It was during my first job (with the commercial bank) when I was sent on a Customer Service training that I learned how valuable this was to every business. I fell in love with the practice and applied what I’d learnt in working with customers and saw the difference it made. I became an advocate of excellent Customer Service.

A Serial Entrepreneur since I was in my 20’s, I created alliances with farmers in various communities across the island from whom I purchased vegetables and other foods and supplied hotels on the North Coast of Jamaica, even while working in a corporate job and enjoying several promotions.

It was also not unusual for me to take a weekend trip to Miami to shop for decorative items, like framed art, and other items for sale back in Jamaica.

I started a cleaning company.  It was not something I was passionate about and finding people to do jobs to my standard was hard.  I ended up doing a lot myself to be able to keep my clients. But that remained a viable business until February 1994.

Mine did! On an early Saturday morning in February 1994, I drove home from a night-auditing job and within hours everything changed! I was on my way to the hospital and admitted later that day.  Over the next two days I heard, “If I operate on you, you would probably be dead within 7 days.” “I cannot accept your belief or faith because if you die…” I was dying! I was in the most excruciating pain and the doctors would give me nothing for the pain, as they “did not want to mask the pain” yet were not prepared to perform the surgery I desperately needed to save my life!

Thankfully, through God’s mercy, prayers, and a loving, hard-working group of Christian men, who worked tirelessly through the night calling doctors all over Ft. Lauderdale, they found a doctor who would perform the surgery.  That night we all discovered that not all surgeons choose to perform all types of surgeries. When there is the strong possibility of the patient becoming septic and could die if extreme care is not exercised, many choose not to do the surgery. The transfer by ambulance to another hospital happened on Monday morning. After 7 days in ICU and 21 days in the hospital, I returned home. A couple days later I called the original hospital floor to thank the nurses who did their best to care for me during the two days I was a patient there, and who took the extra step to call the hospital I was transferred to, to find out how I was doing. After identifying myself to the nurse who answered, she said, “God has a plan for you, my dear.” They did not think I would have survived.

I had no passive income and no structure to my business so that it could continue without me, thus from my hospital bed I gave away all of my clients to other entrepreneurs.

Because of the care I received from the nurses I was motivated to do something in healthcare, but did not want to spend the years required to study nursing. The Elder Care and Alzheimer’s Care certification filled that need and I became a caregiver for the elderly. In 1997 it was back to college to complete my degree, which was interrupted again with another emergency hospital stay and surgery in 1998, and graduation in 1999.

In the summer of 1999 a product line was introduced to me, which I loved. For the next 14 years, and while working in Corporate America for 7 of those years, I taught skin care and color cosmetics.  It was a privilege to coach dozens of women on how to start and maintain a home-based business, as well as give presentations to adults and teenage girls in various libraries in the Ft. Lauderdale area on my signature speech, “Love the Skin You’re In.”

Fast forward to 2006, it was my deep desire to pursue something that I fell in love with many years ago – Customer Service and Retention – support businesses to build relationships with their customers.

Knowledge of the online world opened up to me and I went online in the Fall of 2008 and focused on learning:

Transitioning from the offline to online world was not an easy transition because I really struggled.  I felt like the new kid in High School where everyone knew each other and I knew no one. So I took  lots of training; some were fluff, some I wasn’t ready for, and some I got real value. I finally found and worked with a Mentor who provided guidance from late 2009 to 2011.

In order to deliver the best results to my clients I enrolled in numerous other trainings, including:

Dealing with my limiting beliefs

Even more challenging was my limiting belief around wanting everything to be perfect, which stopped me from releasing some excellent training programs.  Thankfully, I was helped to identify and overcome that belief.  Because of this, it’s easy to recognize it in clients and prospective clients.

I get to inspire highly-motivated female entrepreneurs, 50 and Wiser, on creating a success mindset – identifying and eliminating limiting beliefs - and grow their business fast with strategies that build strong, long-term relationships and connections.

Although I’ve been coaching, mentoring, and speaking for at least 17 years, because of my desire to bring the best results to my clients and connections, I continue to learn from the best coaches and Mentors and am currently a student Master Coach University while pursuing ICF (International Coach Federation, the organization that sets the highest standards of coaching) Certification.

It was an honor to be included in HuffingtonPosts.com “Top 100 Most Social Customer Service Pros on Twitter to Follow” with people I admire in the Customer Service arena, as well as “One of the Top 15 Most Influential Customer Service Experts to Follow on Twitter.”

My belief is: “Focus on relationships and connections, and the money will flow.”