Big tings a gwan!!
I’m a whole business owner, y’all!! So happy and excited to launch The Great Exhale™
What is The Great Exhale, you ask?
It is a soft, nurturing online space for Black women to:
🤎 Be in community with a supportive sisterhood
🤎 Be free from having to constantly code switch
🤎 Divest from the tyranny of overwork
🤎 Be as excellent or as average as we choose
🤎 Share our lived experiences, and have them validated by folks who understand
🤎 Enjoy a softer, happier, more fulfilling life
The vision is to center Black women, because we are usually overlooked, micro-aggressed, underpaid, and forced to exist in the margins of life.
Cool Name, Right?!
It’s good to start how one plans to continue, so asking the LinkedIn community for name suggestions seemed like a great idea. More than 400 entries later, The Great Exhale emerged as the winner! Within 24 hours of launching the company page on LinkedIn it amassed more than 1,000 followers and is currently north of 3,000!
Where The Money Reside
Building one’s own table is a big lift, so launching a GoFundMe fundraiser was the next step! As of this writing (04/29) the fundraiser is at $17,191 of $50K!!! Thanks so much to everyone who has donated thus far!!
But Wait…What’s The Money For?
At the moment we’re a small but mighty team. We are wearing several hats, and building our vision with ingenuity and sweat equity. Clearly, that is not sustainable. Though we are starting small, our goals are big, so we’ll need people to help us.
Anybody who has been following me for a while knows my mantra: FREE IS CANCELLED. I believe that Black people deserve to be paid, and paid well, so the plan to practice what I preach. The funds will be spent on:
- Team – contracting professionals as needed, including publicity, design, admin and social media support
- Tech – building out the platform and expanding functionality
- Company – setting up legal, finance/accounting, operations, licensing, insurance, and other areas as needed
- Branding – logo & brand identity
- Publicity – retainers/contingency fees
- Miscellaneous – unexpected costs as needed
Transparency is one of the company’s fundamental tenets, so as the campaign evolves, I will keep everyone updated with how the donations are spent.
Teamwork Makes The Dream Work
Each team member brings unique strengths to the table. OUR table. That said, I want to give a HUGE shoutout to my Business Consultant extraordinaire, Latrice Torres, aka The Voice of Reason! TGE would definitely not be at this stage without her sage advice. If anyone is looking for a career coach, all I have to say is look at the results. I ended last year depressed and hopeless, and not even halfway into this year, I own a company. And that’s on LLC. Hire her immediately.
What’s Next?
I’ll probably not be posting on my blog monthly anymore. I’ll do my quarterly updates, and that’s that. All my focus has to go toward bringing The Great Exhale to life, and hitting our launch date of Juneteenth.
Here’s how you can stay up to date with everything:
Thanks for supporting, and I’ll be back with an update at the end of the quarter!