HEY! I’M EVONA. 👋

Entrepreneur. Marketer. Four-time business owner. Professional over-researcher. Serial starter of things. And a big believer that you don’t need to have everything figured out. You just need to be willing to figure out the next step.

I’ve Been Figuring Out Entrepreneurship Since 2013. Now I Want to Help You Figure It Out Faster.

I’ve been working for myself since 2013.

No W-2 job. No traditional career path. No boss. No predictable paycheck showing up every other Friday. For more than a decade, every dollar I’ve used to support myself has somehow come from something I created, sold, built, marketed, or figured out.

When I actually stop and think about that, it’s still kind of crazy to me.

Because I definitely didn’t start with some brilliant plan to become a lifelong entrepreneur. I didn’t go to business school and emerge with a perfectly mapped-out strategy. I didn’t have investors handing me money or years of experience running companies.

I had ideas.

A LOT of them.

I also had an almost unreasonable belief that if I wanted something badly enough, I could probably figure out how to make it happen. More than anything, I knew I wanted to create a life that was mine.

Since then, I’ve started four businesses. I’ve built businesses that worked and businesses that absolutely did not work the way I thought they would. I’ve pivoted. I’ve started over. I’ve lost clients and landed incredible ones. I’ve made money, wasted money, learned entirely new skills, sold a business, built teams, and spent an absolutely ridiculous number of hours behind a laptop trying to turn whatever idea was living inside my head into something real.

Along the way, I’ve had the opportunity to work on projects for companies like Google, Samsung, and Salesforce. Today, I run my marketing agency, Twelve Hearts, where I help businesses market themselves, create content, stay visible, build relationships, and grow.

But the part of my story that matters most to me isn’t the impressive company names or the perfectly polished entrepreneur bio.

It’s the fact that for more than a decade, I’ve figured it out.

Not perfectly. Definitely not without mistakes. And absolutely not without moments where I wondered what the hell I was doing.

But I kept learning. I kept adapting. I kept building, selling, pivoting, and moving forward.

Now, I want to help newer entrepreneurs do the same, hopefully with a lot less unnecessary trial and error.

I THINK I WAS ALWAYS GOING TO BE AN ENTREPRENEUR.

I just didn’t know there was a word for it yet.

When I look back at myself as a kid, the signs were definitely there. I was the kid who actually liked going door-to-door selling candy bars for school fundraisers. I had lemonade stands. In middle school, I sold candy to other kids in the cafeteria. As soon as I was legally allowed to work, I got a worker’s permit at 15 because I wanted to start making my own money.

Possibly my favorite early entrepreneurial idea happened in second grade when I decided I was going to start a magazine.

Not just any magazine.

A vegetable-themed children’s magazine.

I have absolutely no idea what second-grade Evona believed the business model for this was going to be. Apparently, I had identified what I considered to be a glaring hole in the children’s vegetable-media market. 😂

Needless to say, the magazine never made it to newsstands.

But the instinct behind it never really went away.

I’ve always loved ideas. I love that moment when something doesn’t exist yet and suddenly your brain goes, “Wait... what if?”

What if I made this? What if I sold that? What if I combined these two ideas? What if I tried it differently? What if there’s an opportunity here nobody else is paying attention to?

And, of course...

What if this actually worked?

That question has probably been responsible for half the decisions I’ve made in my adult life.

In 2013, it led to one of the biggest ones.

IN 2013, I BOUGHT A ONE-WAY TICKET TO SPAIN.

At that point in my life, there were two things I knew I wanted.

I wanted to travel the world.

And I wanted to become an entrepreneur.

So I decided I was going to do both.

At the same time.

There was just one slight problem. I had about $3,000 to my name and needed to figure out some way to support myself while traveling.

I started thinking about what I could possibly do remotely and eventually landed on graphic design.

There was another slight problem.

I wasn’t a graphic designer.

I hadn’t gone to school for it. I didn’t have professional experience. I didn’t have a beautiful portfolio filled with years of client work.

But I knew I was creative. I knew I was willing to work. Most importantly, I genuinely believed I could learn.

So I taught myself.

YouTube became my classroom. I practiced. I learned as I went. I started freelancing. I took projects I felt slightly terrified to take. I got better. I found clients. Eventually, the thing I had basically just decided I was going to become turned into an actual way to support myself.

Over the next nine months, I traveled through eight countries while working remotely.

Eventually, that completely self-taught skill led to opportunities to work on projects for companies like Google, Samsung, and Salesforce.

Sometimes I look back at that version of myself and wonder where I got the nerve.

I had $3,000. I didn’t even know the skill I was planning to use to support myself.

And somehow my attitude was basically:

“Eh. I’ll figure it out.”

That experience taught me something that has shaped almost everything I’ve done since.

You don’t always need to know how you’re going to do something before you decide you’re going to do it.

You need to be willing to learn. You need to be resourceful. You need to ask questions. You need to find people who know more than you. And you need to figure out the next step.

Then the next one.

Then the next one.

That mindset has been one of my greatest strengths as an entrepreneur.

It has also, occasionally, gotten me into trouble.

Which brings us to my first startup.

THE TIME I BASICALLY TRIED TO REBUILD ETSY.

While I was traveling, I was also thinking about what kind of business I could build. Eventually, I created Undiscovered Kitchen, an online marketplace designed to connect incredible small-batch artisan food makers with people looking for unique products.

The easiest way to explain it is that it was basically Etsy for artisan food.

Except instead of simply using Etsy, I apparently decided it would be a much better idea to rebuild Etsy.

Because why make anything easy? 😂

Undiscovered Kitchen became my first real crash course in entrepreneurship.

And when I say crash course, I mean I crashed directly into basically every business lesson possible.

One of my biggest mistakes was spending an entire year building the website.

A YEAR.

I obsessed over every tiny detail. I wanted everything to look perfect. I wanted every page to feel perfect. I wanted every interaction to be perfect.

At one point, I was literally having designers move a button by a millimeter because I didn’t think it was sitting in exactly the right place.

Meanwhile, I was missing the much bigger question:

Did the actual business work?

Eventually, I learned that it didn’t work the way I needed it to. The artisan products were expensive for the average consumer. The pricing model was difficult. I didn’t have the kind of advertising budget necessary to scale a consumer marketplace.

Most importantly, the product-market fit simply wasn’t strong enough.

And no perfectly positioned button was going to fix that.

I spent years trying to make Undiscovered Kitchen work because I was emotionally invested in the idea and determined to prove that I could make it successful.

Looking back, I wish I had failed faster.

I wish I had tested faster.

I wish I had pivoted faster.

And I wish someone had sat me down and said:

“Evona, perfecting something nobody wants does not make it more valuable.”

Today, I jokingly call Undiscovered Kitchen my half-priced MBA, because that business taught me an enormous amount about what not to do.

It taught me that you can be incredibly hardworking and still be working on the wrong thing. It taught me that effort does not automatically equal results. It taught me that sometimes the smartest thing you can do isn’t push harder.

Sometimes you need to change direction.

Most importantly, it taught me something I still have to remind myself of:

Done is better than perfect.

If you’re building your first business right now, I want you to learn that lesson a whole lot faster than I did.

EVENTUALLY, I LEARNED TO PIVOT.

After years of trying to make Undiscovered Kitchen work, I finally accepted that something needed to change.

Instead of throwing everything away, I looked at what I had learned and which parts of the business actually had potential.

I niched down.

That eventually became Gourmet Wedding Gifts, a business focused specifically on artisan wedding gifts and favors.

That pivot taught me another lesson that I think newer entrepreneurs desperately need to hear:

Changing direction does not mean you failed.

Sometimes the thing you’re building right now isn’t the final business. It’s simply teaching you what you need to know to build the next one.

Undiscovered Kitchen gave me relationships, experience, industry knowledge, contacts, skills, and an understanding of e-commerce that made Gourmet Wedding Gifts possible.

One business became the foundation for another.

Eventually, I sold Gourmet Wedding Gifts.

When you compress that story into a cute little entrepreneur bio, it sounds great.

Built company. Pivoted. Successful exit. Next.

That’s not really what it felt like.

Selling the business was incredibly difficult for me because I had invested so much of myself into it. I was participating in a business accelerator at the time, and one of my mentors helped me recognize that I was spreading myself too thin.

Another business I was building had more opportunity, but I couldn’t continue trying to give everything to everything.

Selling Gourmet Wedding Gifts initially felt a little like giving up.

Eventually, I realized it was the opposite.

Sometimes letting go is the thing that allows you to grow.

Once I stopped dividing my energy between too many things, I could focus on the business with the greatest opportunity.

And when I did?

I made more money.

That experience completely changed how I think about entrepreneurship.

Holding onto something simply because you’ve already invested time, money, and energy into it isn’t always determination.

Sometimes it’s fear.

Learning the difference can change your business.

THE NEXT BUSINESS BASICALLY FOUND ME.

While I was running Gourmet Wedding Gifts, I was doing a lot of networking with people in the wedding industry, including wedding planners, photographers, venues, and other business owners.

As people learned what I did, something interesting started happening.

They began asking me:

“Could you do gifts for MY clients?”

That was one of those little entrepreneurial moments I love.

I hadn’t necessarily planned to start another business.

But somebody was asking me to solve a problem.

So I paid attention.

That opportunity eventually became Gifting Made, where I created strategic gifting campaigns for businesses to strengthen relationships with their most important clients, prospects, and referral partners.

That business reinforced one of the biggest beliefs I have about entrepreneurship:

YOUR NETWORK IS YOUR NET WORTH.

I genuinely believe that.

Not in the gross, “collect as many LinkedIn connections as possible because someday they might be useful” kind of way.

I mean real relationships.

Human beings connecting with other human beings.

Because business doesn’t happen in a vacuum.

People hire people. People refer people. People recommend people. People open doors for people.

And people want to support people they know, like, trust, and genuinely want to see succeed.

I’ve watched relationships create opportunities that no marketing funnel could have predicted.

That’s why I believe one of the most important things you can learn as a new business owner is how to build genuine relationships.

Talk to people. Help people. Know people. Connect people. Follow up. Stay in touch. Be memorable.

Become someone other people genuinely want to see succeed.

You can have the perfect logo, website, Instagram feed, business card, funnel, or email sequence.

But relationships will open doors that marketing alone never will.

MARKETING IS REALLY RELATIONSHIP BUILDING AT SCALE.

While running Gifting Made, I started noticing another problem.

We would send an incredible personalized gift to one of my client’s customers, prospects, or referral partners. Later, I would sit down with my client and ask:

“Okay, what have you done since we sent the last gift?”

Very often, the answer was basically:

Nothing.

They hadn’t emailed their clients. They weren’t consistently posting on social media. They hadn’t followed up with referral partners. They weren’t creating content. They weren’t doing much to stay visible.

At first, I couldn’t understand why.

These were smart business owners. They knew marketing mattered.

But they were also doing the actual work of running a business.

They were serving clients, answering emails, solving problems, networking, selling, invoicing, managing employees, putting out fires, and trying to have some semblance of a life at the same time.

They were wearing every hat.

They didn’t need another person telling them:

“You should really post more on Instagram.”

They knew.

What they needed was someone who could actually help them do the things they didn’t have the time, knowledge, or bandwidth to do.

So Gifting Made started evolving.

We added email marketing. Social media. Content strategy. Event promotion. Video. Business development. Broader marketing strategy and execution.

Over time, that evolution became the business I run today:

TWELVE HEARTS.

Once again, I didn’t sit down one day and magically invent the perfect business.

The business evolved because I paid attention.

My clients told me what they needed.

I listened.

I followed the opportunity.

And I adapted.

That lesson is something I want every newer entrepreneur to understand.

Your first version doesn’t have to be your final version.

Your first offer doesn’t have to be your forever offer.

Your first price doesn’t have to be your forever price.

Your first ideal client might not actually be your ideal client.

Your business is allowed to evolve as you learn more about your customers, your market, and yourself.

In fact, it probably should.

SOMEHOW, I’VE BEEN SUPPORTING MYSELF THIS WAY SINCE 2013.

This is probably one of the things I’m proudest of.

I’ve been fully supporting myself through entrepreneurship since 2013.

I haven’t had a W-2 job.

For more than a decade, I’ve figured it out.

Sometimes business has been great.

Sometimes it hasn’t.

Sometimes I’ve felt incredibly confident.

Sometimes I’ve wondered what the hell I was doing.

I’ve made money.

I’ve lost money.

I’ve gotten clients.

I’ve lost clients.

I’ve made great decisions.

And I’ve made decisions I would absolutely not make again.

But somehow, every month, every year, and every version of my entrepreneurial life since 2013, I’ve figured out how to keep going.

And I’m proud of that.

Because entrepreneurship isn’t just about knowing how to start a business.

It’s learning how to keep one going.

BECAUSE I LOVE ENTREPRENEURSHIP. BUT IT CAN ALSO BE REALLY FUCKING HARD.

What I love most about entrepreneurship is the possibility.

The sky really does feel like the limit.

I can have an idea today and start building it tomorrow. I can learn something completely new because I think it might help my business. I can change direction. I can experiment. I can create something that didn’t exist yesterday.

When I’m really in my zone, entrepreneurship feels like being a kid playing in a sandbox.

I get to move things around. Build something. Knock it down. Try something weird. Combine two things that aren’t supposed to go together. Ask a ridiculous question and then see if I can make the answer real.

That’s genuinely fun for me.

Even when I’m technically not working, there’s a pretty good chance I’m thinking about business.

Some people do puzzles.

Apparently, I invent hypothetical revenue streams. 😂

But entrepreneurship has another side.

And I don’t think we talk about it enough.

It can be incredibly lonely.

WHEN YOU’RE THE BUSINESS OWNER, EVERYTHING EVENTUALLY LANDS WITH YOU.

You can have employees.

You can hire contractors.

You can outsource things.

You can build an amazing team.

But at the end of the day, you’re still the owner.

When you lose a client, you have to decide what happens next.

When sales are slow, you have to figure out how to generate more business.

When an idea doesn’t work, you have to decide whether to change it, abandon it, or keep going.

When you don’t know what to charge, you have to pick a number.

When someone says no to your proposal, you have to decide whether to follow up.

When you have seven ideas and enough time to execute two of them, you have to decide which ones matter.

There isn’t always a manager you can walk into a meeting with and say:

“Okay, here’s what happened. What should I do?”

There’s no one above you.

It’s you.

And sometimes that is incredibly empowering.

Sometimes it’s exhausting.

Sometimes it’s lonely.

There have been plenty of days throughout my entrepreneurial career where it has literally just been me and my laptop, carrying both the practical and emotional weight of figuring out how to make everything work.

That experience is a huge part of why I care so much about mentorship now.

I WISH I HAD ASKED FOR MORE HELP SOONER.

Looking back, one of the things I would change about my early entrepreneurial years is how much I tried to figure out completely on my own.

I’m resourceful. I love researching. I love learning. Those qualities have helped me tremendously.

But there’s a difference between being resourceful and making everything unnecessarily difficult for yourself.

Some of the biggest breakthroughs in my business came when I had other people in the room.

Mentors.

Business owners.

People who had already made some of the mistakes I was about to make.

People who could look at a situation without all the emotion I had attached to it and say:

“Have you thought about it this way?”

Sometimes one conversation can save you months of going in the wrong direction.

Sometimes you already know the answer and you just need someone to help you see it.

Sometimes you need someone to tell you that the thing you’ve been obsessing over for three weeks really isn’t that important.

And sometimes you need someone to challenge you because you’re playing smaller than you realize.

That’s why I believe so strongly in having people in your corner.

WHICH IS A BIG PART OF WHY I CREATED THE BUSINESS BADASS CLUB.

After more than a decade of entrepreneurship and marketing, I see business very differently than I did when I started.

I’ve learned a ton.

I’ve made mistakes.

I’ve watched businesses grow.

I’ve watched ideas fail.

I’ve helped other people market what they’ve built.

I’ve seen incredibly talented people struggle because they didn’t know how to find clients.

I’ve seen business owners spend months perfecting things that weren’t actually going to make them money.

I’ve seen people undercharge because they weren’t confident enough to ask for more.

I’ve seen people avoid selling because they were afraid of bothering someone.

I’ve seen entrepreneurs try ten different marketing strategies at once because someone online told them they needed to be everywhere.

And I understand it.

Because I’ve been there too.

When you’re in your first year or two of business, there are a million things you could be doing.

The difficult part is figuring out what you should be doing.

That’s why I created The Business Badass Club.

It’s a mentorship and business community specifically for service-based business owners in their first or second year who are ready to stop guessing and start building a stronger business.

I want to help you understand your business.

I want to help you figure out what you should focus on.

I want to help you attract clients, market yourself, build relationships, improve your offers, price your services, get better at selling, and make smarter business decisions.

But even more than that, I want to help you become a stronger business owner.

Because you don’t just need another marketing strategy.

You need to learn how to think like an entrepreneur.

I’M NOT HERE TO GIVE YOU A COOKIE-CUTTER BUSINESS BLUEPRINT.

One of the things that drives me crazy about the online business world is the idea that there is one magical formula everyone should follow.

“Post three Reels a day.”

“Charge premium prices.”

“Build a funnel.”

“Start a podcast.”

“Run Facebook ads.”

“Send 100 cold DMs.”

“Create passive income.”

Okay.

But does any of that actually make sense for your business?

Your business is different.

Your goals are different.

Your strengths are different.

Your market is different.

Your customers are different.

Your financial situation is different.

Your available time is different.

The right strategy for someone else could be a complete waste of time for you.

My job as a mentor isn’t to hand you the exact same checklist I hand everyone else.

My job is to help you look at the business that’s actually in front of you.

Where are you now?

Where are you trying to go?

What’s working?

What isn’t?

Where are your customers coming from?

Where are you losing opportunities?

What are you avoiding?

What deserves more of your attention?

And what are you spending time on that probably doesn’t matter nearly as much as you think it does?

Then we figure out your next move.

You don’t need someone else’s roadmap. You need help building yours.

HERE’S WHAT MORE THAN A DECADE IN BUSINESS HAS TAUGHT ME.

I believe done beats perfect.

Your website doesn’t need to be flawless before you tell people about your business. Your logo doesn’t need another six weeks of revisions. Your offer doesn’t need to be perfect before you sell it.

Put things into the world.

Pay attention to what happens.

Learn.

Improve.

I believe you should fail faster.

That doesn’t mean trying to fail.

It means creating ways to learn faster.

Test the idea.

Make the offer.

Talk to customers.

Ask questions.

Get real feedback.

You can spend a year theorizing about whether something will work or you can find a way to test it.

I believe your network is your net worth.

Relationships matter.

A lot.

Some of the biggest opportunities of my career came through people.

Build genuine relationships. Help people. Connect people. Follow up. Stay in touch. Be memorable. Be someone people genuinely want to see succeed.

I believe you need to pay attention.

Your customers will tell you things.

Your prospects will tell you things.

The market will tell you things.

Sometimes the best business opportunity isn’t the thing you originally planned to sell.

It’s the thing people keep asking you for.

I believe focus matters.

You cannot give everything to everything.

There will always be another strategy.

Another platform.

Another opportunity.

Another idea.

Another shiny object.

Learning what deserves a yes also means learning what deserves a no.

And I believe asking for help is a business skill.

You don’t get bonus points for figuring out everything the hard way.

MOST OF ALL, I BELIEVE YOU CAN FIGURE OUT A HELL OF A LOT MORE THAN YOU THINK YOU CAN.

That belief has followed me since I got on a plane with $3,000 and decided I would somehow teach myself a skill that could support me while traveling.

It was there when I started businesses before I knew how to build businesses.

It was there when my first big idea didn’t work.

It was there when I pivoted.

It was there when I sold a business.

It was there when I followed a completely unexpected opportunity and built another one.

It was there as that business evolved into Twelve Hearts.

And it has been there every time I’ve found myself staring at some new problem thinking:

“Okay. How the hell am I going to figure this one out?”

Somehow, I do.

And I think you can too.

That doesn’t mean you have to do it alone.

In fact, I think one of the smartest things you can do is surround yourself with people who can help you get there faster.

IF YOU’RE IN YOUR FIRST OR SECOND YEAR OF BUSINESS, I WANT YOU TO KNOW THIS.

You are not supposed to have everything figured out yet.

You don’t need a perfect website.

You don’t need thousands of followers.

You don’t need to know every marketing strategy.

You don’t need to have the perfect offer.

You don’t need to be completely confident.

And you definitely don’t need to pretend you know what you’re doing every second of every day.

You’re building something.

You’re learning.

There are going to be things you try that work incredibly well.

There are going to be things you’re absolutely convinced will work that completely bomb.

There are going to be clients you love.

There are going to be clients who teach you exactly what you never want to deal with again.

There are going to be moments when you feel unstoppable.

And there are going to be moments when you wonder whether getting a normal job would be significantly easier.

That’s entrepreneurship.

But you don’t have to spend the next decade learning every lesson the hardest possible way.

You can learn from people who have already been through some of it.

You can ask questions.

You can get feedback.

You can surround yourself with other entrepreneurs who understand what you’re building.

You can have someone in your corner when you’re stuck between three different options and have no idea which direction makes sense.

That’s exactly what I want to give you.

YOU DON’T HAVE TO FIGURE IT ALL OUT ALONE.

I’ve spent more than a decade figuring out how to make entrepreneurship work.

I’ve learned by doing.

By trying.

By failing.

By selling.

By marketing.

By networking.

By losing clients.

By landing clients.

By making mistakes.

By changing direction.

By asking for help.

By following opportunities I never could have predicted.

And by continuing long enough to get better at all of it.

Now, I want to take everything I’ve learned and use it to help entrepreneurs who are at the beginning of that journey.

Not because I have every answer.

I don’t.

But because I’ve spent a very long time learning how to find them.

So when you’re sitting there wondering...

How do I get more clients?

What should I charge?

How do I market this?

Why isn’t anyone responding?

Should I change my offer?

Should I follow up again?

Am I focusing on the right thing?

Is this idea actually worth pursuing?

What the hell should I do next?

You don’t have to Google your way through every single answer alone.

Sometimes you just need an experienced entrepreneur sitting across from you saying:

“Okay. Let’s figure this shit out.”

That’s the kind of mentor I want to be.

That’s why I created The Business Badass Club.

And if you’re ready to stop guessing, start taking action, and build a business you’re actually proud of...

Your business deserves a BADASS in your corner.

[GET A BADASS IN YOUR CORNER →]