room was silent.

Not because they agreed. Because they didn’t.

She didn’t find her next job. She built her next business.

Carolyn launched her full-service marketing agency and scaled it to multi-six figures. She hired a team, ran the strategy, and sent out monthly $5K+ contracts. By every external measure, she had made it.

Except she was miserable again. Night calls. Weekend messages from employees and clients. The business she built to give her freedom had become its own version of the trap she left. She was good at running it. She didn’t want to be its slave.

So she pivoted. She stopped doing the work for people and started teaching them how to do it themselves, using the same award-winning strategies she’d spent a decade developing. Ember Vale Media Co. was born out of that decision.

Everyone told her it was a bad idea. Almost everyone.

Her dad. Former colleagues. People who thought stability meant staying inside someone else’s system. The chorus of people who confused security with success was loud.

One person believed her from the beginning. Her now-husband, Troy.

Jokes on everyone else:

•     She scaled a multi-six-figure marketing agency

•     She owns a multi-six-figure (and growing) real estate company

•     She owns a multi-six-figure construction company

•     She’s building Ember Vale Media Co. into the coaching company that teaches other business owners exactly what she figured out the hard way

She doesn’t do this because it’s her passion. She does it because she’s genuinely the best person in the room for it.

Carolyn isn’t a coach who has read the books and built a framework. She’s someone who has been inside businesses, her own and her clients’, long enough to know exactly where the money leaks, why launches stall, and what it actually takes to build something that converts without burning you down in the process.

She’s direct. She will tell you the truth about your business. She won’t pull you along or sugarcoat what’s not working. And she will push you past the point where you’d normally stop, because that’s exactly where the money is.