Mad props to the women in business out there, who have put everything on the line for something likely to fail and then threw everything they had into it.

I started a financial planning company in 2011, inspired by Linda Bessette. For over thirty years, people would find their way to Linda’s house by word of mouth and learn about their finances. A significant fact about Linda’s model was that she never advertised.

Clearly, there was a dire need for what Linda was doing on a larger scale.

With Linda’s help, I decided to scale the idea into a broader financial company so I could also teach and empower people to manage their money and investments. This would not only save them money, but people would do better with their money by being more intimately involved with it.

However, with the costs of compliance, the inefficiency of getting paid by the hour, and the need to serve a greater portion of the public, it was clear that my initial model was never going to be profitable.

At that point, I would have been perfectly fine to throw in the towel.

When you are all there is, and paperwork is piling up, your inbox is full, the phone won’t take even one more message, and you don’t have a drop of energy left in you for networking, that’s when the hustle begins.

My partner, Tim, joined Aptus, and we created a process and pricing needed to reflect our efforts. We took on employer retirement plans, where we could help thousands of people every year. We now provide for both individual clients and employer retirement clients.

Aptus is a rare, female-owned financial services firm that has made it. I love what I do every single day. I have surrounded myself with the dream team. People who love all the aspects of the business that entrepreneurs find practically unbearable, certainly undoable.

The experience of starting a business is like being on an elevator repeatedly pushing the button to go up, only to start moving down. It’s like seeing your airline gate up just ahead, and people are already boarding. You run on the moving sidewalk—but it’s going the wrong way, and you now find yourself sprinting to keep pace with the walkers.

But, for brief moments, it’s like flying, and you are willing to do it all again day after day just for those fleeting moments of flight.

The hustle paid off for me because I found a team that hustles as well.

In my previous life, when things got too hard when tasks seemed above my expertise or my pay grade, there was always the next person to fill in that gap. I am glad to know now that nobody does this kind of thing alone.