Six weeks ago I made three blends of cacao in my kitchen, poured them into tins, and showed up at a farmers market on a rainy Saturday in May.
I almost sold out. A woman named bought one of everything before I said a word about what any of it was. Another woman stopped at my table and asked about my ancestry, not my ingredients. A friend in Tennessee paid to have a tin shipped to her before I even had a real online shop to ship it from.
I’m the asset here, not the tins. The tins are beautiful, but what people are actually buying is me — my ancestry, the intention behind this, the fact that I made this by hand from a plant my people cultivated for thousands of years.
The online coaching years taught me something I couldn’t have learned any other way.
I spent years trying to build something inside an environment that rewards performance over substance, and that experience gave me the ability to recognize, almost instantly now, when something isn’t mine. A recent call about a potential collaboration felt off — not because the person was wrong, exactly, but because the transactional energy underneath it was familiar in the wrong way.
I now know the difference between a real collaboration and a transaction wearing a collaboration’s clothes.
My best channel is the one I keep underestimating: shipping directly to one person at a time. That Tennessee package lit me up more than any workshop call, any bigger conversation, any amount of planning. Packing it — the sticker, the recipe card, the handwritten note — I did with a warmth I don’t reach for when I’m thinking about tables and tents. That’s the actual model. One person. One tin. One note. The market is where I find these people. Staying in touch is how I keep them.
The loneliness in building this is real, and it’s not going away by itself. It’s going to find me at a market table, or in a message from someone who read something I wrote and felt seen. I’m not burning out on business. I’m burning out on the businesses that never fit. This one fits.
Whatever exhaustion I feel isn’t about the work itself — it’s about the complexity I keep tempted to add on top of it. What makes this mine is simple: the cacao in the tin, the note in the box, the story at the table. Before the next market, the only thing that actually matters is showing up with something good to sell and something true to say.
I already have both. Everything else builds from there.
2nd journal entry from June 2026
I started a business with a podcast and a coaching identity built around career sovereignty. What I didn’t have was a product — I was selling ideas to people who were mostly also selling ideas.
Then I made something with my hands. A tin of cacao. A candle poured into a mason jar. And on a rainy Saturday in Arlington, fifteen strangers stopped at my table, tried what I’d made, and bought it.
That day wasn’t just $333 in four hours. It was proof that the thing I’d been writing about for years — building something rooted, making income on my own terms instead of contorting myself for a system that was never built for me — was actually happening, in physical form, at a market table, in the county where my parents built a life.
The business-coaching identity showed up on its own, uninvited, and I let it. Someone at my table asked how I was doing as a vendor, and I lit up talking about it. I felt like a business coach again, and I loved it. That’s not a departure from the cacao. It’s the same philosophy in a different room.
Fall season is a different sell entirely. Hot cacao in cool weather isn’t the same conversation as hot cacao in May. By then my equipment is paid for, my product line is tested, and an email list has had all summer to grow. Every sale from that point is closer to pure profit.
What I’m building isn’t just a product business. The tin is the front door. The candle is the room you walk into once you’re inside. What people are actually buying is a relationship with a plant that carries thousands of years of lineage, made by someone who is the lineage — not a customer of it.
I’m letting go of the volume-vendor model I saw — someone else’s booth, someone else’s approach, more locations, less relationship. That model works for products that don’t need a story attached to them. Mine does. I can build something that’s deeply mine and financially sustainable.
I’m letting go of the worry that my Substack is confusing people. I’m one person with one philosophy, showing up in a couple of different forms. The people who came for career content will find the cacao deepens it. The people who find me through cacao will find the career work explains it.
There’s a piece of my story I haven’t told publicly yet — the specific shape of my ancestry, the lineage that runs through this plant and through me. When I finally write it in full, I think it’ll be the most important thing I’ve published. It’ll be the piece that brings my people to me.
I want my time to be my own. I cannot give energy I don’t have.
A 3rd journal entry from June 2026
The business I’m building is relational by design — not because I sat down and strategized it that way, but because that’s just who I am.
I care whether someone feels seen.
I care about a tin being a long-term companion, not a one-time transaction.
I care about the subscription being a monthly practice, not just a recurring charge on someone’s card. That’s the actual ethos underneath everything else.
And yes — some people will just want the cacao.
They won’t engage with anything beyond the product itself. They’ll transfer it into a jar without a second thought about anything I’d want them to know about how it was made. That’s fine. They still paid me for something I made with my own hands.
I need to keep showing up fully for the people who are already leaning in and let the purely transactional ones be exactly what they are.
A note from the Present Day
It’s been so interesting to look back at my journal entries from when I started this cacao business. And the different things that stood out to me, the different things that resonated, because ultimately I’ve been so grateful and appreciative of everyone I have met at the farmers market. I’ve been so grateful to have been in communication with some of my local Pilates studios that wanted to do a tasting workshop, of being invited to a holiday market at a winery this December.
I wouldn’t have been able to fathom these sorts of blossomings and opportunities because all I had envisioned for myself at the time was just the nervousness of showing up at a farmer’s market with my booth and people not being sure of what I sold and whether they would want to try it, and me trying to explain what it is and who I am in a way that wasn’t salesy or uncomfortable for them or me.
Whenever we embark on something new, give ourselves grace and space to feel whatever it is we’re feeling and recognize that there’s going to be things that we never could have anticipated or prepared for.
Once we plant a seed, it’s no longer ours to control. It’s bloom and grow on its own time in its own way, and different things are going to come into contact with that plant. Everything is a journey in itself. So I hope you all enjoyed reading Snippets of my journal entries, and I hope they have helped or given you a glimpse of kind of my inner dialogue in a helpful way :)
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