We recently connected with Erin Perkins and have shared our conversation below.
Erin, appreciate you joining us today. Do you manage your own social media?
I did my own social media for the first 3.5 years of my business before I hired Devin of Creative Gravity to take over my social media. It wasn’t a decision that I took lightly because having someone that didn’t have my lived experiences – create and write my content is a challenge. But Devin does it beautifully. I do share my stories in other ways, that Devin takes my stories and makes it even better.
This has made it easier for me to be more present and share with my audience.
Erin, love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?
I established Mabely Q with the goal of continuing to be a graphic designer and an online business manager for other businesses. I was also struggling with my own identity as a disabled person, I embraced being deaf, though still working through the fact that my vision is slowly disappearing.
Wanting to gain more clarity on what I offered as a business, I joined global organization called, Tide Risers. Within the first session, I started to realize that my being deaf has led me to where I am today. If it wasn’t for being deafblind, I wouldn’t be where I am today.
With this newfound identity, I shifted the core foundation of Mabely Q to educate others about business accessibility because many small businesses were focused on building businesses for people like themselves, while neglecting the simple fact that not everyone is like them.
I’ve come across so many obstacles with wanting to learn from amazing educators only to discover that I couldn’t participate in many of them because I didn’t have access. I would reach out to the business owners that I wanted to learn from and let them know that I couldn’t learn from them. Their reaction was often, “wow, I never thought about that.“
Determined to break through the lack of accessibility, I knew that the best way I would be able to advocate for accessibility is through education. It’s a central part of my platform to encourage other businesses to remind them not everyone is like them.
Showing them that just because I was born with a disability doesn’t mean I don’t want the same things as the person standing in front of me. As cliche as it sounds, I’m also a believer in things happen for a reason.
What’s a lesson you had to unlearn and what’s the backstory?
I was 20 years old. Sitting in a dark room at the eye specialist. My younger sister and I were waiting for the doctor to come back in after he did a few different tests. We were joking around a bit. The doctor comes back into the room and informed me that I have Usher Syndrome and I would be blind in 10 years and there’s nothing I could do about it. My only option was to proceed with the lasik surgery to improve my corrective vision. And, he walked out of the room.
Usher syndrome is a rare genetic disease that affects both hearing and vision. It causes deafness or hearing loss and an eye disease called retinitis pigmentosa (RP)
20 years of my life, I had NO idea you were supposed to be able to see the person sitting next to you. No wonder I was terrible at the setter position in volleyball. Realizing this helped me make sense of some of the things that happened to me as a kid.
My knowledge of Usher Syndrome was lacking. I knew a few people at college who had this condition and I thought to myself, how is this possible? I can drive. I walk fine. I get around without any issues. I don’t have any of the signs that they exhibit in being “disabled.”
It was completely ableist of me to even think like that because I only had limited exposure to a few people who have usher syndrome. Now, I’ve met countless people with this condition, and everyone has adapted to this condition in their own way.
Any stories or insights that might help us understand how you’ve built such a strong reputation?
The thing that I believe helped me build my reputation within the industry is having empathy with others. I get that as a small business owner, it’s challenging to do all the things. And then to have someone come in and say that you need to do more in order to make the business accessible to everyone.
It feels DAUNTING, impossible, overwhelming. I made it my mission to teach people to make progress in making tweaks to their business so that it feels doable. It’s so important to me to have people who realize they’re missing a whole market out there not feel like throwing their hands up and walking away from it all.
Showing people the easy & small changes that they can make within their business brought the barrier down a bit, and allowed people to realize, oh, I can do this. This is just part of owning a business and the more I do this, the more people I reach.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.mabelyq.com/
- Instagram: http://instagram.com/mabely_q
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/MabelyQ
- Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/mabely-q
Image Credits
Stacy Carosa Photography: https://www.stacycarosaphotography.com/