At 14, I didn’t have a business plan.

I had a stoop on Putnam Avenue, a niece with long hair, and pictures of Allen Iverson I was trying to copy.

This was mid-2000s. Allen Iverson era. Every teenager in Brooklyn wanted those braids –  the cornrows, the two-strand twists, the slicked-back styles that made it into the sports pages and onto the block. I wanted to learn how to do them because I was obsessed. I wasn’t thinking about money. I wasn’t thinking about a client base. I was looking at pictures and trying to make my hands do what I saw.

My mom was a cosmetologist. She had her license and did hair out of our apartment, men and women both, for as long as I can remember. She passed when I was seven. But she left me something. An eye for it. I grew up watching her work, handing her clips and rollers before I understood what she was building. When I started teaching myself braids, I wasn’t starting from zero. I was starting from her.

My niece had hair down to her hips. Thick, long, beautiful. She lived with my brother on Putnam Avenue, and I’d go over and braid her hair on the stoop outside. That’s it. That’s where the business started, on the steps in the middle of the block.

Parents would walk by. Slow down. Stop.

Can she do my daughter’s hair?

My sister-in-law would say: yeah, twenty dollars, she’ll do it.

I didn’t set a price. She set the price. I just kept braiding.

By 16, I had regulars. Kids from the neighborhood, their friends, people who heard from someone else. And then somehow I started getting asked to do updos. Wedding updos. Formal styles, pinned up, for the ceremony.

I said: bring me a picture and I’ll figure it out.

No YouTube. No class. No formal training. I had the irons and the rollers and the clips from watching my mom, and I had an instinct I didn’t have a word for. I would sit with a picture until I understood what was holding the style together, and then I’d build it. I charged more for weddings. Not because I decided I deserved it. Because my sister-in-law told me to.

What I loved about doing hair had nothing to do with money. I loved the focus of it. The sitting with someone. The way a person looks in the mirror when you’ve gotten it right. My mom understood something about that, I think. I didn’t get to ask her, but I believe she knew.

I’m telling this story now because I’m at a different starting line. I’m rebuilding my coaching practice after time away, figuring out what it looks like to reopen on different terms. And I keep coming back to this: every business I’ve built, I built the same way. I sat down somewhere I loved being, did the thing I loved doing, and people showed up.

I see the opposite a lot in my coaching work. Senior managers who have been sitting with the next move for two or three years. They have the skills. They have the instinct. They can picture what the next thing looks like. What they’re waiting for is the plan… the right credential, the right timing, the version of themselves that finally feels ready.

What I want to say is what my sister-in-law said to me on that stoop: set a price. Start.

The readiness doesn’t come first. It comes because of the work.

The Make Moves Method™ I use with clients moves through three phases: Awareness, Inner Authority, and Aligned Action. Most people assume it’s linear. First you understand yourself, then you build confidence, then you act. In practice, it’s messier than that. Action is often how the awareness arrives. You try something. The trying tells you something. You adjust. The confidence builds because you moved, not because you waited.

I didn’t develop an opinion about doing hair and then start braiding. I braided, and the opinion of myself formed from there.

The stoop might be enough. You might already have what you need in your hands.

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If you’re not sure where to start: take my Why Do I Feel Stuck? quiz. It gives you language for the patterns that might be shaping your current decisions.

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Sharilyn Chavez is a leadership coach (CPC, ELI-MP, ACC) working with senior managers and directors who look fine on LinkedIn and are quietly questioning everything. Reopening September 1, 2026.