Your Badass Journey Guest, Wendy Schultz

After experiencing intense burnout, Wendy Schultz left a senior level position in the healthcare system to begin a life of entrepreneurship. And in 5 short years, her commitment to integrity and excellence has rocketed her vacation rental business to success. 

Wendy is a teacher at heart and loves to help people find vacation homes that they can enjoy, as well as rent to offset expenses. More than anything, though, she wants to inspire others to create a life they don't need a vacation from!

I love this idea of creating your permanent vacation; building a life that you really don't need to take vacation from because you're truly aligned with what you love, and you're doing it every day to create that income that you need to have the life that you want. 

So, I know you'll enjoy today's conversation and hearing about how Wendy created this life for herself, as well as how she’s helping others avoid hitting that burnout in order to build the thriving life that she believes everyone deserves.

The Burnout is Real

Wendy did everything that she was supposed to do: she went to college, she got a degree, she got a job right out of college, she got my master's degree, she got married, she had kids. All of it.

She gave so much energy to her job, and it was actually really fulfilling for a long time. But as time went on, the healthcare industry changed. Every time she climbed a new mountain, conquered a new challenge, she just found a higher one at the top. It was really exhausting, she wasn’t seeing her kids a lot, and then she started having panic attacks in her office on the daily. “And I just decided that I was done with that, and I couldn't do it anymore.”

So, Wendy ended up working for another corporation for a year, doing a less stressful job and making less money, while she built a business on the side. She was working mornings, evenings, and weekends on her side hustle, but even after all of that, her business had only made $10,000 in the first year.

Some people might have given up — but Wendy decided it was time to sink or swim. So, Wendy paid off a lot of her debt and saved up six months of expenses before quitting her job to become a full-time entrepreneur.

Going with the Flow of Business

Today, Wendy owns and rents out dozens of vacation houses, but her business took a lot of different shapes before she got to this point.

It started as an online store selling furniture and decor to hotels, bed and breakfasts, and rental homes in her vacation town. But the local businesses wanted to work with other local businesses, so she opened a retail store in a seasonal location open May through October. The retail location was over an hour away from her home, so they decided to buy a rental property to stay in while they were working.

But Wendy never actually ended up living in that rental house. “We decided it was much more fun to rent it out and get money from it.” So they bought a second property and the same thing happened — and that's really where the business started to take shape. Because then other people started coming to the store asking her to run their rental homes. So, after a while, they just decided to close the store and go full into vacation rentals.

I love hearing the whole journey leading up to someone’s success. A lot of people just see the “success” side, and they don’t realize that there was this whole journey leading up to it, full of work and toil and mistakes and pivots.

Wendy tells us that “a badass is not fearless, but they move through fear anyway” — and Wendy is definitely a badass.

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