About

NICE TO MEET YOU

Hi, I'm Heather.

I didn't start my businesses because I needed a backup plan. I started them because I love systems. Then the layoffs came, and those systems turned out to be my backup plan.

From Oliphant, Ontario to Wall Street

I grew up in Oliphant, Ontario, Canada, a very small town with no stoplights and no stores. Somehow I ended up on Wall Street in Manhattan. Here's how.

When I lost my mom in my 20s, it felt like the tether to my foundation had been cut, and I had floated out into space. Nothing held me in place anymore, and that's what made the leaps that came next possible.

A girlfriend and I took her brand-new white Jeep, pulled the roof off and drove from Canada all the way to Key West. That trip led to my first invitation to New York City. I showed up in the middle of December with a Florida tan and fell in love with the city immediately.

For the next few years I went back and forth between Canada and New York every six months, waitressing and bartending in both places. Networking across the bar is how I talked a Wall Street business funding company into bringing me on for data entry. They hired me as a private consultant, so I opened my first company. Looking back, it wasn't really a company yet. It was just my job. But because I was hired that way, I had to learn how a business actually works: forming one, handling the taxes and staying compliant. I made those mistakes early, so you don't have to.

Where I found what I love

That "short-term" data entry job turned into three years. I built their CRM in Excel before we moved it to Salesforce, and that's when it clicked: I love organizing information and building a process. I grew into a full account manager role, handling remarketing and bringing in new deals.

After COVID, many of those business loans started defaulting, and I moved to National Debt Relief. I started as a negotiator, settling debts with law offices, debt buyers, collection agencies, medical offices and creditors. Then I moved into sales and became a top converter. My edge was simple: I had been on the other side, getting those payoff letters myself, so I could tell clients exactly what the program involved.

Later I moved to partner marketing. I saw a gap in how we brought on new partners, so I designed our partner onboarding system and helped scale the affiliate program. Then I was laid off.

The businesses I built on the side

For the past 10 years, alongside my 9–5, I've been building a pet sitting business and a reselling business. Reselling let me geek out on inventory systems. Pet sitting let me track revenue and growth. Together they've given me income to travel the world, from Tahiti and Bora Bora to Montenegro, Albania, Paris, Nice, Puglia, Sicily, Tuscany, Milan and New Zealand. These days I even source reselling inventory while I travel.

As the businesses grew, I set them up the way I wished I'd known how to from the start. I closed that first LLC, the one that was really just my job, and formed a new LLC as a holding company. That holding company owns a separate LLC for each business: one for pet sitting, one for reselling and one for my media company. Eventually, all of them will be held under a trust, so my nieces inherit a money system.

Why Press 4 Please exists

My own company had waves of layoffs all year, and the same thing is happening across the US. I've learned a lot from merchant cash advance, affiliate marketing, sales, negotiation, process building and running my own businesses, and I want to use all of it to help anyone who's been laid off, or who's afraid they will be.

But I'm also doing this for my mom. She was a single mom of three girls, and she needed multiple streams of income to stay flexible enough to be in a thousand places at once. She cleaned houses and babysat. She taught swimming lessons in the Great Lakes and ran boat licensing courses. She ran a kids' camp. She opened and closed cottages on the islands with her own boat. She did it all.

Remember, this was a town with no stoplights and no stores. Most people would struggle to find one job there. My mom found six. That's how innovative, creative, driven, consistent and dedicated she was to living the life she wanted to live.

Watching that kind of hustle growing up was the most motivating thing I've ever seen. She did it all, and so can I. So can you.

There are ways to start today with no money, no car, no materials and no experience, and to build something of your own that nobody can lay you off from, and that gives you the flexibility you need to be there for yourself and your family.

Results are not typical or guaranteed and depend on individual effort.