Susanna's Story...

My first career was in hardware IT, I did hardware support and repair on computers when I finished college, which lead me to running a department at a local IT firm.

While I did that during the day I also taught a variety of fitness classes, as I am a busy body, and need to spend energy.  

I had 1 child, and stayed home with her for 9.5 years, and I was available for her and provide care. I gave up the Corporate IT job and income to be home, and I grew my fitness side hustle to a Studio serving clients in my rural community. This went on for over ten years.

Being home was great, but she is in school full time, so I was hungry to do something more and or different. 

This lead to researching new business opportunities and I looked at many. I found a local franchise I liked and also a found a partner that had the opposite skills to my own. Short story of how this came about is that we started our business in January of 2011. Mid of Winter and the super slow season. ( we are in Canada so hardly any events in the winter ) We bought an Event Rental Business Store.

We bought in to a franchise, which started out with a lot of bumps in the road, but we we managed to get it up and running, loans paid off and to get it to debt free status.  

Jump ahead to April 1, 2016, we changed out name and we also left the partnership/franchise so now we are alone out in the event rental world. We spent 1 more year at our original location and then changed our model to pretty much rentals and balloons for birthdays and decor only. We discontinued all other retail, no longer participated in Halloween costumes and decor. With the move we added 1100 square feet, small showroom for our rentals and balloons, we are still growing in this space and loving it. We are getting tight in here tho, but managing.

We have built up our offerings and revenue alike.

The pandemic was a big hit against our revenue and forced closures by our government etc. and it was a big struggle, however we have bounced back. We are around, stronger than before as we had a forced down time during the pandemic which gave us a lot of room to evaluate our future path.

Today, we are super happy to be here, serve our customers and have the ability to keep expanding.

In 2015 I also started to look into real estate in the USA, and bought a few properties. That process is slow but steady, and working it to keep expanding for my future retirement fun money.

With my IT background I also offer digital services to other small businesses that need a boost and some help, but they do not need the large packages and cannot afford the large costs. This seems to be a win - win so keep on helping whomever I can.