A campaign I did for a local solar panel company performed way better than they expected. We told the story of regular families lowering their bills and helping the planet instead of just throwing technical specs in people’s faces.
The campaign got shared, their inquiries doubled, and they referred me to a friend at a clean energy startup. That startup referred me to another founder in Boulder.
I realized there was this whole wave of climate tech and green companies that were brilliant at building technology but terrible at talking about themselves.
And I was good at turning complicated, boring tech into stories normal people actually cared about.
So I leaned into that niche.
I reworked my website to speak directly to impact-driven companies. I started going to conferences in Denver and Boulder, signed up for cheap exhibitor tables and sat there with a basic banner and a laptop talking to anyone who would stop long enough to listen.
I spoke on tiny panels about storytelling for impact, worked at ugly hotel bars with founders in Patagonia vests, collected business cards, and followed up on LinkedIn like my life depended on it.
Sometimes it did.
Slowly, Heartline grew from me alone in a noisy co-working space to a small team sharing cheap office space in a renovated warehouse district just outside downtown.
I hired my first employee, a copywriter who had been laid off from an agency and was thrilled to have a chance to build something new.
Then I brought on a video editor who could make our ideas look as good as they sounded.
And later, a strategist who knew paid ads better than I ever would and loved spreadsheets in a way I never could.
Every time I signed a new lease or a bigger contract, Mom would remind me,
“Good thing I set everything up properly. Banks love seeing my name on those documents.”
She said it like a joke, like a flex.
And I laughed along because I thought we were a team.
I handled the clients, the creative, the management. She handled the paperwork and the taxes.
My dad would swing by sometimes, hold up one of our campaign posters, and say,
“Look at you building an empire.”
Then follow it up with,
“One day you’ll slow down and have a family of your own, right?”
As if the business I was building didn’t count as a family I was feeding.
As the years passed, the projects got bigger.
We weren’t just designing logos and social posts anymore. We were running full-scale digital launches for startups about to announce funding rounds, building content strategies for companies expanding into new markets, producing video series that actually changed how people saw clean energy.
I flew to San Francisco for client pitches, to Austin for a conference, to New York for a workshop.
I’d walk into rooms full of guys in suits, set up my deck, and watch their skepticism turn into respect. As soon as I started talking through the numbers and the creative inside Heartline, my role kept evolving.
I was no longer just the one making things. I was leading strategy sessions, hiring department heads, sitting in on every major client meeting.
Staff came to me when they were stuck, when they needed direction, when they wanted to celebrate a win.
My mom wasn’t in the office day-to-day. She’d stop by occasionally, say hi to people, ask about revenue and projections, then leave.
But every time we needed a bigger credit line or wanted to negotiate better terms on something, her name and her credit history were what smoothed the way.
She never let me forget that.
“We’re a good team,” she’d say. “You’re the vision. I’m the foundation.”
It felt good at the time.
My dad liked to brag about us. He’d tell friends,
“Lena and her mom built this thing together.”
Even though she couldn’t have explained a single campaign if you’d put a camera in her face.
My sister watched from Chicago, half curious, half dismissive, making comments at holidays like,
“Must be nice working online. I could never handle that instability.”
While also asking if I could take a quick look at her LinkedIn profile.
After about 10 years, Heartline was pulling in over $3 million a year.
We moved into a bright, glass-walled office in downtown Denver with our logo on the door, a real reception area, and a view of the city that made late nights a little easier to swallow.
My team grew to around 30 people.
We were working with startups across the country, signing clients from San Francisco, Austin, New York, sometimes hopping on calls with Europe early in the morning.
We had health benefits, a 401(k), Friday lunches when we hit big goals.
For a lot of my employees, Heartline wasn’t just a job. It was their career, their rent, their kids’ health insurance.
By year 12, we hit $5.2 million in annual revenue.
I remember the night I saw that number on the end-of-year report. I sat alone in the office, lights low, the city glowing outside the windows, and I felt like I had finally done it.
I had taken every ignored milestone, every “is that a real job?” comment, every time someone dismissed digital work as “just posting online,” and turned it into something no one could shrug off.
Mom called to congratulate me, her voice warm and proud.
“I always knew you’d make it big,” she said. “And remember—the way we set things up is why you were able to scale this fast. It’s a good thing you trusted me.”
I thanked her because in my mind she was right there with me on the winning side.
I looked at the logo on the wall, the open-plan desks, the photos from our last team retreat, and thought, This is mine. I built this. We built this.
It never crossed my mind that the same signatures I’d scribbled at 22 would give her the power to decide—with a single meeting and a couple of documents—that my 12 years of work legally belonged to someone else.
The year everything cracked didn’t start with my business.
It started with my parents.
After decades of quiet resentments and louder arguments, my mom and dad finally decided to divorce.
I wish I could say it shocked me, but honestly, by then the silence at family dinners was louder than any fight.
What did surprise me was how fast things moved once lawyers got involved.
There were papers, appraisals, negotiations about the house, the retirement accounts, the cars.
Whenever Heartline came up, my mom’s tone changed.
She called it “my business” in front of her attorney. She talked about the risk she took putting it under her name, about the support she’d provided me.
My dad looked uncomfortable, but didn’t push back. On paper, Heartline was hers, and he had always seen it as Lena’s thing with her mom’s help—not something he could or should fight for.
When the dust settled, my dad got his share of the house sale and his retirement accounts.
My mom kept Heartline Digital completely separate, as if it were some investment she’d made all on her own.
I remember sitting in her kitchen one afternoon, stacks of manila folders on the table, when she casually said,
“This business is what’s going to make my retirement comfortable. You and I did this together.”
The part stung, but I swallowed it.
I told myself it didn’t matter whose name was on the paperwork as long as I was the one actually running it.
Then Victor appeared.
He was a real estate developer from Phoenix, the kind of man who wore expensive watches and talked about “opportunities” in every other sentence.
My mom met him at some financial conference and was engaged within a year.
He started flying into Denver on weekends, talking about golf markets and how Denver was ripe for redevelopment.
At first, I tried to be polite.
I took them to brunch, listened to his stories about flipping entire apartment complexes, nodded when he asked if Heartline could maybe help with branding for his next luxury project.
It didn’t take long before their conversation shifted from wedding plans to asset strategy.
One day, I stopped by my mom’s house and caught part of a call on speakerphone. A banker’s voice was talking about loan structures, collateral, and something about how having an established digital agency pledged alongside the real estate would strengthen the package.
My mom hurried to turn it off when she saw me, smiling too wide as she changed the subject.
That was the first time a cold little knot formed in my stomach.
A few weeks later, Mom and Victor got married in a small ceremony in Phoenix.
Rachel flew in with her husband and kids. My dad didn’t go.
I was there, standing in a dress I’d bought last minute, watching my mother promise forever to a man who already saw my business as a line item in his next deal.
When we got back to Denver, Mom suggested a family dinner to talk about the future.
She made a reservation at this Italian place downtown—white tablecloths, soft jazz, the kind of spot where people celebrate promotions and anniversaries.
It sounded harmless.
It wasn’t.
We sat there, me across from my parents, Rachel next to my mom, her phone face down on the table like it was killing her not to check it.
We ordered, made small talk about the kids, about Denver real estate, about the Broncos.
Then my mom pulled out a neat, thick folder and placed it between the wine glasses.
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