A Meeting Place for All Home Office Women

A mistake by a chiropractor changed her life ‘forever’. But Lillie did whatever it took to realize her dream. Today, she is a sought after writer and editor, running her successful business from her home office. This is her inspiring story…

Although I’d always dreamed of writing “someday,” I was too busy running my interior landscape company to write anything other than business documents and occasional articles for a trade journal. “Someday” seemed a long way off until a mistake by a chiropractor caused a stroke and left me seriously incapacitated. As I went through months of rehabilitation to become functional again, I realized I couldn’t continue to dream of a far-distant “someday.” If I wanted to realize my dream, I needed to get started.

Returning to my business was important – I had eighteen employees and 300 customers depending on me and my company. And I had to prove to myself that I could function again. Fortunately, I was blessed with loyal, hard-working employees led by my managers – my sister and my brother – who kept the company running during my recovery. My husband oversaw the business as well as taking care of me and all the household responsibilities. I went back to working part-time sooner than the doctors expected, but it was a couple of years before I was strong enough to run my business full-time and devote energy to writing on the weekends. After I proved to myself that I could manage my company again, I was ready to move on, but it took another two years to find a buyer that agreed to keep all my employees as well as my business accounts.

By that time, I had finished a novel and was working on another. Of course, writing and making money from writing are two vastly different things. So my husband (who is retired) and I started a network marketing business. Not only was it a source of income, but I was experiencing dramatic results from the nutritional products. Five years after the stroke, I was out of the wheelchair, though I still had some residual “deficits” as the doctors called them. I enjoyed sharing my success with the products with others.

My true love (other than my husband of forty years!), however, is writing, and as I started earning money from writing, I cut back on the network marketing business. Network marketing is, I believe, the best way for the average person to generate a significant income without experience or major investment. I even wrote a book about it to help people who want to avoid scams and succeed in business: How to Get Started in Network Marketing from Home.

But I had promised myself that when I recovered from the stroke, I would pursue my dream of writing. My novel, Stroke of Luck, a romance novel in which the heroine suffers a Wallenberg syndrome stroke just as I did, was published as an e-book, and my freelance writing business was picking up. When I contacted a small, new publisher and expressed disappointment at how poorly edited their books were, they hired me to edit for them, and my business grew by word of mouth. Today I have all the work I can handle, and I love every bit of it. Helping a businessperson create a winning proposal or an author create a terrific book brings me great pleasure.