Professional Hype Woman

Nov 3

5 min read

I’m usually not very good at stopping long enough to look back at what I’ve done because my brain is already about five ideas ahead and thinking about what we’re doing next. But every once in a while, something happens that makes me actually stop and take it all in for a minute.

Finding out I was named the 2026 Small Business Advocate of the Year through the Northwest Indiana Entrepreneurial Excellence Awards was definitely one of those moments. This recognition means a lot to me because it’s not about just one project or accomplishment, it’s about something I’ve been doing for years without ever really thinking of it as advocacy. Supporting small businesses has never felt like a separate thing I do, it’s just part of who I am.

Even before The Collective existed, I was the person sending someone a new business to try out, sharing an opportunity, talking through an idea, or deciding that two people absolutely needed to know each other. I still do all of that now, except there are more businesses, more programs, more cities, more people involved, and way more group texts.

When I started my first business in 2017, I didn’t really know what I was doing. I was a stay-at-home mom making skincare products out of my kitchen with $1,000 I borrowed from our family savings while learning everything as I went. I didn’t have a big network of business owners around me, and I definitely didn’t understand all the resources, organizations, programs, funding opportunities, partnerships, and relationships that existed throughout NWI.

I was just trying to figure out the next thing in front of me, and that experience is a big part of why The Collective started in 2019. I knew how isolating it feels to build something at the same time you’re trying to figure it all out, and I knew there had to be a better way for business owners (like myself) to find each other, share what they knew and help each other grow.

Over the past (almost) 8 years, The Collective has grown in so many ways. We’ve created events, educational programming, partnerships, consulting services, community givebacks, and eventually a nonprofit that allowed us to expand into programs like Farmed & Forged.

But even as it’s grown, the basic idea behind it has stayed pretty simple.

How can we help people? How can we create opportunities that didn’t exist? How can we make sure a business owner gets into the right room, meets the right person, hears about the right opportunity, or gets the visibility they need at the right time? And, because my brain apparently refuses to stop at just one objective, how can we make one good idea help more than one group at the same time?

I tend to look at almost every project through a win-win lens. If we’re going to put the time and energy into building something, I want to know how we can make it work for as many people as possible. Can it create more business for someone, support a local organization, bring people together, and put money back into the local economy at the same time? Farmed & Forged has become one of the projects where I’ve really been able to put that way of thinking into practice.

Of course it gives farmers and vendors a place to sell their products, but it has also become a welcoming space where everyone can feel like they belong. It improves food access, brings people into our communities, supports local organizations, creates programming for kids and families, and puts more money directly into the hands of local producers.

After the storms this past August, that became even more obvious. Families had lost food during extended power outages, while farmers and producers were dealing with canceled markets, damage, and lost income of their own. Within one week, more than $12,000 in food-access benefits went out through our markets.

People were able to replace food they had lost, and every one of those dollars was being spent with local farmers and food producers. That is the kind of work I love most because nobody has to lose for someone else to win.

The same thing also happens on a smaller scale all the time. Sometimes advocacy is building a program or creating an event. Sometimes it’s making sure small business owners are included in conversations with elected officials or community leaders. Sometimes it’s sharing a grant opportunity, referring someone for a project, or helping a person work through an issue they’re having. And sometimes it’s just a random text that says, “You guys need to know each other.”

I think it’s easy to underestimate how much those smaller things matter. I’ve seen a simple introduction lead to a new client, a workshop create an entirely new revenue stream, and one opportunity lead to something someone never expected.

I was never really thinking about any of it as advocacy, I was just helping where I could. That’s also why this award means so much to me, because it recognizes all of those little things that can make a really big difference for someone’s business.

So much of what I know now came from having absolutely no idea how to do something and deciding I was going to figure it out anyway. I’ve built businesses from the ground up, started a nonprofit, taught myself how to write grants, walked into rooms where I wasn’t sure I belonged, and taken on things that pushed me way outside of what I already knew how to do. I’ve second-guessed myself plenty along the way, and I still have moments when I wonder if I’m doing too much, not enough, or whether an idea is actually going to work. But all of that figuring it out eventually became experience, and now I get to use some of what I’ve learned to make the process a little easier for someone else.

That may be the part of this recognition that means the most to me. I’ve been on the side of entrepreneurship where you’re trying something for the first time, questioning whether you’re making the right decision, and wishing you had someone who had already been through it to call. I can’t give anyone all the answers, but if something I’ve learned, a person I know, or an experience I’ve had can help someone else get where they’re trying to go, I’m always going to share it.

I joke about being a professional hype woman, but I really do get just as excited about other people’s wins as I do my own. Watching someone take an idea, work their ass off to build it, and eventually see it start paying off will never get old to me.

None of what I’ve built has happened by myself. It has taken a lot of people willing to trust me, work alongside me, share what they know, make introductions, show up, and occasionally let me drag them into a project after I come in way too excited with, “Okay, I have an idea, hear me out!”

I started all of this as a small business owner trying to figure things out for myself, and somewhere along the way, helping other people figure things out became just as important to me as building my own business. Being recognized for that means so much, and I hope I never stop being the person who gets a little too excited about someone else’s good idea.

I’m incredibly proud to be the 2026 Small Business Advocate of the Year, but I’m even more proud that helping other people build their businesses has become part of what I get to do for a living.