Chaos & Doodles, a journey to peace
Hi... I'm Beka, and I'm learning who I am and how I fit into this world. If you're new around here, you likely found us over on TikTok, and the point of today's blog is to unpack the absolute chaos the last few months have been, explain some things, and hopefully share some stuff you don't know!
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So a little background. Advancing Aiden was started in 2019, and if you head to our Behind the Scenes group on Facebook, you'll find the original post for the store opening. I'll summarize it really quick: "one of my biggest parenting goals is to teach my children to chase their dreams and make a difference in the world" and that has never changed. We started, or rather, I started, Advancing Aiden to help pay off our daughter's NICU bills, and along the way, it has evolved into so much more.
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So a little background. Advancing Aiden was started in 2019, and if you head to our Behind the Scenes group on Facebook, you'll find the original post for the store opening. I'll summarize it really quick: "one of my biggest parenting goals is to teach my children to chase their dreams and make a difference in the world" and that has never changed. We started, or rather, I started, Advancing Aiden to help pay off our daughter's NICU bills, and along the way, it has evolved into so much more.
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So, who is behind Advancing Aiden? I'm so glad no one asked. Lemme show you! You can find a picture of me on the home page, so I'll share my family with you. This is Nick, my husband. He's pictured with our children, Andrew, and Aiden. And YES, the initials of our business are AA because we have Andrew and Aiden, and the initials match! Nick has been a constant with the business since we reopened on Andrew's birthday last June. A few things... Andrew is a left handed ADHD genius who has a heart of gold and LOVES to tell jokes. He's one of the reasons each DoodlePlanner comes in a left handed version. Aiden is a tiny warrior, she's hard of hearing, and a cancer survivor before she's even started kindergarten! She loves to doodle more than I do, and is the inspiration behind Legacy Doodles.
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Into the chaos we go.... hold onto your hats because I'm going to try and tell this story as quick as I can...I heard it on TikTok and it's the best way I can explain it... I give all the additional context because I think I'm more tolerable with context. Don't worry, my therapist and I talk about it regularly.
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How did we go from epoxy tumblers, to glitter and blanks, all the way into left field of planners and office supplies?!?!
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You can blame my MOTHER. (Hi Mom, I love you) See.... my love of office supplies, color coding, and need for emotional support Sticky Notes came from my mother. When I first got into making epoxy tumblers all the way back in 2019, I had told Nick "I just wish I could somehow turn my obsession with planners into a business." and he told me I could, but I laughed at him and went back to my epoxy tumblers, because WHO WOULD WANT SOMETHING TO COLOR AND PLAN?!?! That was crazy talk.
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I hadn't learned that I had ADHD yet, I was drowning in postpartum, complicated by my Complex PTSD and the fact we had a medically complex NICU baby and a not even 2 year old. Both Nick and I were working full time, and we were just trying to keep our heads above water. I'll spare you the details of my wandering around the craft community during the height of COVID and the rise of TikTok, but what I will tell you is I never fit there.
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We closed our business (when it was glitter and tumbler blanks) in the midst of our daughter fighting cancer and the COVID pandemic in April of 2021 due to some reasons. We also moved to be closer to my family in MN because we had finally admitted we just couldn't do it ourselves anymore. Nick was an amazing support through the process, and we were separated for months while I started my new job, went house hunting, had a family member unexpectedly die, and my dad was hospitalized repeatedly for COVID. When it rained... it poured...
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Fast forward to Christmas 2021, and Nick could see I was drowning. I had been diagnosed with ADHD, and was pursuing treatment, but I was a shell of myself. He asked me if I missed the business, and if I wanted to open it again. He told me he supported me in whatever I wanted to do, but he felt I was slipping away, just going through the motions. We started looking around and found an adorable little spot to open our store front.
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It was a little "local girl makes good" moment for me. My family had been in our small town for about 15 years, and when I left the Navy, I was loud and angry about how I would NEVER come back. It's a topic for another blog, on another day, but the treatment I received by the hometown crowd when I divorced my ex husband (who is the cause of my C-PTSD) was nothing short of an abomination. So for me to be back, with my family, and setting down roots... it was a big deal to me. I knew no one else probably cared or new... but it matters to me. We opened our storefront, focusing on gifts and craft supplies on June 3rd, 2022.
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We were blown away by the support, and we were riding the high, right up until I went viral in August 2022 for clapping back at a Karen. Between the pressure of an unprepared for viral video and mounting pressures on me at my corporate job, I began to struggle. Nick couldn't do much to help with the store, and we began to lose momentum. It felt like it was all on my shoulders, our sales stalled, and I couldn't find the time to fill orders, or get new product in, much less even post about our product so you would know we had product. In November, my company went through the first of two reduction in workforce experiences, and it felt like the weight of my entire department was transferred to me with the departure of our management team.
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I was unprepared for the pressure, and looking back with the perfect vision of hindsight, I realize that the upper management staff that put me in the position they did were in the wrong. I was working 120 hours or more, and from November to the day before Christmas, I think I saw my children 4 times outside of Thanksgiving weekend. I would leave for work before the house woke up, and would come back after everyone had gone to bed. I suffered, my family suffered, and the business was completely forgotten. This was also when the hostile work environment and discrimination at work began to escalate.~
Fast forward to April of 2023, nothing had really changed, it had been 6 months of this hell, and I was wasting away, very literally, having lost more than 100 lbs in about 9 months. This was on the heels of one of the worst moments in my career. I had promised my husband in January that work would get easier since the audits were behind me, and I would start prioritizing my family. There was a meeting with Aiden's doctors that I told Nick I wouldn't miss, and I missed it because the COO of my company made it clear that he did not agree with me leaving a meeting that was running late to make the appointment. The conversation with my husband that day was the turning point for me.
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I called my therapist and told her I felt like I had lost my business and now my job had almost cost me my family. I felt like I was losing everything, even myself. We started talking about how I got to this point. Nick and I started working together to find the root cause of what was going on. He was feeling like he was just watching me slowly waste away (figuratively and literally) helpless to do anything. I was hospitalized repeatedly, which was very difficult for him as well, and we finally found out that I am in early stage kidney failure. That was when we made the decision that my future wasn't at my company. It was time to make an exit strategy.
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During our therapy sessions we started talking about the business, and Nick asked me why I was so dead set on having one. I had never been able to really answer that question, and in a moment of clarity, I looked him in the eye and told him, "this has always been about building a legacy for the kids. Money doesn't buy happiness, but it buys options and I never ever want to hear my daughter stayed with a partner who tried to k*ll her because she didn't have another option. If we build this business right, she will always have options." I had never realized that everything tied back to that so clearly. That's what this was all about. It was why I kept coming back, and why I kept trying. My husband looked me in the face and replied, "you deserve options too."
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That was the start of our pivot. We knew from that moment that was our exit strategy. We went back to the drawing board. We knew we both hated glitter and was very clear our hearts weren't in it, and we weren't passionate about it. He asked me again about office supplies and planners...and so we decided to give it a try. In June of 2023, we had our final craft community conference. I was teaching "Building Blocks of Business" and we knew it was the perfect time to debut the pivot. There was one thing we identified I liked about Advancing Aiden before the pivot, and that was teaching. I LOVE to teach HOW to run a business, because it's all about process. But I won't get into that in this blog. (I know, stay on track.)
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We had some office supplies, and a few planners (the laminated ones, and the watercolor desk pads) I was still focusing on the crafty small business community but I was still holding back, and both Nick and I knew it. I was using an old version of the DoodlePlanner at work but I didn't want to share it. Then... the conference. I realized just how disposable and truly less than human I was to the craft community at that event. On the car drive back with my bestie Megan, in the middle of the night after an ER trip that cut our time at the conference short, I stared out the window and tallied up all the investment.
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I tallied up all the money, time, expertise, and knowledge I had invested in EVERYONE else, and I realized, it was a shit investment. ONE person from the event team checked to see if I was okay when it was public knowledge I was hospitalized. It was easy to see that I was investing incorrectly. It hit me that I was doing that in so many more places than just the craft community. I was investing in a company that would let me go the next day if they thought it would help their toxic company. I was investing in friends that saw me as a resource and not a human. We had moved to 12 minutes from my family and we had seen them maybe 12 times in 18 months. But I had gone to see internet people three times in another state. I was floored with my blindness.
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So. We decided to step back. We decided to invest in ourselves, and bet on ourselves. On July 17th, 2023, we did just that. I decided to post the brain dump sheet I was really liking for work, and the video cleared 2 million views easily. I was FLOORED. Nick... Nick not so much. He's not a "told you so" kinda guy, but he wasn't surprised. In his own words, "babe, YOU are your own target market. Just be you. THAT's why it's working." So we kept working. We kept pushing and on September 11th, 2023, I walked into my company and handed in my resignation to my company. A company that had taken so much from me and had simply given me experience with harassment, discrimination, a hostile work environment, ethical violations, and a lifelong lesson on what I will never do as a leader. They asked for more. They asked me to consult for them, they asked me to cancel the PTO I had needed to take to get down to use or lose for them to pay me out, promising they would pay me out. I found out after I received my final check they decided days before my final day to go back on paying out my extra PTO, a final fuck you simply because they could. All while they still tried to get me to consult for them, which I had denied.~
So, it's now Friday, October the 13th, and I'm two weeks in being full time at Advancing Aiden. We have new branding, we have stable growth plans, new products in the pipeline, and we have so many new friends. But.... I want you to know something...
Nothing we do is an accident....When I was meeting with the team to redo our branding I told them that I wanted to keep the teal (sexual assault survivor ribbon color) and the purple (domestic violence awareness ribbon color) and I told them I wanted to keep the A somewhat present because it was for both my kids. They BLEW me out of the water with the new branding... and I didn't tell them this, but I sobbed my absolute heart out with my husband when I saw the brand mark, with the three writing implements. See... in our old logo we had all our family zodiac signs, including my oldest daughter, Hope, who was too perfect to stay on this earth. There was no way they could have known that I was mourning that loss of connection to her with the rebrand. And somehow....the brand mark has three clear elements. I took it as a sign that she's still with us, and still a part of us.
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So did you need to know all that? No.... but I'm more tolerable with context. This is why our company is so important. We have so many tiny details sprinkled around that mean so much to us... and I wanted to share just a little with you, a peek behind the chaos if you will...
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So all I can promise you is this... we are so very passionate about sharing the things that have made my life with trauma and ADHD better, because everyone deserves tools that will help them calm the chaos in their mind. Everyone deserves a space they can be chaotically themselves. Are we going to always do this right? Absolutely not. Are we going to have flops of products?! YES, we already do... (I thought the class notes would be more popular so now we can't launch our next new thing until we have more space. Baby steps. and Lessons. Now we only get a small amount of each new product.)
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But we are going to learn together, grow together, and find our way. This was a really roundabout way to get here, and I wonder where we would be if I had listened to my husband more than four years ago, but we are here today, so this is the journey we will keep on.
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If you made it this far.... thank you for listening, I hope this makes more sense, and I know I'm wordy. You can come be chaotic over in our Facebook group with us, you can find us on Instagram, you can join us on TikTok and YouTube, or you can sign up for the text and emails to chat through the blog. Wherever you choose to meet us, I hope you enjoy the journey, and I would love to see whatever part of your journey you want to share.
~from the chaos to the chill,
~from the chaos to the chill,
Beka
Comments
You stated all of this so clearly and precisely. I’m happy for you that you found your passion. I want to order from you soon. You are an inspiration to me
Becca, you and your whole family are very tough and deserving. You all deserve options, and not be used up by corporate America. I will support in every endeavor that you put your mind to because I know that you and Nick and those wonderful kids of yours can make anything a reality.