The MBA I Didn’t Realize I Was Earning
Share
When you decide to start a small business — especially one born from a lifelong relationship with a place, a scent, and a memory — nobody shares this one massive detail: that you are about to get an education you never signed up for, and it's going to cost you more than tuition.
As someone who has built their career in Media and Marketing, I understand brand strategy implicitly. I know how to build a narrative, craft a message, reach an audience. I understand what moves people, what makes a product resonate, and what it means to make a brand come alive.
And yet, none of that fully prepared me for the MBA I was about to embark on, and what it actually takes to create and grow a brand.
Building A Business Is Not For the Weak
My MBA began with a syllabus – what did I need to learn. Everything.
Building a website optimized for online retail — not just beautiful, but functional, searchable, shoppable. Learning Shopify from the inside out. Configuring Meta shopping integration. Understanding inventory management, pricing strategy, margins, and the particular math of a handcrafted luxury product where every pour has a real cost.
Creating an LLC. Understanding tax implications, deductions, accounting, and the financial architecture of a small business. Learning that passion is the fuel but the numbers are the engine.
Packaging. Waste. Shipping logistics. The moment you realize that how something arrives at someone's door is part of the brand experience — and that getting it wrong is expensive in more ways than one.
And then — becoming a one-person creative agency. Product manager. Brand manager. Content creator. Photographer. Copywriter. Designer. Social media strategist. Blog editor. Customer service manager…and the list goes on.
I understood these disciplines in theory. Putting them into practice as a solo operator while working a full-time job is an entirely different course.
Arguably, the degree you get on the other side is priceless and lasts a lifetime, while the blood, sweat, and tears for the tuition is paid in full, in real time, every day.
A Day in the Life
Nobody asked, but here's what a typical weekday looks like — because context matters.
6am. The dog and I walk four miles. It's the best part of the day and I protect it fiercely.
Home by 7:30. Breakfast for me and my husband. Check in on my mother and her caregivers — she's 92 and the most important person in my world right now. Desk by 8:45.
Work until 5:30. My real job — my first passion – my career built over decades out of my love of storytelling, gift of strategic thinking, and ability to synthesize complicated into layman.
5:30 — leave to see my mom. Home by 7:30. Dinner with my husband and best friend.
10:00— Read until the book hits my face, then I'm out until we do it all over again.
The weekends are when Chez Shea gets its full attention – when I create, blend, pour, finish, package, sell, and plan. When I tinker with formulations and chase the scent that still eludes me. When I shoot content, write captions and map out the week ahead.
In between — in the margins of everything else — I adjust. I tinker. I keep going.
This is not a complaint. Far from it – it's a portrait of life – and one I think a lot of people are living in some similar version. It's my truth and it's worth sharing.
In My Zen
Candle making allows me the grace to exhale. It's my Zen. Where the website, the margins, the LLC, the social strategy, the emails, the custom orders, the logistics is the noise; the pour is the silence.
I watch the wax melt from solid into liquid. I add the fragrance and stir — slowly, deliberately — and I close my eyes and just smell. Just be in the moment. Nothing else exists in that moment. Not the inbox, not the caregiving schedule, not the barking puppy begging to play. Just the scent and the warmth and the particular alchemy of what's happening in that vessel.
Then I pour. And I wait. And I watch the liquid become solid again. Zen.
Spending Against Future Earnings – Required Course
My grandfather said you have to spend money to make money, yet, spending money before making sales is so counter intuitive.
But the website costs money. The inventory costs money. The packaging costs money. The photography, the SAAS tools, the fragrance oils, the vessels, the shipping materials — the products that help your business run. All of it costs money before a single candle sells.
And once you invest in yourself and your business, you wait for the fire to catch. You pour your heart into the brand, you build the content, you show up every day, and you wait for the spark that turns a small business into something that sustains itself.
How do you get that spark? I'm still trying to figure that out. But one thing I know is that you don't get it by stopping.
They Don't Teach Passion in Business School
Passion isn't taught. It's innate. It's just in you and it burns for all the right reasons. We're not talking about the Instagram version of passion — not the aesthetic, not the flat lays, not the beautifully curated feed. The real kind. The kind that gets you up at 6am to walk the dog and sit down at your desk and pour candles on a Saturday afternoon when you could be doing literally anything else.
The kind that makes you believe that what you're building matters — that the scent you're chasing is worth finding; that the brand you're creating will find its people.
My MBA didn't come easily. It came from every mistake I've made and learned from. It came from my first sale and every sale thereafter. It came from praise and criticism. It came from early mornings and late nights. It came from grit, and love, and passion.
And it will never be complete – because learning and growing never stops.
If any of this resonates, come find your scent. The Chez Shea Palm Beach Collection is waiting for you.
Breathe In What You Love.