Interested in starting your own entrepreneurial journey in health and wellness but unsure what to expect? Then read up on our interview with Sharise Nance, Founder of Vitamin C Healing, LLC. and Co-Owner of HandinHand Counseling Services, LLC., located in Pittsburgh, PA, USA.

What's your business, and who are your customers?

Vitamin C Healing, LLC is a service-based organization that enhances emotional wellness by helping professionals, entrepreneurs, and mental health leaders struggling with self-care, work-life balance, compassion fatigue, and burnout through corporate workshops, consultations, group coaching, online courses, and books.

Tell us about yourself

I started my first business, HandinHand Counseling services LLC with my good friend and business partner Tess Kenney in November 2013 after working in social services and community mental health for several years. We saw a need to create a safe therapeutic space for black and brown people to navigate mental health services. After working part-time in practice for a year, I wanted to expand my message of breaking the stigma around mental health in Black communities. I wrote my first award-winning book, Vitamin C Healing for the Mind, Body, and Soul, dedicated to healing mentally, emotionally, and psychologically while managing life’s complexities.

Shortly after writing my first book, I created a company after its name Vitamin C Healing. In just four years, and due to my personal experiences with compassion fatigue and burnout in the mental health profession and witnessing these conditions amongst my colleagues, Vitamin C Healing has evolved from creating strictly literature to broadening its approach to include live and virtual workshops, webinars, and online courses, transitioning my books into a business to serve communities across the globe. In 2020, during the height of the global health pandemic, I expanded my facilitated messages about Compassion Fatigue by facilitating international workshops in the United Kingdom and Canada.

I am a native of Pittsburgh, PA, and I reside with my husband, William (Bil) Nance, a native of Brooklyn, NY. I enjoy running, watching football (huge Steelers fan), traveling, and trying new and fun foods. I was a shy kid, and initially, I got into the social work and mental health profession to advocate for children and families to use their voices to evoke the change they desire. After my father passed away from COVID in December 2020, I dedicated each day to his legacy as he was my biggest supporter along this journey.

What's your biggest accomplishment as a business owner?

Leaving my full-time job and taking the leap to full-time entrepreneurship on July 7, 2017. In January 2018, my business partner and I created the foundation of a group practice and had grown to employ nearly nine staff at our private counseling practice.

What's one of the hardest things that come with being a business owner?

While there are a lot of things in your control because you get to dictate the course of your day, there are also a lot of things beyond your control. As a business owner, one of the hardest I face each day is dealing with the unknowns. There will always be some obstacle, challenge, or incomplete task at the end of the day. Running a business can be so unpredictable no matter how prepared or organized you are. It requires a lot of flexibility, patience, faith, and resilience.

What are the top tips you'd give to anyone looking to start, run and grow a business today?

  1. Have a non-negotiable self-care regimen. Implement a self-care practice, something you will do for your mental, emotional, spiritual, and physical health each day, no matter what is going on around you.
  2. Identify a niche. It is normal when we start a business to serve everyone. Oftentimes if our audience is everyone, we are really serving no one.
  3. You can do anything; you just can't do everything. Establish processes, business operations, accounting, human resources, legal team, etc. You must build a team to scale.
  4. Give yourself some grace. It takes time.

Where can people find you and your business?

Website: https://www.sharisenance.com/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/snance80
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/sharisenance/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/Sharisenance
LinkedIn: https://bit.ly/3Sa1qGL

If you like what you've read here and have your own story as a solo or small business entrepreneur that you'd like to share, then please answer these interview questions. We'd love to feature your journey on these pages.

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