I’m Cydnie.
I work with women who are the only reason their business runs, and who have been the only reason for a long time.
I do brand and business development consulting, in Forest Lake, Minnesota.
Before I tell you about me
Most of the women I talk to are doing fine on paper. The business works. They are the only reason it works, and they have been the only reason for a long time. Nobody around them can see a problem, so at some point they stopped bringing it up.
Nothing is wrong. That is the part that is hard to explain to anyone. You are not in crisis, you have not lost anything, everyone would say you are doing well, and you have not felt like yourself in a while and you cannot point to a single reason why.
I know what that costs because I did it for longer than I should have, and nobody could see it on me either. What happened to me next was loud, and it did not have to be. Nothing has to break first.
What happened
They told me I didn’t have a choice. I told them I did.
I had been performing a strength I did not have since I was a teenager, hiding under achievements that never once made me feel successful. For fourteen years that looked like doing well. There was nothing to point at and nobody was unkind to me. I just kept getting quieter, and the quieter I got the harder I worked, because working was the one thing I still knew how to do.
Then it got loud. I got engaged, found out we were pregnant, and designed and planned a destination wedding in three months, and twenty weeks after that our first son arrived and I had no idea what I was about to miss. I lost the first two and a half years of his life to postpartum depression while giving everything I had to a company that taught me I was replaceable and that the only opinions worth anything belonged to the people who made money.
In 2025, with two boys fifteen months apart and my second having just turned one, I had an urge to book a trip. Not a family trip. A trip for myself. I decided in three days and it left in two weeks, after two and a half years of not moving, drowning in it, in and out of the hospital. I got on the plane hoping for something.
I went as a guest, in a group of fifteen, and I knew nobody, and it was the first time in years I had been alone, alone enough to hear myself again while I processed everything I had been carrying.
Two days in, after surfing for the first time in my life, I checked my personal phone hoping my husband had texted to check on me. It was work, telling me I didn’t have a choice.
I texted back shaking that I did have a choice, and that I chose my family and my children’s health. Moments later I was hyperventilating and bawling my eyes out, knowing this was part of the suffering too.
I decided right there that I was not going back. It took my husband three days to get on board with me leaving a job that was part of how we paid for our life. I came home and I put my notice in.
I built what came next while my boys were in and out of the hospital with a rare genetic mutation. Partway through, my husband had a stroke at thirty-six.
Nobody was coming to do it for me. The time was finally mine to choose.
There is a craft room in my house that I use more than I let on. I drink a lot of water and I’m unbothered about it. I sing, but not in front of people. It has not all been the hard parts.
What held
God isn’t an afterthought. He is the whole foundation.
Church was not something I was avoiding, it just was not part of my life, and neither was the bible.
In April 2025 I felt a need to join a women’s bible study run by a local company where I live, which made no sense at the time and makes more sense now, because I was at my breaking point and God was finding a way to shepherd me to Him.
The first day I walked into that church I was in such need of hope that I raised my hand and surrendered my life to Him, and He kept going after that, opening doors and closing the ones that were never meant to stay open.
That fall He moved again and I felt the urge to be obedient and be baptized in His name. Days before, I almost backed out.
Moments before I stepped on stage in front of eight hundred people to give my testimony, I was tapping my chest trying to slow myself down, after fourteen years of not being able to say one true thing about myself out loud. I went under shaking and I have never felt relief like coming up out of that water.
God is in my life, so He is in how I work. He does not have to be in yours. I meet you where you are.
I believe you were , that , and that you were never meant to stay in . I stayed in one for fourteen years and called it being competent.
For fourteen years I thought being useful was the same thing as being made for something, and it took losing the job to find out how much smaller useful is.
Two and a half years of not moving, then three days to decide, and I still could not have told you why I booked it.
I was performing for people who could be rid of me in an instant, and I called that a career.
What I do now
The work goes in an order.
The first part is working out what is actually going on, which is almost never what you came in thinking it was. Most people arrive certain they have a marketing problem and leave knowing they have an operations one, or the other way around.
The second is getting back the hours and the decisions you gave away to keep it running. This is usually where the resistance is, because every one of those handoffs felt like relief at the time.
The third is setting it up so it does not fall over when you step back.
Resurface, reclaim, build. I named them that way because that is the order I went in.
Where to start
Start wherever is honest.
The written page is yours whether or not we ever speak again.
The Letters. One letter a week about what it costs to run the thing you built. Free, and not a newsletter.
Send themIf you are weighing whether any of this is for you, the Questions page answers the things people ask before they book.
Come up. There’s no wrong way to do it.