10 min read

Today, it’s August 2026, and I feel so far behind where I thought I’d be by now.

I launched Go Skin Check in March of this year, as planned. Things were falling into place, and I thought they would continue to do that.

But I was wrong.  Sort of.
And my body was trying to tell me something.

I started getting a funny feeling. You know that jitter in the pit of your stomach? A rumbling beneath the surface?

That’s the one.

I felt it for weeks before my official launch. I tried to brush it off, but there it was, still nagging me.

Some people call it intuition or instinct, or that inner voice. Other people call it discernment.

Over the last few years, I’ve been learning to recognize that feeling, acknowledge it, and follow what it’s trying to tell me. I really started listening about a year before my launch, after I was scammed out of $1,100. That day, I vowed to always pay attention to that feeling and trust it.

Since then, I’ve been acutely aware of it.  Though, sometimes, I still have trouble differentiating it from my run-of-the-mill anxiety.
But when I listen to it, most times I’m right on the money.

This time, I felt it. And I chose to ignore it.

How Did I Get Here?

In 2024, I was laid off from what I thought of as my dream job. It was a job that, for most of my career in dermatology, I didn’t even know existed.  My “dream job” was a position as a Dermatology Registered Nurse Coordinator at a very well-respected academic hospital in the Texas Medical Center.  Now, this was not the first dermatology coordinator position I’d had. But this one? I knew this was the job I could retire from.  The previous coordinator had been there for 25 years!  She was planning to retire soon, but until then she would stay on part-time.  In my head, there was no way I could fail.

I got this job based on my expertise, knowledge, and leadership skills. And now I would also have access to the blueprint inside the mind of the nurse who had held this position for the last quarter of a century.  This was very much unlike my previous coordinator role, where I showed up to work with no one available to train me because no one in my clinic actually knew my role.
There were many reasons why I thought this would be my dream job.

But in nine short months, my dreams were shattered.

August 6, 2024.
The headlines read:
TEXAS CHILDREN’S TO LAY OFF 1,000.

And I was one.  Myself and 999 of my coworkers, from all areas of the hospital, were notified that we no longer had jobs.

How could this be?
I’m a Registered Nurse!
I work for a hospital that has been around for decades.
Who lays off nurses?

That morning, several things happened to me:

1. I lost my “dream” job
2. My belief in a “stable job” and “job security” was shattered.
3. More important than losing my dream job, I was losing my place in an industry I loved: dermatology.

I felt like I was losing my identity.
But losing that position put me on a very important trajectory.
A trajectory that would eventually lead to me launching Go Skin Check 19 months later.

For the first time in my nursing career, I started seriously thinking about what it would look like to build something of my own.

That Funny Feeling

In November 2025, I was introduced to a dermatologist.
She was looking for opportunities to expand her teledermatology practice. She had been working full-time in a clinic and was planning to leave her full-time employment to pursue telemedicine as a career.
This sounded perfect for me because I was looking for a dermatologist who enjoyed telemedicine and was comfortable diagnosing and treating patients that way. She and I had a conversation, and I thought it was a match made in heaven.

This was the biggest piece of the puzzle. Finding the doctor who could help me make my vision a reality. I wasn’t just trying to start a business. I was trying to build a different way for patients to access dermatology care, based on a problem I had seen throughout my career.

Now that I had found one, I got busy putting together all the other pieces.  And there were MANY pieces.
I kept in touch with her over the next few months to keep the relationship warm.
Then, in April 2026, I was ready.

But I had that funny feeling.  Something wasn’t quite right.  I blew it off as anxiety.
After all, I was spending a ton of money on this business. I was way outside my comfort zone, doing something I had never done before. Of course I was anxious.

I also assumed the feeling was there because, despite spending all this money, I still had not secured the contract with the doctor.
This was the final piece of the legal structure, and I was still waiting for the draft from the attorney.

Finally, the contract was ready for signatures! I sent it to her.
And waited.
A few days went by.
Then a week.
No response.

So I followed up....

Crickets.

The nagging feeling I had been attempting to silence became louder.  Still, I ignored it.

She eventually followed up with questions that felt odd to me.
She wanted an explanation of why we even needed a contract so she could explain it to her attorney.  Obviously, this felt like a huge red flag. I didn’t understand why her attorney would need me to explain why a contract was necessary. We eventually settled the question over a conversation, but my spirit was not settled.

That nagging feeling grew louder.  But I was determined to make this work.
After all, this was the final piece of the legal puzzle. The piece that made this a real business.
So again, I ignored it. I revised the contract and gave her what she wanted.

Then she asked for two more revisions.
And after all of that, she sent me a email that shook my world.

Four Words

Around nine months earlier, while I was still in planning mode and Go Skin Check was still an idea growing inside my head, I visited my hometown, New Orleans, for my grandmother’s funeral. At the time, I was getting used to talking about the idea of starting a business. That took a lot of practice. And a lot of confidence. My mentor, Dr. Kimberly Madison, founder of Mahogany Dermatology, had spent months pouring into me, reminding me of my power and my position. Now I was back in my hometown, surrounded by family and friends, and I was finally ready to tell them my secret:
I’m starting a business!

Before then, I was terrified of other people’s opinions. I was afraid of hearing their negative thoughts about the idea. I was afraid that if I heard them say the words out loud, I would internalize them, and their beliefs would become my beliefs. I was afraid I wasn’t strong enough to rebut them. Or that I wouldn’t have the words to articulate why I knew I could succeed at this.

But I was in my year of doing scary shit.

And it was time. So I decided to tell my uncle first.
He’s a mid-career banking executive. He owns several investment properties, and I trust that he knows more than I do about business and probably more than me about life.

His opinion matters to me.

So there we were, sitting in my late grandmother’s house on an old leather couch. I’m updating him on my life and the adventures of having college-aged kids. Then I do it. I take a breath and start telling him about Go Skin Check.

And he immediately starts doing the thing I feared the most. Drilling me with questions.

How will the business be structured?
How will I make money?
How will I get customers?

I explain my plan to work with a dermatologist who would see the patients through telemedicine. I tell him the business depends on this very important piece. At the time, I hadn’t found the doctor yet. I was still early in my planning, but I knew the model needed a doctor to work.

Then he says it.

Four words.

Four words that struck me like a lightning bolt.

Four words I would ruminate on.

Four words that I still hear in my head.

He said:  “Single point of failure.”

I like to think he immediately regretted saying it because he quickly changed his tune and started giving me some watered-down encouragement.
But the encouragement rolled off me like water off a duck’s back. After those four words, none of it mattered anyway.
I couldn’t hear anything else.

Those four words would both haunt me and drive me going forward.

Those Four Words

Nine months later, early on a Saturday morning, I got the email.

It was the response I had been waiting for.
But the news was not what I wanted to hear.

The email read:
“My responsibilities have rapidly expanded and I do not think I can devote the time and consistency needed to properly support your project.

I was CRUSHED.

"My project"??
Project??

She called my business a project. That told me everything I needed to know.
There it was.
The nagging feeling I had been ignoring.
It had been trying to tell me something.

Go Skin Check was much more than a project! It wasn’t a hobby.  It wasn’t a fun thing I wanted to do in my free time. Go Skin Check was designed to change the way patients access dermatology care. It was much more than a project.

A thousand thoughts ran through my head in about ten seconds, but only one landed.  

Those four words my uncle had said to me nine months earlier. SINGLE POINT OF FAILURE.

Over and over. All the doubts I had suppressed came flooding back. I had spent months and thousands of dollars putting the pieces of this business together, and here it was falling apart before I could even see my first patient.

This was NOT on my BINGO card!

Was he right?
Should I not be building a business that depends on other people to deliver the service?
Should I quit?
Had I wasted my time and all my money?
Was this the right decision?

I allowed myself to sit with those thoughts. I told my supportive husband, who was standing in our kitchen making Saturday morning breakfast like he always does.

I felt sad.
I felt confused.
But most of all, I felt embarrassed. Embarrassed that I had even thought for one moment that I could do this.
Who am I to think I can build something great?
Who is going to trust me?
After all, I’m “just a nurse.”

Single Point of Failure

So what exactly is a single point of failure?
It’s a term used to describe one part of a system that, if it breaks, stops the entire system from working. There is no backup. No spare. No one waiting to take over. If that one piece fails, everything else goes down with it.

That was my first real lesson in building a healthcare business: you can have a strong vision and still build a model that is vulnerable in ways you didn’t see at first.
That was what my uncle saw when I described the structure of my business.

And after he said it, I almost believed it. Then, on that Saturday morning, that email tested my resolve.

For a moment, I thought my uncle had predicted my future. But then I remembered all the work I had done mentally. And all the work Kimberly had done to get me to this point of believing in myself. She knew my mind needed to be fortified long before I understood why. She knew I needed to have an unshakable belief in myself before I traveled down this road.  I had been preparing for that Saturday morning and didn’t even know it.

On Saturday, May 23, 2026, I made a decision.
I decided I would not allow those four words to become my truth.

They would NOT define my business.
They would NOT predict my future.
I would fight.
But how?

That story is for another day. Today, I want to share what I learned. Hopefully, some of my lessons will help you too.

What I Learned

1. Listen to your intuition.

It’s your God-given ability to sense when something is awry. Don’t ignore it like I tried to. I knew something didn’t feel right long before I had proof that something wasn’t right.
I’m learning that I don’t always need to know exactly why I feel something before I pay attention to it.

2. Move quickly when decisions are made.

While I don’t think that doctor was ultimately the best fit for me — spoiler alert: I found another doctor who is a much better fit — I do think that if I had moved faster and gotten the deal done sooner, I would have had a better chance of getting her to move forward.
From the day I first spoke with her, five months passed before I sent her the contract. A lot happened for both of us in those five months. Her circumstances changed, just as she explained.In the end, those changes may have saved me from partnering with someone who did not see my vision the way I saw it. But the lesson remains.

Speed in decision-making has always been my Achilles’ heel. It’s something I still struggle with, but I’m improving as I grow. When opportunities knock, answer the door quickly. And when you know the decision you want to make, get the deal done as soon as possible.

3. Everything happens for a reason.

This one I already knew, but sometimes you need the reminder.
It’s not happening TO you.
It’s happening FOR you.

When I encounter challenges, I try to remember that even when I can’t see why something happened the way it did, there is usually a reason. Sometimes it opens the door to something greater. Sometimes it protects you from something awful.
And sometimes, you don’t understand which one it was until much later.

I thought losing my dream job was the end of something. It turned out to be the beginning. I thought losing the dermatologist who was supposed to help me launch Go Skin Check meant my uncle had been right. It turned out that story wasn’t finished either.
And neither am I.

If you want to know what happened next, sign up to be notified when the next blog post drops.
Because this journey is just getting started.