If you had asked me five years ago if I would ever entertain the idea of starting a school, I would have laughed. It wasn't even in the back of my mind. Yet, here I am entering my third year as the cofounder of Acton Academy Fort Lauderdale, a school that now serves nearly 40 families—including mine. Life has a tendency to surprise—and stretch—us in ways we never would have thought possible.

My unexpected journey from disillusioned educator to ambitious entrepreneur and back to education innovator has now led me to my newest adventure: joining the Foundation for Economic Education (FEE) as an Entrepreneur-in-Residence. It's a role that feels like a culmination of everything I've worked on up to this point—a personal "hero's journey," if you will, coming full circle to face challenges I never could have tackled without the diverse experiences of the past three decades.

My path has been anything but linear. After 10 years of teaching, coaching, and earning my M.Ed. in Student Development, I was primed for a well-rounded career in education. But like many young idealists, I quickly became disillusioned with the very system I was meant to serve. Out of restlessness I learned what later would become a valuable business skill: how to pivot.

For the next 20 years, I immersed myself in the world of entrepreneurship. I owned a digital marketing agency, consulted for businesses, coached both athletes and executives, and wrote a book about sales strategies. Each venture was a crash course in real-world value creation, adaptability, and the raw courage it takes to put your best ideas on the line for others to judge in the marketplace.

I couldn't see it then, but it has become clear that my time first in education and then in the business world as an entrepreneur was preparing me eventually to combine those seemingly disparate experiences as an education entrepreneur.