We Opened Our First Indoor Location During The Great Recession

In 2008, while the economy was cratering and businesses were shutting down left and right, I signed a lease and started construction on our first purpose-built, year-round indoor swim facility.

People thought I was out of my mind.

For 14 years, we'd been operating out of hotel pools and outdoor locations. Seasonal, weather-dependent and limited. I knew that if we wanted to grow, if we wanted to actually fulfill our mission of making families safer around the water, we needed our own space.

So I did it. Right in the middle of the Great Recession.

Was I scared? Absolutely. But here's what I'd learned by that point: there's never a perfect time. If you wait for conditions to be ideal, you'll wait forever.

The irony is that the timing actually worked in our favor in some ways. Construction costs were lower, landlords were more flexible and families were looking for affordable, high-value activities for their kids. Swimming lessons checked every box.

We opened that Kendall location in July 2009 and it went great! By 2013, we opened a second facility. And that's when things really took off. Having our own buildings, purpose-built for what we do, changed everything. The experience got better. The team got more invested. The families noticed. We opened 3 more locations in the next 6 years!

It also put us on the radar of private equity firms. Which, years later, led to the whole conversation about how I wanted to exit and ultimately to employee ownership. But that's a story for another post.

The point is this: some of the best decisions you'll ever make will look crazy to everyone around you. If you believe in what you're building and you've done the work to prepare, trust yourself.

The recession didn't stop us. It launched us.

I Wanted to Make a Difference by Building in a Different

My parents were incredible. Hardworking and resilient immigrants. They built a successful restaurant in Lake Charles, Louisiana from nothing. I have enormous respect for what they accomplished.

But somewhere along the way, I realized I didn't want to replicate their path. I wanted to be different. I wanted to make a difference by building a business in a different way. 

They built a traditional business and I watched them struggle with HR issues. I wanted to build a business that served the people in it.

They ran everything through sheer grit and willpower. I wanted to build something with systems that could outlast any one person.

They kept their finances close to the vest, the way most entrepreneurs do. I wanted radical transparency. Open books. Shared understanding of every dollar.

This isn't a criticism of how they did things. They did what they knew. They did what worked for their generation, their circumstances, their world.

But every generation gets to choose. And I chose differently.

That choice showed up in everything we did.  In becoming a certified B Corp. In spending years teaching my team personal financial literacy before we ever opened the company's books. In choosing an Employee Ownership Trust over private equity. In founding the Ripples of Impact nonprofit.

I think a lot of entrepreneurs feel this tension. You love and respect the people who inspired you, but you also see things you want to do differently. And that's not betrayal. That's evolution.

If you're building something right now and you feel that pull to do it your own way, even if it doesn't match what your mentors or your parents or your industry says you should do, trust that instinct.

Being different isn't about rejecting where you came from. It's about honoring it by building something even better for the people who come next.

Five Words That Got My Team and I Through a Pandemic

When COVID shut everything down in March 2020, I didn't have a pandemic playbook. Nobody did.

We had to close all five of our locations overnight. Our entire business model for Ocaquatics Swim School, teaching kids to swim in person, became impossible.

IT. WAS. TOUGH! 

I remember sitting in my office thinking: How do I want to be remembered for how I acted during this difficult time?

I landed on five words: calm, compassionate, stable, positive, leader.

That became our framework. Every decision we made, every message we sent, every meeting we held, I filtered through those five words.

Calm: don't panic, even when the numbers look terrifying. Your team takes their emotional cues from you. If you spiral, they spiral.

Compassionate: everyone is going through something right now. Give people grace. Listen more than you talk.

Stable: be the anchor. Don't make reactive decisions. Don't cut people loose at the first sign of trouble. Think long term.

Positive: find the opportunity in the crisis. What can we build right now that we never had time for before?

Leader: Lead with people first and always model the behaviour you want to see. 

So that's what we did. We launched virtual activities to keep our team connected. We doubled down on our mentorship programs. We used the downtime to strengthen our culture instead of watching it dissolve.

When we reopened, something remarkable happened. Our team came back stronger, more connected and more loyal. They'd seen how we treated them during the worst of it, and they responded by showing up as their best selves.

The pandemic tested everything about our company. But it also proved that when you lead with people first, your people will carry you through anything.

Those five words are still on my wall above my desk. Calm. Compassionate. Stable. Positive. Leader. They work just as well on a regular Tuesday as they do in a global crisis.

3.2 Million Swimming Lessons and a Mission to Reach Zero Drownings

We recently hit a milestone that stopped me in my tracks: 

3.2 million swimming lessons taught!

When I started Ocaquatics in a hotel pool in 1994, I was a 22-year-old single mother teaching a handful of kids to swim so I could pay the bills. If you'd told me that one day we'd reach 3.2 million lessons across five locations, I would never have believed it.

But here's what I think about when I hear that number: 3.2 million opportunities where a child learned something that could save their life.

Because drowning is still the number one cause of accidental death for children ages 1 to 14 in Miami Dade County. It happens silently. It happens fast. And it's almost entirely preventable.

That's why we partnered with Miami-Dade County on the Zero Drownings Miami Dade initiative. We're bringing swimming lessons into public schools, reaching kids who might never set foot in a private swim school. Kids in underserved communities where access to pools and lessons has always been limited.

This matters because water safety shouldn't depend on your zip code. Whether your family can afford swimming lessons shouldn't determine whether your child knows how to save their own life.

Our Ripples of Impact nonprofit funds lessons for families who are experiencing financial hardship. Every speaking engagement I do, every dollar I earn from sharing our story, goes back into getting more kids in the water.

3.2 million is a beautiful number. But honestly? It's not enough. Not when there are still kids in our community who don't know how to swim. Not when families are still losing children to something preventable.

So we keep going. Until zero drownings isn't just a goal. It's a reality.

I Sold My Company to My Employees While They Were Sleeping

On March 1, 2024, our 30th anniversary, I called a team dinner meeting.

I stood in front of 50 members of my team who had helped me build this company and I told them I had sold Ocaquatics.

The room went silent. You could feel the fear. After everything we'd built together, I could see it in their eyes: "Here we go. Everything's about to change."

Then I told them the rest.

I sold it to them while they were sleeping through an Employee Ownership Trust. They went to bed as employees on Feb 29 and woke up as co-owners on March 1, 2024.

The reaction was something I'll carry with me forever. Shock. Disbelief. Joy. Tears. Hugging.  One of our custodians, who's been with us for 15 years, just stood there shaking his head with the biggest smile I've ever seen.

People ask me why I didn't just sell to private equity. The offers were good. After 30 years of grinding, I could have taken the money and walked away.

But I kept thinking about the people in that room. The ones who show up early. The ones who stay late. The ones who treat other people's children like their own every single day.

Those are the people who built this company. And those are the people who deserve to own it.

Of our co-owners at the time of sale, 78% of them are women. 94% identify as Hispanic or Black. Almost 70% were born in another country. This isn't just employee ownership. It's wealth creation for people who have historically been shut out of ownership.

That announcement day is still the proudest moment of my career. And probably always will be.

My Logo Is a Doodle. And I Wouldn't Have It Any Other Way.

I need to tell you about my signature. Because it's not what you'd expect from someone who has run a company for over 30 years.

It's a smiley face. Hand-drawn. Curly hair. Big grin. That's it. That is my signature that has now become my personal logo.

No sleek typography. No carefully chosen color palette. In fact, I tried working with a designer to make something more "professional", more reflective of what I saw other business owners doing but it further reinforced what I always knew... I've got to stick to the doodle. The same one I've been drawing since high school..

I started sketching it in the back of notebooks sometime around junior or senior year. It just kind of happened. A little smiley face with wild curly hair that looked like me. I'd sign notes with it. Scribble it on papers. It became my thing.

Then I kept doing it in college. And when I started Ocaquatics Swim School. And for the next 30 something years after that.

I once tried to sign a bank document with it. The banker was not amused. Apparently smiley faces don't count as legal signatures. Who knew?

But here's why I love it and why I've never replaced it with something more  “polished."

That little doodle is me. It's positive. It's a little quirky. And it makes people smile, which is kind of the whole point.

When I look around at the logos in the business world, especially in the thought leadership and speaking space, everything looks the same. Clean lines. Muted colors. Very serious. And after a while, they all kind of blend together.

My smiley face with the curly hair? Nobody forgets that. People see it and they instantly get a sense of who I am before I've said a single word and no branding agency could replicate that in the same way. That I'm approachable and I'm fun.  And while I take what I do seriously, I take myself lightly. And I'm going to authentically share the real ups and downs of building a business over three decades.

I think your brand should feel like you. Not like a version of you that's been filtered and polished and boardroom-approved until all the personality has been sucked out of it.

I built a swim school from a hotel pool into an employee-owned, certified B Corp. We have taught over 3.2 million swimming lessons and we are just getting started! I turned down private equity. I did things differently my entire career. So why would my personal logo now be any different?

If you're starting something new, or reinventing yourself, or stepping into a new chapter, here's my advice: don't overthink the branding. Find the thing that's authentically you, even if it's a little weird, even if a banker frowns at it, and lean in all the way.

My doodle has outlasted every trend, every rebrand suggestion, and every well-meaning graphic designer who offered to "upgrade" it.

Some things don't need upgrading. They just need to be unapologetically themselves.

Just like that curly-haired girl who drew it.