Welcome to The No-BS Business Club

My mouth gaping, I watched as the Senior Partner at the fancy-pants law firm I worked for outlined the curve of a woman’s hips with his hands. Did he really just do that?! I thought.

“I don’t get why you’re so ambitious,” he said. “Don’t you just want to get married and have babies? You know, I could get fired for saying that.”

Just when you thought it couldn’t get worse.

I was a 24-year-old lawyer working for one-third the pay of the associates who graduated the year before me. The world economy had plummeted, and firms pounced on the chance to take advantage of the opportunity.

My hands trembled as I approached the Senior Partner about unfair treatment I thought I’d received. The firm had hired eleven new associates from my class — ten of them were men. The other was me.

When you work in at a law firm, there’s a lot of competition around who gets what cases. Since your entire life revolves around billing and racking up more hours than the next lawyer, you’ve got to get cases — big ones — to survive.

After that disastrously toxic and misogynistic meeting, I’d go on to work as a business lawyer for another five years. I wish I could tell you it got better, but sadly this story is only one of hundreds of cringeworthy stories I’ve got.

Severing the Ties

It took a particularly terrifying plane experience midway over the Atlantic Ocean in 2016 to scare me enough to take control of my life. You’ll get to read all about it in my upcoming book, When I Start My Business: I’ll Be Happy. (Get on my book waitlist!)

It wasn’t that the thousands of feet we plummeted, or the hard turn we took to the left sending everyone’s belongings all over the plane scared me into thinking life was short (it is).

It was the jolt of lightning I needed to my core to realize I wanted to build a life on my own terms. More than anything, it showed me what I couldn’t see for myself.

My unhappiness didn’t lie with any of the toxic lawyers I worked for, or the pay I was “forced” to accept. I had let myself become victimized by my life. I blamed everyone and everything around me for what was going on — acting like I had nothing to do with it and couldn’t do anything about it.

As Taylor Swift so poetically put it, “It's me, hi, I'm the problem, it's me.”

I’d love to tell you that the plane ride set me straight. (Spoiler alert: it didn’t). What it did do was set me out on a path of starting my own online business.

I thought I’d slam the mahogany doors at the firm and trot out to a blissfully stress-free, and straightforward life as an online entrepreneur. But life had other plans.

Life: Scrambled

In 2016, I left the firm to start my own health coaching business. But I didn’t get that satisfying seatbelt click feeling of having found “my” thing when I did. As I worried I’d messed up in leaving the law and thought I’d have to go back to my drabby skirt suits, an idea hit me: what if I combined my legal knowledge with what I’d learned over a year or so as an online health coach?

What if I could help other online business owners legally protect their businesses?

Within weeks of starting Sam Vander Wielen LLC, my legal templates and education business, I found out I had to have brain surgery for a chiari malformation. After nearly a year of PT and rehab, I was finally able to get back to focusing on my legal templates business. And then my Dad got cancer.

The day my Dad was diagnosed with leukemia (AML, to be exact) was like a nightmare and a blur had a baby. It was a blurry nightmare. I quickly became his caregiver and sprung into action tackling all of the not-so-fun things that come along with a terminal diagnosis: wills, insurance, medications, grants from big pharma to afford the hundreds of thousands of dollars in unpaid meds. The list went on.

My Dad lasted much longer than he was ‘supposed to’ — about 3.5 years longer, actually — which wasn’t the blessing you might think it is. We navigated hundreds of chemo sessions, dozens of blood transfusions, scans, surgeries, and biopsies together. We ate bagels in the lobby and stopped by our favorite Jewish deli on the way home, where his favorite deli clerk would drop his bread through his back window so he wouldn’t have to be exposed to other people in the shop.

After a particularly perfect, long weekend at my house in New York, my Dad went home. Within hours, he fell, broke his hip, and sent the leukemia filling his bone marrow spilling into his blood and throughout his body.

Within 5 days, he passed. It broke my fucking heart.

Overnight, I went from being “I can’t control his cancer but at least I can manage the shit out of all of the things” to a grieving daughter. There was nothing I could do to stop his cancer. And there was nothing I could to patch the millions of holes in my heart.

As any grieving person knows, the first few months are a hazy, messy, “just get through it” time. Just as I began to feel the fog lift many months after my Dad’s death, my Mom was killed.

Is This the Bottom?

I’m still relatively fresh off of losing my Mom. The circumstances of her death are horrendous and heartbreaking. When cancer steals your parent’s life, it’s hard to be mad at it because a. it’s not really a ‘thing’ to be mad at, and b. it takes lots of other perfectly good, kind lives too. I didn’t want someone else to get cancer instead of my Dad.

But when someone kills your parent for a very specific reason, that awakens anger in an entirely different, ferocious way.

There’s something about your life being cracked open — all of the pieces scattered across the floor, broken so badly they can’t be put back together again — that motivates you to give less Fs.

The past few years have humbled me. They’ve taken me out at the knees and toned me down in ways, frankly, I needed to be toned down anyway. I’ve surrendered and come to terms with the lack of control we all have over anything but our own actions.

Unsurprisingly, it’s caused me to cheer for you (and myself) to live a life on your own terms. I’m not here to tell you how to live exactly, but only to hold you accountable for doing things the way you want to be done, not the way society expects or commands of you.

Welcome to Something Different

When it comes to your business, doing things on your terms has become my go-to mindset. It’s something my mindset coach,

Jennifer Diaz

, and I talk about often. And it’s one of the main reasons I’m here on Substack, too.

After years of feeling “beholden” to the algorithms on social platforms, my soul craves slowness, nuance, and community. I’m feeling less like lip-syncing and pointing to things on a screen, and more like showing you what’s in my heart.

If you decide to join me here On Your Terms, you’ll get weekly newsletters from me with behind-the-scenes essays as I continue to build my multi 7-figure business online, marketing tips that align with my chill mindset, and legal tips that won’t freak you the heck out.

In all honesty, I’m excited to play in this space to see where it goes and see where you all, as a community, take it. These days, I’m taking some of the strategy pressure off, and putting on a bit more of what actually feels like its done on my terms.

I hope you’ll join me here.

Let me know in the comments below if this resonated. Or, if you’re new here, say hi and let me know where you’re from.

xo,

Sam