The Business Reality Check: You can’t grow a business you hate.

Tonika Ward has spent her career inside healthcare, first as a nurse, then in administration, and now running her own consulting firm helping facilities fix what's broken. Compliance issues, low morale, EHR problems, patient satisfaction scores that never seem to move. She's good enough at her job that almost every client ends up asking the same thing: forget the consulting, will you just come work for us?

We sat down with Tonika to...

Haleigh Dean started HD Media so she could have more time with her kids. She's also a full time student studying video production, which means most weeks she's juggling homework, client work, and being a mom, and the only hours she has left over are the ones going straight back into the business. Talent has never been the issue. Haleigh has an eye for editorial, high fashion, campaign style visuals that most photographers and video...

Lexie Loman has already lived a few different lives. She started college planning to be a journalist, switched to psychology after one semester, spent five years working with kids at a psych hospital after swearing she never would, and then spent the next several years touring regionally as a musician, topping red dirt charts in Texas and even playing a couple of weeks in Ireland. Somewhere in there she also became a licensed thera...

Melissa Bishop is no stranger to hard work or deep healing. After getting clean from a drug addiction in her 20s and having her life transformed by a single moment of compassionate belief, she dedicated her life to helping others find their way back to themselves. Today, as the founder of Wholehearted Studio, she offers coaching, Reiki, intuitive readings, Human Design, EFT tapping, and mediumship—and she’s booked nearl...

Maria found Pilates and yoga because her knees gave her no other option. Two kneecaps that never fused, a doctor telling her to stop running or go under the knife, and a studio in Moore, Oklahoma that gave her back the strength, peace and balance she needed at what she calls one of the lowest points in her life. She wrote the word "ascension" on a vision board that year. The name stuck. The mission never left.

A year into building A...

Adam did not leave community mental health because the bureaucracy was choking him out. He left because he was tired of driving an hour to work every day and his kid was not going to stay little forever.

After four years in community mental health, Adam stepped out on his own and built Greenside Prairies, a private practice where he works with individuals on trauma, OCD, anxiety, aging concerns and life transitions. He loves being a...

Jay Tharian did not stumble into entrepreneurship. He ran at it from every direction he could find.

He fell in love with technology as a kid, ripping apart Walkmans and figuring out how the internet worked before most people knew what it was. He went on to spend years in the restaurant industry scaling franchises and building tech infrastructure, eventually becoming a director of technology for large restaurant companies. When COVID...

Selena Parrish has spent 30 years in veterinary care. She knows what is in every product on her shelves, why it works, and what it will do for your pet. That is not something you find at the big box pet store down the road. That is what she built Wags, Whiskers, and Beyond around.

It started as a converted 18-passenger bus she drove to events across the OKC area. When she was ready for more, she opened a brick and mortar in Yukon, O...

Morgan Dilldine and her husband built M&N Property Care from the ground up in the Oklahoma City area. The work is good. Their clients love them. They get referrals because the quality shows up every single time. Morgan has a 90% close rate once she gets someone on the phone. Her clients almost become friends by the end of a job. Those are not small things.

What they are working on right now is consistency. Some months are fully ...

Mendy Applegate built HDC Academy to answer one of the most frustrating questions in small business: why does nobody hand business owners the actual owner's manual?!

Trust us, she would know. Mendy spent years in corporate, pivoted into running her own bookkeeping firm in 2020, and has grown into one of the most trusted small business educators in the Oklahoma City area. She speaks at the Chamber, at colleges, at real estate groups,...

THE BUSINESS REALITY CHECK PODCASTEpisode 5: When the System Does the Work But the Story Does the Selling with Patrick Wilson of Bar-Key BartendingPatrick Wilson is not just a bartender. He is a problem solver who spent years in accounting and banking before deciding he was done building someone else's business. When he launched Bar-Key Bartending, he knew from the very beginning that he wanted to build something that felt differen...

THE BUSINESS REALITY CHECK PODCAST

Episode 4: When the Culture Is the Brand with Devin from Fernwell Salon and Spa

Devin did not open Fernwell Salon and Spa because she wanted to run a business. She opened it because she had spent years working in environments that were the opposite of what a salon should feel like, and she made a promise to herself that she would build something different. Something safe. Something where every singl...

THE BUSINESS REALITY CHECK PODCAST

Episode 3: When You're Great at What You Do But Nobody Knows You're There Yet with Mo from Crush Theory Beauty

Mo made a decision most people would never make. She spent six months away from her husband and babies, lived with her in-laws, and went back to school full time to build something she believed in. Last month, she opened Crush Theory Beauty, a skincare studio in OKC rooted in science, genui...

THE BUSINESS REALITY CHECK PODCAST

Episode 2: When Your Self-Imposed Expectations Become Your Boss with Liliana Provencial

Liliana Provencial has spent more nights than she can count working past midnight since her daughter was born. She's running three businesses doing the creative work that lights her up, but somewhere along the way, her stress and self-imposed expectations became her boss.

She's a military spouse, a mother, and a c...

THE BUSINESS REALITY CHECK PODCAST

Episode 1: The Gap Between Loving Your Work and Making Money From It with Melinda Schmitz, Founder of Lifestyle Techniques

Five years into her business. Working full-time. Posting every day. Running ads. Spending money on courses and tools. And Melinda Schmitz still couldn't figure out why her calendar wasn't full.

She teaches confidence and social skills to young people—work she genuinely love...