I started my creative design agency with a $1,000 camera and a simple prayer: God, help me make $1,000 a month. At the time that was a really big deal for my family and would have helped us greatly.

I spent most of my life trying to figure out how the different parts of me fit together. At Spelman, majoring in psychology felt natural, because I couldn’t be a counselor without a degree, but then there was my talent for art. I’m a firm believer in using all the gifts God gave you to the best of your ability, but I had no idea how to bring psychology and design together. That’s when I decided that learning graphic design was the best way to strengthen my skill without losing it. By the end of my college career, I was making party fliers for SpelHouse parties and helping my friend run his promoter business.

After graduating from Spelman, I went to Georgia State for my master’s because I was too afraid to be a grown-up. When I finished, I went into nonprofit management, doing a whole lot of development and design support for the organizations I worked for. After getting married, I moved to New York to help plant a faith-based camp, where I ran retreats, secured funding, and still ended up building websites, designing flyers, and taking pictures. I didn’t know it then, but I was building the exact skills this agency would require.

When we moved back to Georgia, my church asked me to design a T-shirt for a women’s conference, which snowballed into branding the entire conference, then building the website, and again, supporting with marketing.

That was the first time I considered building something out of the work I was already doing. My first lady took me out to lunch as a thank you and said, “You need to make your side hustle your main hustle.” And I laughed.

It felt like such a huge stretch of imagination that I could jump from social work to business owner. And she said, “I’m serious.” Even though I thought the idea was ridiculous, I couldn’t shake what she said, so I prayed for a sign. Not long after, my church called me up after service and gave me a $1,000 check. I bought my first camera, and in July 2016, TK Consulting & Design™ was born.

My goal was $1,000 a month. That first year, we made more than $27,000. Ten years later, we have served over 300 clients, completed more than 2,200 paid projects, and generated more than $1 million in revenue.

It’s tempting to tell the story that way: start with $1,000 and end with $1 million. That’s a choice. It’s just not the whole story.

The whole story includes clients we lost, offers that didn’t sell, people I hired before I was ready to lead, and months when cash flow made it hard to meet obligations. According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, nearly half of new businesses close within five years. By ten years, roughly two-thirds are gone. Only about one in three is still standing at the ten-year mark. But those numbers count the businesses that close. They don’t count all the times a business nearly fails and survives.

The truth is, a business doesn’t have to close its doors to experience failure. Sometimes failure is a bad decision, a service that no longer works, a hire you weren’t ready to manage, or a year when revenue falls after years of growth. There’s always a question as to whether this failure is the final one. And I didn’t survive ten years because I avoided failure. I survived because I learned how to fail without making every failure final.

Here are ten of the lessons that helped me do it.

1. Do Not Despise Small Beginnings

There is a lot of pressure in entrepreneurship to go from zero to one hundred real quick. Build the team, land the big contract, hit six figures, become known. My first goal wasn’t to build a million-dollar agency. It was to make $1,000 a month, and there was wisdom in that.

Small, steady work gives you room to get your reps in. You learn how to serve one client before serving hundreds, and how to manage yourself before managing a team. You make mistakes while the stakes are still low enough to recover from. When a company grows faster than its structure, it can look successful publicly while everything underneath is struggling to hold the weight of that “success.”

Some opportunities make you more visible. Others make you more viable. Learning the difference can determine whether your business is still here years from now. Sometimes the quiet work is the work that keeps you alive.

2. Give Your Business Enough Time to Teach You

One of the dangers of entrepreneurship today is that people change too quickly. A service doesn’t sell immediately, so they change the service. A post doesn’t perform, so they change the message. A few slow months, and they change the audience, the pricing, and the entire business model.

Yes, pivot when necessary. But get the data first, so pivoting doesn’t create instability.

You can’t learn from a pattern you never allow to form. There are absolutely times when the answer is change, but there are also times when the answer is to stay still long enough to collect better information. Sometimes a slow month is information. Sometimes it’s simply a slow month. The longer I’ve been in business, the more I’ve learned to respect the difference between reacting and responding.

3. Pivot Strategically

In 2019, we began expanding into digital marketing. The decision wasn’t driven by panic. Most of our work was project-based, which meant a great month could be followed by a month of wondering where the next project was coming from. I wanted recurring revenue, so we began building retainer relationships around capabilities we already had: websites, design, and messaging.

Then 2020 happened, and suddenly businesses everywhere were scrambling to show up, communicate, and sell online. McKinsey found that the pandemic accelerated companies’ digital adoption by three to four years in a matter of months, and the shift toward digital products jumped ahead by seven years. Because we had already started building, we didn’t have to become a different company overnight. We simply leaned further into something we were already developing.

The best pivots aren’t always dramatic reinventions. Sometimes they’re small, informed adjustments made at the right time. Understand why you’re moving before you move.

4. Learn How to Fail Without Making Every Failure Final

There is a version of entrepreneurship that only talks about failure after the person has succeeded. By then, the failure has been cleaned up and given a purpose. That’s not what failure feels like while you’re in it.

While you’re in it, you don’t know if this is the lesson you’ll laugh about later or the thing that will end the business. You don’t know if the client leaving is making room for something better or if you simply lost a client you needed. You don’t know if the slow season is temporary or the beginning of a larger problem.

That uncertainty is part of entrepreneurship. Over ten years, I’ve had to learn the difference between a bad moment and a bad business, between something that needs refinement and something that needs to be released. Sometimes survival is simply deciding that this particular failure will not be the one that takes you out.

5. Authenticity Is Harder When You Feel Like You Have Something to Prove

I can’t talk about entrepreneurship without talking about what it has meant to build as a Black woman. Black women are the fastest-growing demographic of entrepreneurs in the United States, with nearly 2.7 million businesses nationwide, yet Black women founders have received less than 1 percent of venture capital funding. Many of us are building with less access to capital while facing the same expectations to grow, scale, and succeed.

When you feel like a mistake might be used as evidence that you never belonged in the room, authenticity can feel risky. There have been times when the pressure to prove myself made it harder to admit what wasn’t working. But pretending to be perfect is its own kind of trap. You can’t fix a problem you’re pretending not to have. So why pretend?

That lesson also changed how I receive advice. Recently, on a panel about using grant funding to buffer payroll, someone offered suggestions about my invoicing process. The advice was thoughtful, but it was based on assumptions about access to capital that didn’t reflect my reality. People often give advice based on what should work in an ideal scenario, not the complexity of real operations. Just because someone has knowledge doesn’t mean they have the right knowledge for your business. Becoming a stronger founder has meant learning to filter advice, adapt what’s useful, and discard what doesn’t fit.

6. Community Is a Business Strategy, Even When It Does Not Look Like One

There’s no version of this story where I built TK Consulting & Design™ alone. Someone asked me to design a T-shirt. Someone told me to take my gift seriously. My church gave me the first $1,000. Clients trusted me before I had ten years of experience to point to. Friends said my name in rooms I wasn’t in.

Community isn’t adjacent to my business story. Community built the business. Over 300 clients didn’t come from any one viral moment. They came one relationship at a time. Entrepreneurship can be lonely, but I don’t believe it was ever meant to be done alone.

7. Let All of Your Gifts Work Together

For years, I thought I had separate interests: psychology, social work, art, design, systems, strategy, helping people, and business. Ten years later, I can see that TK Consulting & Design™ wasn’t built because I chose one gift. It was built because I stopped separating them.

My social work background taught me how to listen, assess needs, and understand systems. My creativity taught me how to communicate ideas visually. My faith shaped how I think about purpose. Even the systems I built to manage overwhelming caseloads were connected to the work I do now. I had always been a strategist. I just didn’t have the language for it.

The thing that makes you different may be the combination you’ve been trying to separate. Sometimes your business model is hiding in the intersection of everything you thought didn’t belong together.

8. Growth Is Not Always an Upward Line

We celebrate the year we cross six figures, the biggest contract, the best month. We talk less about what happens after.

My revenue story is not a straight line. There were years of slow growth, years of major acceleration, years when revenue declined, and years when it climbed again. The JPMorgan Chase Institute found that the median small business holds only enough cash to withstand 27 days without money coming in. Even a profitable business feels real pressure when incoming revenue doesn’t match the timing of payroll, taxes, and other obligations.

One difficult year doesn’t erase the years that came before it, and one great year doesn’t guarantee the years after. Revenue is important, but it’s information, not identity. The goal isn’t a perfect upward line. The goal is to build something capable of responding when the line moves.

9. Wanting to Build a Team Does Not Mean You Are Ready to Lead One

I knew early that I didn’t want a business that only created opportunities for me. I wanted to create jobs, so I started hiring. If I’m honest, I hired before I fully understood what it meant to carry the responsibility of employment.

Hiring someone isn’t just covering their salary this month. It means having the infrastructure to manage their work, the cash flow to pay them consistently, and the clarity to define what they own. I learned some of that the hard way. There were times when payroll was stressful, and times when I couldn’t pay people when I intended to. I carry the weight of that.

I also had to confront something about myself: managing people was not a natural strength of mine. I am deeply people-centered, and I believe people have value beyond what they produce. But honoring people and managing performance aren’t opposites. If you hire someone, you owe them more than kindness. You owe them clarity, processes, expectations, and leadership.

I would absolutely hire W-2 employees again, but next time I want to build more of the infrastructure before I build the team. Creating jobs is still part of my vision, but good intentions are not an operating system.

10. Sometimes the Goal Is to Survive Long Enough to Understand What You Are Building

I didn’t have a solid ten-year plan when I began. I had a loose one-year plan, which involved the next yes, the next client, the next lesson, the next adjustment. That may be the greatest lesson of all. I didn’t survive ten years by always making the biggest move. I survived by learning how to make the next right move. Sometimes that meant moving forward, and sometimes it meant staying put. Sometimes it meant admitting I was wrong, and sometimes it meant deciding that a failure would not be the end of the story.

So if you’re in your first year, your fifth year, or the year that feels like it might be your last, I can’t promise that every business is meant to survive. Some things need to end.

But don’t mistake every failure for an ending. Don’t pivot so quickly that you never learn your business. Don’t become so focused on being seen that you neglect the work that makes you sustainable. Don’t be ashamed of small beginnings, and don’t underestimate what can happen when you keep making the next right move.

Ten years ago, I prayed for just a little more. Today, I’m building a legacy for my children.

Survival is not the absence of failure. It’s what is built from it.