Let Me Introduce Myself

I was the last person you’d expect to end up in this industry, including me.

Entrepreneurship was already in the family before it was ever in me. I spent years working at my parents’ IT business growing up. They’d noticed technology was becoming the thing back in the early 80s, long before that was obvious, and built a business around it. I watched all of it up close: the risk, the reinvention, the willingness to bet on something before everyone else caught on. Apparently that apple doesn’t fall far from the tree, I just took the long way around to prove it.

I spent years, from 2011 to 2017, as an independent yoga instructor. I led classes across studios and gyms, on the beach, at community centers, schools, all over the Daytona Beach area. I was asked to teach some belly dance too, so I offered that as well. It was work I loved, and it came with zero benefits. I went without health insurance for a long stretch of that time. Not because I didn’t need it. Because I’d talked myself into two contradictory fears at once: that I couldn’t afford it, and that it was probably some kind of scam anyway.

Piecing together a living as a yoga instructor meant wearing a lot of other hats too. I worked at a produce shop. I sold t-shirts at a tourist trap by the beach. I sold light bulbs online. I stocked and organized a warehouse. I tracked financials for an Airbnb rental company. I did some home health work. I rented out rooms in my house and had a couple roommates to help absorb the cost of living. I even picked up a few belly dance gigs at a couple of restaurants and parties. Whatever it took to keep the lights on while I tried to balance the creative work I actually loved.

The ACA had passed back in 2010, but it wasn’t until years later that insurance became my path. At one point, I’d even started back at college, trying to steer my career toward physical therapy. I already had a Bachelor of Science in Psychology from FSU in Tallahassee, class of 2004, but working one-on-one with people through yoga taught me that real healing lived in the body as much as the mind. People found genuine inner peace on the mat, and I found myself chasing that deeper balance of mind, body, and breath, there was something almost ethereal about the breath itself that kept pulling me back. But that fell apart. I broke down, honestly, because I just needed to get a job, and steady income wasn’t something a degree in progress was going to give me fast enough. So, on top of everything else, that stretch was a time of inner growth for me, slowly waking up to my own inner truth. I could feel how enmeshed I’d become in relationships that weren’t actually moving me anywhere, just holding me in place. I needed to get a job and learn to rely on myself, and that mattered just as much to me as the paycheck did. Someone told me that if I studied for the licensing exam and passed, I was basically guaranteed a decent paying job. I didn’t have some grand vision of a calling. I just needed something steadier. I gave myself three weeks to study, took the exam in 2017, and passed on the first try.

That job turned out to be at a call center, selling insurance over the phone. I was mostly miserable there, and it wasn’t just the work itself. Every Open Enrollment season came with mandatory overtime, the kind that swallows your whole life for months at a time. That rat race burned me out in a way that’s hard to explain to someone who hasn’t lived it. I did make some great relationships with co-workers throughout those years though. The respect that grew between the people who were stuck there with me, learning their backgrounds and personal stories in between calls, gave me something to hold onto. And the people on the other end of the line whose lives I was impacting by getting their insurance needs met, even when the call took hours to resolve and I never talked to them again, gave me a glimmer that I was on the right path.

I stuck with it until the next opportunity arose. I worked for a variety of different agencies along the way and learned how each one operated, what they got right, what they got wrong. I even became a trainer for a while, teaching other agents how to succeed. The most valuable thing I learned was that it’s impossible to know everything in this industry. What actually matters is knowing which resources to draw from, and always considering the source of whatever data you’re being handed.

There were plans I could have afforded years earlier. Insurance itself wasn’t the scam. But is the system built to stay confusing on purpose? That question is exactly the kind of thing that lights a fire under someone like me, a seeker of truth with a genuine drive to find clarity where other people just throw up their hands. Nobody had ever explained any of it to me in a way that didn’t feel like a pitch.

That became the whole point of the work. Not the sales pitch. The patient, meticulously thorough explanation.

After trying my hand at every job under the sun, my commitment to a career in health insurance became something serious. Politics change. Policies change. The industry itself shifts underneath you constantly. But one thing hasn’t: people in America are always going to need access to healthcare, whatever that ends up meaning at any given moment. I’m passionate enough about that to stay noble with it, ride the wave, and stay loyal to my clients above everything else, doing what’s actually right for them, not just what’s going to fill my pocket.

Looking back, I see this whole thing as a true calling to my mission, one that bloomed slowly rather than all at once. Those early days in the high-volume, high-turnover call center felt dark, honestly, like nothing was growing at all. But I was a seed being planted. Every one of those hundreds of calls, explaining deductibles, coinsurance, out-of-pocket limits, subsidies, over and over, was a root growing underground where nobody could see it yet. Leaving that desk to become a full-service agent out in the community was the stem and the petals finally reaching toward sunlight. And now, fully independent and building something of my own, I feel like a flower bud right before it blossoms.

Also, I’m still fully that person I was before I joined the soul-sucking career of call center insurance sales. I’m still an artist. I paint sometimes, I’ll still shimmy my hips when the mood strikes, and the rest of the time I’m deep into astrology, Human Design, birth charts that have absolutely won out over the laundry, or the TV, or whatever else was supposed to happen that afternoon. I’m constantly reading or listening to audiobooks too, always something new to chew on. And the training kept going too, trauma-informed yoga through Connected Warrior, an oncology yoga certification with Christina Phipps, Reiki training a couple years back where I got certified Level 1. None of it disappeared when I picked up an insurance license. I just added a couple more screens and monitors, an alarming number of acronyms, and a whole new tolerance for hold music.

It wasn’t a straight line from there to here. While I was pregnant with my son, I was called a scammer, by someone who should have been in my corner, not working against me. That stung in a way I’m not going to pretend it didn’t. But it also clarified something for me. I stopped needing outside validation for the work I was doing, and started trusting my own judgment about what was right for the people I served, and for my own family.

I became a mom in 2019, and that changed the math on everything. The stakes weren’t just mine anymore. Whatever I built from that point forward had to be something I could actually be proud to call my legacy, not just a paycheck.

That’s part of why I went independent. No single carrier telling me what to sell. Just the freedom to look at someone’s actual situation, health history, budget, doctors they don’t want to lose, and recommend what actually fits them. It’s also why I got appointed with a range of carriers, since the options available actually vary county to county even though my license covers the whole state, plus a few licenses in other states too. I’m not trying to build the biggest book of business in Florida. I just didn’t want geography to be the reason I couldn’t help someone who found me.

I don’t buy leads. My business has grown organically, one referral and one genuine relationship at a time. Part of how I keep it that way is community outreach: partnering with other local businesses, like provider offices, and getting carriers to sponsor things that actually promote health and healing in the community instead of just handing out pens with their logo on it.

One of those efforts, a senior technology education series, was a big hit last year in Port Orange. I’m bringing it to the Ponce Inlet community now. The whole point of it is simple: empower the aging population with technology awareness, and protect them from scams that specifically target people who feel unsure navigating a phone update or a suspicious call.

That’s also why clients come back to me year after year, and why so much of my business grows through referrals. I’m not chasing new clients. People send their parents, their neighbors, their coworkers, because they trust how I handled their own coverage.

I’m also serious about one more thing: privacy. I follow HIPAA to the letter, and whatever you bring to me, your health, your finances, your story, stays with me. I’m not running a smear campaign disguised as small talk, and honestly, anyone who has that much spare time to sit around discussing other people’s private business is a little alarming to me.

I still think like a creative. I still desire freedom to think for myself, but that’s not the same as being too stubborn to hear a better idea. I know now that guessing on health insurance doesn’t just cost you money, it costs you when you’re already at your most vulnerable. That’s why I do this, and why I do it the way I do.

You don’t have to keep avoiding this. You just have to find the right person to ask. If you’ve never had someone actually explain a health plan to you instead of sell it to you, that’s the whole reason I’m here