We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Lacey Keigley. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Lacey below.

Lacey, appreciate you joining us today. Owning a business isn’t always glamorous and so most business owners we’ve connected with have shared that on tough days they sometimes wonder what it would have been like to have just had a regular job instead of all the responsibility of running a business. Have you ever felt that way?

I am happier as a business owner than I was working for someone else. Setting my own schedule – as in, deciding how I spend the actual hours of my day – is more valuable to me than the bottom line. I like deciding what gets my attention and how MUCH of my attention that particular something gets.

Of course, nearly every week I think about what it might be like to NOT own my own business. To have a “guaranteed” income and having someone to fall back on if that income doesn’t come through – something that feels more “steady”.

Just this week I saw a job listing for a company I have long followed and long respected. I clicked through link after link, a trail of seeing how I could fit in with this leader’s values and visions, how all of the requirements for this specific job were directly in line with my skill set. I gazed longingly at the confirmed high salary. I clicked through to the actual beginning of the application. Typed my name.

Then I looked around me. As in, I literally looked around me. Sitting on my cozy screened in porch, Avett Brothers playing in the background, my son lounging nearby reading a book, my dog literally on my feet.

There’s a season for everything, for every part of our lives. And the season might come where I sell my business and work for a more consistent paycheck. It’s good for me to envision holding all of it with open hands. To know there are options and choices and I am daily making one of those choices too.

I like knowing that the effort I put in is directly proportional to the benefits I receive. From me, for the ones I love and provide for.

Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.

At heart, I’m a writer. (I won’t go this far back, but let’s just say I had a Smith Corona typewriter in my upstairs childhood bedroom and I can’t even recount the number of pages I typed through up there!)

After years of doing freelance writing for magazines and blogs while also raising my six kids and homeschooling them, my life circumstances placed me back at Square One. A divorce shortly after I turned forty required a difficult reinvention and I was presented with an opportunity to purchase a website I had written a few articles for. I purchased Travelers Rest Here about five years ago. Travelers Rest Here is a website and social media platform that shares the stories of the people and the places of the town of Travelers Rest, South Carolina. (A town as charming as its name!)

We share stories about local business owners, residents and the community members. We partner with restaurants and shops and businesses. We let our readers know what fun events and activities are available, where to stay and where to shop and so much more!

I’m really proud of the way TRH has grown. What started as a teeny IG feed of several thousand has grown to over 17,000 and I have never purchased or paid for a single promotion. The word of mouth has been the biggest component of our growth. We now have a popular weekly newsletter with incredibly high engagement and a website with a Town Guide and weekly stories. We host a podcast and have just started a YouTube web series.

We work together with all sorts of folks who provide amazing events and opportunities. I have loved working with many nonprofits who need no-cost advertising. I’m also really proud of the mural project we created and funded a few years ago to bring a gorgeous work of art to our town during the pandemic. We did this through crowd sourcing and were able to pay two local artists a generous wage during a season when artists were struggling to find work.

For this particular project, and really all of the others we get to lend a helping hand to, the real source of the magic I see repeated time and time again is the community! What a fabulous one we have. It’s truly incredible and legitimately inspiring to find people who love and support and respect one another, who share one another’s burdens and place others before themselves. I find that there are more good than bad people and that hope continues to rise strong.

Any insights you can share with us about how you built up your social media presence?

This feels like a tricky one because if you have ever dipped your least little toe into the river of social media, you know it’s a swirling and changing torrent and just when you think you’re heading in the right direction, the current shifts and catches you in an eddy.

Enough with that analogy, but the point is – change is a constant.

Instead of serving the master of algorithms and numbers, I tried to stick to one guiding principle: Share the content you want to share.

Post what is valuable to you and to your brand. Be honest. Don’t use clickbait or trendy gimmicks if they don’t fit what you’re working to do anyway.

I firmly believe that good content will speak for itself.

I’ve based pretty much everything on that idea.

I share what is valuable and important to my readers. I share what is funny and true. And as much as I want to see the numbers and the engagement rise, the numbers are not my master.

Truth. Reality, Sincerity. Valuable information. These are my goals.

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

The summer after my husband of nearly twenty years left, I felt at a loss in nearly every area of life.

I looked ahead at what I thought of my future and it all looked like a pile of NO. A stack of what I could no longer do. Of who I no longer was.

And I didn’t like what I saw.

I did not want a series of “can’t” and “no longer” and “out of reach” to define the second half of my life.

I wanted something better than that. For me. And for my kids.

That year I decided that my new mantra would be “yes, you can” even though my head was bursting full of all the ways my life was saying “no, you can’t”.

I took a few impossible ideas, directions I assumed were road blocked for me, and I said, “Yes, I’ll do those things.”

With the help of an army of friends and community supporters, something I can never say enough good about, my next year looked entirely different that I expected.

Here a few things I said yes to that following year or two, despite having deeply believed that those things would be forever nos because of my circumstances:

Yes to taking my kids on multiple cross country trips alone.
Yes to getting accepted into graduate school.
Yes to continuing to homeschool my kids.
Yes to starting a successful learning collective with several other mothers.
Yes to buying and beginning a business of my own.
Yes to running a half marathon.
Yes to making myself join in on a notes-free public speaking event.
Yes to buying my own house for the first time.

Those yeses defined my year and then also the rest of the years that followed in ways that have bettered my own life and the lives of my kids too.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://travelersresthere.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/travelersresthere/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/travelersresthere
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lacey-keigley-835632150/
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCDRrqs0CV9RSLC6AQg-8TLg
• Other: My own personal website – https://www.soeveryday.com