We recently connected with Chasha Vee and have shared our conversation below.

Chasha, thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today We’d love to have you retell us the story behind how you came up with the idea for your business, I think our audience would really enjoy hearing the backstory.

I came up with this idea when I started to pay more attention to myself, my own wants and needs. How I always put everyone before myself and barely had anything left when it came to my self-care. Here I was, almost 40 years old, divorced with two sons that were almost grown and I started to feel like there was so much more to life and I needed to enjoy every bit of it. I’ve always been the one to help anyone out if I could, but part of me started to feel like I deserved to be selfish sometimes when other people’s problems began to take a toll on me. I’ve always enjoyed traveling since I was a child, but once I received my passport and started to travel outside of the United States, that opened up a whole new world for me. I wanted to find a way to help others experience new and easier ways to enjoy life as well.

Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers.

In 2015, my oldest son was in California about to graduate from school for Music Production and I had just come back from driving my youngest son to college in Florida. After all those hours I came home and it was empty. It was just me. Now what? What else is there for me to do? I didn’t know. I’ve spent all this time thinking about everybody else and I had no clue what to do next. Then I thought about the wonderful experience I had the prior year, in 2014, when I was invited to celebrate a 50th birthday party in Jamaica with some close friends. Now I had never been to Jamaica and was just starting to enter this newfound freedom I had, so I went and it forever changed my life. I had so much fun and I felt recharged, refreshed, I felt alive again. All the stress of day-to-day life quickly melted away. I was a new person and for the first time in a long time, I felt like I had purpose again. This was the life I had been missing. This was it. For the first time, I knew what it was like to take care of me and I made no apologies for it. For the first time, I was free, I was liberated, living my best life and loving me. Since then, I made it a point to travel at least once a year and now that I’m 50 and retired, I plan on traveling even more. I travel somewhere at least once a month even if it’s just the next city or state away to do something different.

My Journal: Live, Let Go and Try Something New is now available on Amazon and I wanted this to be where people can begin to document the new endeavors in their life. I want to encourage you; that person who has always sacrificed their money, time, and their resources to their family, friends, loved ones, their job and is never taking time for themselves. I want to encourage you to live, let go and try something new. Maybe traveling is your thing, maybe try a new recipe. Try something new that you might enjoy. Break out from the normal day-to-day operation and do something for yourself this time because I want you to feel the same way that I felt when I was able to try something new, and I started traveling. I don’t live my life with regrets, I just take them as life lessons and another chance to do better and enjoy it.

I’ve always felt different, knew I had a purpose and people seemed to be drawn to me and love to talk to me about pretty much anything that’s on their mind. I know I have a gift and it feels good to know that people are comfortable sharing personal information with me. It also sets me apart from most because I actually care about others well being. I am finally learning to applaud myself on a job well done, stand proud, and want others to do the same.

Can you tell us about a time you’ve had to pivot?

I had to pivot my career and decided to take early retirement from a financial institution I worked for the last 26 years. I had entered this company as an intern paralegal which led to a permanent position. I was hard-working with a great track record. They always wanted me to train someone, but somehow I was never good enough when it came to being promoted. After hearing every made-up story on why I was yet again passed over, I had enough of trying to figure it out and knew I would be better off leaving. If there was ever a perfect time to take a risk and bet on me, this was it. I had worked at this company for more than half of my life and they didn’t deserve another day of me. I had been having spiritual talks with my God every morning, afternoon and evening about how my time there was done and it was time for me to step out on faith once again. I had already set up one of my LLC’s some years ago, so now I just needed to prioritize the business and its main purpose. I have lived a very interesting life so far and knew it was about to get better. As I began to look around and noticed that a lot of things I was going through, past and present; there were a lot of other women who could relate. I began documenting things that can help improve mental health and ways to make life much easier and enjoyable.

Can you open up about how you funded your business?

I funded my business with my pension and 401K. When I said I was stepping out on faith once again, I meant that I was all in and betting on myself. I thoroughly considered the risks and worked on having a solid business plan. After assessing the risks, I understood the potential consequences of using my retirement funds to finance my business. I consulted with a financial advisor to evaluate the risks and implications of using my retirement savings. I developed a detailed business plan; a comprehensive business plan that outlined my business concept, target market, competitive analysis, marketing strategy, financial projections, and growth plan.

Contact Info:

• Instagram: @chashavee
• Facebook: Chasha Ventures
• Tiktok: @chasha.vee
• Other: Email: [email protected]