We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Renée Gotcher a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Renée, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. We’d love to hear the backstory behind a risk you’ve taken – whether big or small, walk us through what it was like and how it ultimately turned out.

The biggest risk I’ve taken as an entrepreneur is owning a private integrated arts and academics program for local homeschooling families. When my family joined this unique community in 2015, it was the perfect fit for my artsy girls but a completely new endeavor for me. I began teaching history, literature, and worldview in the classroom for the first time.

Due to unexpected leadership changes, I became interim campus director and was eventually asked if I’d be willing to take over campus ownership. This was a huge leap of faith for my husband and me because my professional experience before homeschooling was journalism—not education!

Up to that point, my career included seven years of corporate publishing in the San Francisco Bay Area before transitioning to freelance editing and writing. Along the way, I flexed my entrepreneurial muscles by starting a successful direct sales business and founding an award-winning blog called NextGen Homeschool.

Although I enjoyed entrepreneurship, I never imagined myself running what was essentially a small private school. I liked partnering with the families who joined us, but I was stretched out of my comfort zone as a business owner. I had to consider expenses I wasn’t prepared for, such as location insurance, emergency training for staff, hiring an accountant, and more.

The emotional toll proved to be the biggest challenge. I loved owning my own business and all the creative aspects of my role, such as course planning, marketing, and event direction—including producing a few stage musicals! However, I struggled to manage parents’ expectations, hire qualified yet very part-time teachers, and stay on top of the additional financial responsibilities.

When I decided to step down from ownership four years later, I felt like a failure—like I wasn’t strong enough to roll with the punches. However, the couple that took over ownership the following year had the bandwidth and drive to expand the program beyond anything I would have wanted to manage. The campus has grown by leaps and bounds, and my daughters enjoyed that growth. My youngest graduated in 2024 with 12 fellow seniors in her class—our first graduating class had one, my eldest daughter!

Was the risk worth it, even if it didn’t “pay off” like I had hoped? Absolutely, yes. I matured as an entrepreneur, my daughters saw me in action working as a small business owner, and I kept the program running until the next owner was ready to take the reins. I would do it again in a heartbeat!

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

As a freelance writer and editor, I provide editorial guidance and services to emerging Christian writers and contribute articles to several online publications. With 30 years of writing and editing experience—including corporate publishing, freelancing, and blogging—I come alongside writers who want to take their stories into the public space and help them create compelling content with eternal impact.

I’m also a wife of 30 years, a retired homeschooling mama to three dynamic daughters (the youngest left the nest for college in the fall), and an outdoor-loving Colorado transplant who was stripped of my “superpowers” by debilitating physical anxiety twelve years ago.

Since then, God has reignited my passion for sharing stories of hope and healing with a deeper understanding of how important stories of faith are to the reader. I’ve been on the receiving end of a lot of hope-filled wisdom and inspiration thanks to women who have vulnerably shared their journeys with me, and it’s a privilege to partner with emerging Christian writers in need of professional guidance to create and refine their own stories of faith for publication.

On my blog, “The Pace of Grace,” I write about my journey to relieve anxiety, restore peace, and revive hope by stepping outside for rejuvenating walks in nature. My goal is to invite women to stop striving to overcome anxiety and overwhelm alone and walk with God at His pace on the path to healing and freedom. I’m also a contributing writer for Crossmap.com’s “Daybreak Devotions” series, where my devotions appear monthly. I was privileged to collaborate with a talented team of Christian authors to write and release the devotional book “Life Changing Stories: A Devotional Collection Revealing God’s Faithfulness and Transforming Power.”

Any stories or insights that might help us understand how you’ve built such a strong reputation?

One of the most important lessons I’ve learned on my entrepreneurial journey is that there’s no substitute for face-to-face interaction with leaders and colleagues in your industry to build your reputation and grow your reach. Thanks to online courses, YouTube, Master Classes, and more, you can gain all the knowledge you need to “master” your craft without leaving your desk. But you have to get out of your comfort zone and interact with people who are where you want to be or heading there alongside you if you want to take your creative work to the next level.

When I began freelancing in 2003, I had just left a well-known technology newsweekly publication. I had already built a network of sources in that industry, so it was easy for me to find writing and editing work with tech companies. However, when I began homeschooling my daughters seven years later, I decided to change my focus to writing for the homeschooling market. Believe it or not, homeschool blogs were already popping up left and right back in 2011, so I knew I had to get “plugged in” to this emerging editorial space if I wanted to make an impact.

I took my first step by getting on a train to Omaha in the middle of the night to attend a fairly new homeschooling conference there. My sister-in-law, who also homeschooled and contributed to our fledgling blog, met me there. We planned to show up wherever published writers and bloggers would be educating the audience. That three-day trip became the launching pad for five years of successful blogging on our award-winning family blog, NextGenHomeschool.com, and some of the contacts I made that week continue to be in touch as editorial partners and collaborators.

When I decided I wanted to broaden my horizons beyond homeschooling topics, I knew exactly what I needed to do: Attend an event for writers and editors active in the Christian women’s publishing space. This time, I flew to Charlotte on a red-eye to attend the “She Speaks” conference with Lysa Terkeurst, a prolific New York Times best-selling author. That was almost four years ago, but I am still in touch with a handful of creatives I met there who have collaborated with me on several projects since then, including a published devotional collection available on Amazon!

In my opinion, there’s just no better way to grow your impact as a creative than to grow your network of industry colleagues and mentors through in-person events. Conferences are a cost-effective way to start because someone else has gathered like-minded people for you to network with! I made the sacrifice of travel expenses when I wasn’t earning any income in those editorial spaces yet, but today, I still benefit financially from the connections I made.

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

I’m very open on my blog and other publishing spaces about being blindsided by physical anxiety for the first time in 2012. As a Type-A overachiever, the subsequent spiral into chronic, generalized anxiety crushed me. I felt like I was stripped of my “superpowers” as a homeschooling, blogging, entrepreneurial mother of three who ran the household alone much of the time because my husband traveled regularly for work. I spent months trying to fight the physical symptoms with every remedy under the sun besides medication, but ultimately, medication helped me regain any resemblance of normalcy.

At first, I thought there was no way I could handle any more responsibilities, let alone the ones I was already obligated to. At that time, I was a board member for my local homeschooling group, ran an active homeschooling blog, homeschooled my three daughters, and picked up contract editorial work when I could squeeze it in. My first reaction was to lighten my load, and I did where I could. However, I knew God had brought me this far into the homeschool publishing space for a reason, so I maintained the blog and continued to attend homeschool conferences.

Once my anxiety symptoms were under control, I felt more capable physically but struggled with feelings of inadequacy when it came to writing for the homeschooling blog. Type A’s know what I’m talking about: If you can’t do things as well as they could be done, you’re not doing a good job. I wasn’t sure if I was qualified to give anyone advice in this broken state.

However, the next conference I attended had a session on facing parenting fears, and I got to talk about my fears with the speaker after the session. She encouraged me to be honest about my struggles because—guess what—I wasn’t alone. Sure enough, when I began to share my experiences online and with small groups of trusted friends, I found out she was right. Among the friend circles I already had were several women who had gone through the same battle—and some who later experienced it and knew they could come to me to talk about it.

Having the opportunity to contribute to the published devotional book “Life Changing Stories: A Devotional Collection Revealing God’s Faithfulness and Transforming Power” was a pinnacle moment of achievement for me. Not only did God sustain me to persevere through this ongoing battle without being wiped out, but I also had the opportunity to assure other women that they’re not alone in their mental health struggles—and there’s a light at the end of the tunnel.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://reneegotcher.com/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/thepaceofgrace_reneegotcher
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/reneegotcher.anewchapter/
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/reneegotcher/
• Other: My Link-in-Bio Page: https://reneegotcher.com/ig/

Image Credits

Renée Gotcher (all are my photos)