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

Alright, Shveta thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with 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?

As a South Asian Female, first generation American born, I can tell you, as many of my peers in the same category will agree, your career path has likely been selected for you. Being an entrepreneur was definitely not one of them. My parents migrated to the US in the early 80s, first generation to leave their home and family behind to do something different. That puts a lot of pressure on them as parents, and on us as kids to make sure we all succeed. When you come from an upper middle class family, the need to go elsewhere to build a future was unnecessary. Yet my father yearned for his own path, so he set out and did it. The struggle, however, was real so I suspect that was the reason for me to follow a safe and stable path to success. Now, as a mother of two, I understand their perspective. Why would you want to see your children suffer like you did? Make it easier on yourself and work for someone else, let them deal with the headache. Growing up, that’s what was engraved in my head so I didn’t really feel the need to venture out and find my passion. Until one fine day it fell in my lap! I planned and designed my big fat Indian wedding and fell in love with the whole process. Sadly as long as it took to plan, in five days it was all over and I went back to reality but not without a lot of buzz for me to seek a job in the wedding industry. I was bored of my day job, it was redundant with tons of corporate politics. I would come home unhappy and constantly complain. Was this it for my life? I started to rethink starting my own business but the thought of it was very scary. I did a lot of research but I wasn’t naive to the fact that you can do all the research but nothing can prepare you 100% to start your business. After a lot of debate, listing all the pros and cons, I was still stuck on whether I should take the leap or not. Newly married, Ihad an established career in the corporate world. I should be starting a family and settling into that life but I did the opposite! I took the leap into starting my own business instead. I made my business my new born child after marriage. If you ask me what made me do it? It was because I was challenged in more ways than one. A close family member told me I couldn’t do it! “Wedding planning isn’t a career!” “When will you have time for a family?” A woman’s job was to run a household, take care of her husband and raise kids. “How will you be a part of society?” “What will people say?” “What respect will you have?” “ How much money could you possibly make? All the negativity eventually pushed me into it and it’s because I love a challenge and proving people wrong. The challenge was the one thing missing from my corporate job. I craved excitement, the unknown and oddly enough the stress of the world I’m in. It’s been 10+ years and I wouldn’t change a thing. In all my research in this industry and as a business owner, what I love most is that you set your own standard, create your own success path, and every challenge you overcome is based on your hard work and ability to overcome it. I live to say.. I’m self made. I personally believe being a business owner you have to be strong willed, willing to fail but able to pick yourself back up. I can say there are many times where I’ve doubted myself and wanted to go back to a regular job but I know I wouldn’t be able to live with the idea that I gave up so quickly. The biggest fear of being a business owner is failure, not being able to bring home a paycheck, especially when you have a family, mortgage, kids and their future to think about. When COVID hit and we went into a lock down, it was just three days before I found out I was pregnant with my second child. As months progressed, I realized life would never be the same, I was willing to accept defeat and ready to close A Panache Affair finishing up the few weddings we had left. I went back into the negativity that was first presented to me when I originally wanted to change career paths. I started to accept the life that I felt was chosen for me with COVID, and being a mother of two. To add to it, my husband received an offer that was too good to pass up but it meant we had to leave our home and move to another state. I basically gave up all hope in trying to continue having my own business, and in my mid thirties to start all over again just wasn’t in the cards. That was it for me. So with that being said, August 2021, A Panache Affair was officially shutting shop. I was devastated. I won’t say that I was the biggest wedding planner, I had two part time coordinators, and was averaging 4 to 6 big weddings a year. Objectively speaking you would say it wasn’t a big loss. However, for me it was a HUGE loss, almost like a death in the family. It made me very empathetic to those businesses who lost everything and for those who lost their jobs during COVID. For what seemed like decades, there wasn’t much hope for a normal life. You put a lot into your own business, it’s like I said earlier, it’s your baby. Now I really began to think about what people would say, how would I fit into society, and what respect will I have left now that I had closed down my business. After months of debating with my husband, we came to the conclusion of raising my prices in hopes that over the years I had built a good reputation, therefore an increase in pricing and being in a different state shouldn’t stop me. It didn’t! I started digging into the state we were moving to and realized it was a great market to expand in, and my focus became to continue to grow in Southern California and expand in Arizona. We doubled our business every year since, and continue to expand, adding more full time and part time employees. I consider myself a realistic person, I know the success of my company after COVID came to me like it did for many other businesses with the increase in demand. However knowing what we have achieved so far makes me want to keep it going. To me success is sustainability, how long can you sustain your current success? What changes, improvements or updates are you going to make to stay current? This is the new challenge I face with being a business owner, and all I have to say is challenge accepted.

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

A Panache Affair is a unique blend of intelligent professionals who share a passion for planning events. Our level of service, attention to detail and customized experience for each client is what makes us stand out. We thrive on being different, and innovative when it comes to design and overall experience. A Panache Affair has a large team of experienced event professionals that can handle all aspects of your event. We highly believe in the quality of the event over the quantity of events we do each year, ensuring each client gets the attention they deserve on their event. Our company is continuously expanding, adding new event planners and coordinators and tapping into new markets across the nation. We are based in Southern California and Arizona and operate nationwide.

Learning and unlearning are both critical parts of growth – can you share a story of a time when you had to unlearn a lesson?

The biggest lesson I am still trying to unlearn, is to stop thinking/listening to this mysterious society that exists, the naysayers, and maybe self appointed pillars of our culture? As an adult, it amazes me to think how something that was unspoken became something we consumed and let control our daily life. What I mean by unspoken is, our parents never directly said “whatever you do in life you need to think about our community and what they consider good.” It wasn’t on a scroll, where someone said you have to follow our culture’s standard and fit into this size box in order to be or feel accepted. This was something that we just understood because of situational circumstances. For example, if I went out too late at night, I was lectured about society “What if someone from our community saw you?” Or if I wore something that was categorized as questionable, then I would hear “What would people say if they saw you wearing that.” Interestingly enough I never questioned it, I just went along with it and abided by those rules and really cared about what other people thought of me. Then I struggled with who I was as a person for a very long time because I was made to think one way but felt completely different. You start to feel bad about yourself because you realize you don’t fit in this perfect box. You are different. Different is not okay, and you will not succeed by being different. Growing up in that type of environment, marriage became liberating because I could finally burst out of that bubble. My husband was that guy who challenged the system, and went against the norm. He struggled as well but he didn’t let them stop him, and for that reason it allowed me to do the same. I needed that support, to help me make those tough decisions. I’m not fully cured of this bad habit, I catch myself from time to time falling back into it but then I see my two kids, and I know that I would never want that for them. So anytime my son asks me, “Mom what do you want me to be when I grow up?” My response is always “Whatever your heart desires.”

Let’s talk about resilience next – do you have a story you can share with us?

I went to the Sikh Temple with my in-laws for Diwali, the Indian New Year. We had made this a tradition in my husband’s family to go all together to celebrate. This was about a year into my new career path and because my in laws weren’t happy about it, I guess they had shared this with some close family friends. As I was taking my shoes off to go inside the temple, one of the family friends had approached me asking how it was going and understanding what they were looking for, I replied with a simple answer, “Good”- then they proceeded to talk about everyone else’s career path, and talking about their success. I realized the intentional purpose behind the success stories of others, it was designed to make me feel so small. In that moment I felt bad, in that moment I definitely doubted myself, it was because I had low self esteem. It lit a fire in me, not only to continue with my career, but to make it big! Big enough to be seen and recognized, where I don’t have to explain my success, it will be done for me. I will remain humble and thankful for every opportunity, including this one, being able to explain my story. I’m almost there, I can feel it. I look forward to Diwali next year!

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.apanacheaffair.com/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/apanacheaffair/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/apanacheaffair/
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/a-panache-affair/about/
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@panacheaffair/videos
• Other: https://www.tiktok.com/@apanacheaffair

Image Credits
Yuko Weddings Ushna Khan Photography Ama by Aisha Symboll Photography