I fell in love. Then I lost a client on the train ride home.
It was my first real vacation in three years of starting my business. Three weeks in London and Paris with Duane, the man I’d just fallen in love with. A photoshoot in Paris. A dream trip.
On the train home, I finally looked at my phone.
We want to terminate the contract.
She’d been my client for three years. She was also a friend. She knew I’d met someone. She knew where I was and why. She’d even bought me the dress and shoes for the photoshoot I’d just done in Paris.
I cried real tears on that train.
First I was disappointed. Then I was angry at myself for a client being disappointed in me. I waited years to fall in love and to be taken on a trip like this. I’d earned it.
The money was real. A client worth $2,000 a month, gone. $5,000 in refunds in a single month. A launch I never got to execute, worth another $10,000. But the money wasn’t what scared me.
I was scared I’d found love and was about to lose everything else. The life I’d built, I loved.
It was a two-sided coin. I loved my life, and I’d built it alone. Now there was someone to build it with. But, could the business come along too?
Sitting on that train, I couldn’t see it would be possible.
What I left out
I wrote about this in 2015, for YFS Magazine. I included the Four steps that got the business back on track in under 90 days.
All of it was true.
I left out the crying, the anger, and how scared I was.
What it actually was
Here’s what I can say plainly now.
Love didn’t break my business. It showed me the business only worked while I was in the room.
My team depended on me. Our processes were documented, but they were documented with me involved, so they didn’t hold the second I stepped away. Newsletters slipped.
Contracts never went out. Clients were onboarded 72 hours late. One was billed twice.
And I expected grace from that client. We were friends. But business is business, and friendship is friendship. She’d paid for a service, the service dropped, and she wasn’t wrong.
I’d confused the two.
Everyone calls this a work-life balance problem. It’s an operational problem. A business that can’t survive three weeks without you is a j-o-b.
What it has cost since
A year later, I moved to the UK for love. Five hours ahead of my East Coast clients. Eight ahead of the West Coast. Everything I’d built ran on referrals and rooms: events, speaking, relationships. I rebuilt my network on a different continent. My business has never grown on social media. Social and I still have a love-hate relationship.
Then Copenhagen. Then again with two daughters. Back to the UK in 2020. Now Doha, Qatar (the middle east). Duane and I will be married for ten years on November 9, 2026.
Every move, every baby, every shift in our life, the business had to change with it. I’ve rebuilt the systems, the team and upgraded the tech more times than I’d like to admit.
Now I run a lot of the business on AI, my team runs on it, and so do my clients’ teams. That’s a story for another day.
Here’s the part I don’t say out loud.
I wasn’t a good steward of what I earned. I didn’t save enough. I didn’t put enough away for retirement. I enjoyed the life we were building, the countries we lived in, the experiences I wanted Mia and Elise to have. I don’t regret those. But I could have done better. My relationship with money has changed.
And then there’s time. Mia is 10. Elise is 8. The hours they’re in school are my work hours, and it’s never quite enough. My clients are seven to eleven hours behind me, so some nights are work nights. I keep strict calendar rules and strong boundaries so I’m at their activities and the events.
The business is still an emotional weight. I carry goals nobody asked me for, a number in my head for where it should be by now. Despite everything it’s done, part of me says there’s more. So I put the blinders on and go back to why I started it: to have autonomy of my time and be available to my family when I had one.
If I go back to that goal, I’ve succeeded. The business supports my life now. I get to live in the cities we move to instead of just passing through them.
Where I am
I’m better. I’m not finished. There’s still more work for me to do.
Why I’m telling you this
I’m starting a series about the things women who run businesses can’t say out loud. The secret wish to quit. The resentment nobody warns you about. The money you made and didn’t keep. The conversation you keep rehearsing.
I am lucky and grateful that Duane has been a steady income in our house from the start.
I don’t carry what the women in this series carry. But I know what it’s like to love someone, watch your business wobble, and be too scared to say it.
The women in the pieces that follow are composites drawn from my clients and colleagues.
Details are changed. The pattern is the same.
So I’ll start where they start. What’s the part of your business that only works while you’re in the room?
Read Part 1: She wants to quit her business.
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About me: I’m Sonaya. For 15 years I’ve worked behind multi-six and seven-figure founders as The CEO Partner, putting the systems in place and launching the programs that give them more time and freedom while the business keeps running. I started my own business in 2011 and have lived abroad since 2015. I write Global Life Project for people who want a different life and haven’t said so yet. Decide the life first, wherever you are. Then build your work around it.
Beautiful
Thank you for this very candid share. I recognized a lot of myself in there, but we got this!