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I'm Odessa.
Here's the long version.
I started my first business at 18 — a green cleaning company, in a market that didn't yet know what "green" meant. I was selling a category before the category existed, which taught me the gap between having a good idea and knowing how to sell it. That gap has shown up in every business I've started since.
Through my twenties: I practiced as a licensed real estate agent in California, learning what closing a deal actually costs in time and judgment. I ran an award-winning photography business and learned that "award-winning" doesn't mean profitable. I sold radio at the national level, which is how you learn to walk into a stranger's office and ask for money. I worked as a business manager and stage manager in professional theater, where I learned to make complex things happen on deadline with people who didn't always want to do them.
The first business I built, scaled, and sold was a medical billing company serving midwives — a niche so specific I could have been the only person in the country doing it. I sold it because I'd built something a buyer wanted, which is a different exercise than building something customers want. Both matter, and most operators never figure out the second one.
Then real estate, the operator version. I owned Coza Properties in Maine — flipped single-family homes and ran a multi-unit building. Real estate teaches you what other businesses can obscure: you can lose money on the actual numbers, not just on vibes. Carrying costs, contractor delays, market timing. The math is brutal and it doesn't lie.
A few years later, I started MyBodyGallery as a side project — a body-positivity platform that's still running today, with tens of thousands of contributors and millions of users. It taught me what an online business actually requires once you have an audience and have to keep them. Most people don't get that far.
In 2017 I founded Kettle, an IT consulting firm. It grossed $3 million in its second year. While I ran Kettle, I also operated The Hub (a coworking space) and launched Jenny & Julio (a CBD-infused condiment line). Three businesses, one set of hours, a global pandemic. In 2020 I closed Kettle. The math worked. The life I wanted around the math did not.
Today I run Alaria Business Solutions — strategic counsel for early-stage business owners, and a small implementation practice for clients who need help building the thing after we've worked through their strategy.
What this means for you.
Ten businesses across twenty-five years. Real estate, IT, photography, body positivity, food, services, co-working. Different industries, same pattern.
The pattern is what I sell now.
Most advisors advise from one perspective: their own business. I've operated across ten of them — product and service businesses, with capital risk and without, online and in physical space. That breadth matters when you bring me a question:
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I've usually seen something like your situation before, even if your industry isn't one I've worked in. Patterns translate.
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I can tell you quickly whether something is a real problem or a normal early-stage situation that just feels worse than it is.
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I won't pretend to know what I don't know. There are paths I haven't walked — venture-backed scaling, heavily regulated industries — and I'll tell you when you've crossed into one of them.
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I'm still operating. The pattern recognition is current, not retrospective.
If that sounds useful, we should probably talk.