Silver Lining started on September 19, 2003 as a part time initiative doing freelance event promotion work. After working for a national promotional marketing company and then an international advertising agency, I left to develop Silver Lining full time on April 25, 2005. Like so many small businesses, Silver Lining was just sort of an idea that kept building upon itself. I made all of the classic mistakes early on and I had all of the same challenges that so many others face. I hired the wrong people, I took on more than I could handle, our offering wasn’t clear enough, I was always scampering for money to cover our cashflow. The list goes on and on. I also didn’t have a clue what I was doing (sound familiar?).

For the first year of the business I tried to get in any work I could in order to pay the bills (which I barely did) but that resulted in a lack of focus and clarity about what we did and who we were. I spent most of my time trying to understand the small business space by interviewing entrepreneurs. I realized over and over again that small businesses all struggle with the same types of things. We struggle with cashflow and capacity. We need to think strategically about growth but don’t have a lot of money or time to put into it. I saw over and over again that small businesses were putting money into either hiring a coach or consultant or hiring a junior level employee. One got strategy without execution and the other got execution without strategy. Both resulted in the entrepreneur working more trying to implement strategies or create strategies and coach execution. Both also resulted in money going out the door without anything coming back in. Based on all of this, in September of 2005 the Personalized Silver Lining Plan (now referred to as the Silver Lining Action Plan – SLAP) was launched and used as the model for small business planning. Silver Lining has continued to evolve since it first began.

In early 2008 Silver Lining was almost 3 years old and feeling the strain of the quick growth. I also started to feel disengaged from the business – it was not driving and inspiring me the same way that it had in the past. After a lot of self reflection and business evaluation some tough choices were made- as often has to happen in a small business. I laid off the majority of my staff to step back and figure out how to do what we were doing better. I took a long look at my own role in the company and tried to figure out what I was best at and how to use me best as the President of Silver Lining.

Throughout 2008 and early 2009 Silver Lining launched the entire Self Serve concept- offering initiatives to help entrepreneurs create and execute their own SLAP, instead of having Silver Lining do it all for them. With the combined offering of Full Serve and Self Serve, Silver Lining is set up to help small businesses wherever they are in their growth cycle. It has not been a simple journey and it is not over. This part of the section will be forever updated because if there is one thing that I have realized as an entrepreneur, you are always creating and your story is always evolving.