When I moved back to Akron in August 2024, I told myself I needed to slow down. What I didn't know yet was that slowing down would show me exactly what I was supposed to build.
I spent 15 years moving around the country, shifting states every three years or so. I loved the adventure, but that constant motion made it hard to hold onto things, including art supplies. My anxious brain would only allow me to keep what fit in a tiny Ford Focus. That's not a lot of stuff. And it meant I had been neglecting something important: my identity as an artist.
Akron made sense for a lot of reasons. The cost of living gave me breathing room that bigger cities don't, and for some reason my husband loves the winters here. I returned with long-standing strategic relationships already intact, which meant I needed to be up and running fast. I was grateful to Micah Kraus for opening a dedicated portion of his and his wife’s studio space to get me settled: a desk, a chair, a filing cabinet, and a cozy couch I worked from more often than the desk. Micah was my high school art teacher, and it's not lost on me that he's the one who helped me land again.
The end of 2024 and most of 2025 were, selfishly, dedicated to making my own artwork. I needed to honor my identity as an artist and get back into the practice of making things as a therapeutic and diagnostic tool. The cheaper cost of living Akron provides and the stability Bounce offered allowed me to do that while continuing to serve my clients. I found the clarity that comes with being able to slow down. That clarity allowed me to see Akron for what it really is, with all of its sharp edges and hidden beauty.
As my practice evolved, so did my footprint at Bounce. I outgrew the studio and started holding meetings in the Generator phone booths on the second floor. These were first come, first served, and not always available. It was humbling walking a client through the hall poking your head into small rooms hoping one is open. I made it work, but I outgrew those too. My client work shifted from one-off project-based work to longer-term problem-solving engagements that required a strategy room. Somewhere I could leave Post-it notes on the wall for a few days, letting the ideas percolate until they formed into a clearer picture. When I saw an available office with the full whiteboard wall, I started drooling and took it. That’s where I am now. I can have one client's notes on the board until our next session while still leaving room for whoever comes in next. It's spacious enough that clients and I can pace around as we think. And the benefit of staying in the same building means I still find myself back on the studio couch. A shared space where we can work quietly on our own things, deep in thought, until something bubbles up too loud to ignore. At which point, we interrupt each other to untangle the knot that continue to strengthen our autonomous businesses.
But I still saw these as two separate parts of my life. There was the artist me, making work in my home studio. And there was the brand marketing and fractional CMO work with clients at Bounce. I segmented my time. Fridays became studio days. Except my business was growing much faster than I anticipated, and when studio days came, I was too tired to take advantage of them. I needed to find a way to fold these two things into one.
The turning point came gradually, through those Quiet-Time-Bubble-Up-Organic-Conversations on Micah's couch. Micah is deeply rooted in Akron's arts community with his own design business. I am ingrained in the business side. Having two different perspectives that entrenched and knowledgeable allowed me to see where I could serve Akron in a way that is currently missing.
It was also happening in client sessions when I made offhand comments giving clients the same diagnostic tools I use personally as an artist to strengthen my business. Those landed so much deeper than a custom-built Excel Gantt chart that sit unused in OneDrive folders. The connective tissue was forming, and I dove into every resource I could find: the Small Business Development Center inside Bounce, the local Chambers of Commerce, the Akron-Summit Public Library small business center, and networking groups. And in those conversations, I kept finding the person who was supposed to be giving me advice was asking me how I did it instead. They were asking for advice on how to better serve their own audiences.
What I've slowly realized through all of it (the couch, the phone booths, the whiteboard wall, the workshops) is that Akron is missing a bridge. One that I can shape because I’ve experienced it firsthand. And one that I couldn’t fully appreciate until I allowed the two versions of me (the artist and the entrepreneur) to fully integrate.
Artists and creative entrepreneurs in Akron have access to incredible resources. What they're missing is the bridge between those resources and the internal capacity to use them. Most entrepreneurship support assumes the person is ready and delivers tactics, capital, and exposure. What it doesn't deliver is the reflective space to figure out whether you're resolving discomfort or responding to meaning.
I think about Akron's challenge this way: an economically depressed city can lead to emotionally depressed residents who may not feel ready to address the root cause. But improving the economic depression requires addressing the identity depression first. It's a chicken-and-egg problem. What I'm actually building is a program designed to interrupt that loop. My role alone is not meant to fix the system, but to articulate it clearly enough that people can start to move through it.
That's what makes this place worth building in. Having moved back from Austin (a place where everyone seems to blow smoke up your rear) to Akron (a place where many people suffer from a nihilistic outlook), it's refreshing to work with people who are pragmatically optimistic. The city needs more of that. Bounce has been a place where that optimism has room to grow. I'm not ready for my next shell yet, but I can already see it from here.