A 39-year-old veteran left a job paying $80,000 to start her own business because she knew she could do it better than her bosses

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A 39-year-old veteran left a job paying $80,000 to start her own business because she knew she could do it better than her bosses
Antisha Walley
  • Antisha Walley, 39, started a business in 2020 after realizing she could do things better on her own.
  • She's on track to take home $70,000 this year but also has additional income to support her as the business grows.
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The longer Antisha Walley, 39, worked in corporate human resources roles, the more she found herself disagreeing with the decisions of her superiors.

In January of 2020, the same month COVID-19 first arrived in the US, the Air Force veteran decided she could do the job better herself — launching her human resources consultancy business Make The Change, LLC.

In 2020, she had one client and brought in $3,000 in sales. But by 2021, she'd quit her full-time job, which paid $80,000, to dedicate all her efforts to the business.

It's paid off. In 2021, sales grew to over $50,000, Insider verified via documents. She's forecasting she'll reach over $100,000 this year — of which she expects to pocket a net amount of roughly $70,000 if things stay on track.

But despite her optimism, Walley is giving herself a cushion with an additional $18,000 in annual income by renting out a single-family property she owns.

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"For anyone who's an aspiring entrepreneur, it's always a really good idea — if you can — to have some type of supplemental income or a nest egg," she says, "a savings somewhere for those times, where you may not actually be generating the income or revenue that you hope for."

Walley is among millions of Americans who've been drawn to self-employment over the past few years. Citing Bureau of Labor Statistics figures, Bloomberg estimated that there were roughly 16.8 million self-employed Americans as of June, accounting for over 10% of the workforce and representing the highest share since 2008. While the number of self-employed Americans fell to 12.7 million in 2020, it returned to pre-pandemic levels a year later.

Experts have pointed to several explanations for the rebound. As millions of people lost their jobs, many Americans in need of work started their own businesses. As childcare responsibilities pulled parents out of the labor force, self-employment offered some people the flexibility they needed. Others, like Walley, had entrepreneurship in their blood and felt they had an idea worth pursuing.

20 years in the making

For Walley — whose career has intersected with the military, meteorology, banking, construction, and ultimately, human resources — starting her own business was in some ways 20 years in the making.

In 2001, she joined the Air Force at the age of 17, where she worked in the meteorology department for four years. After leaving in 2005, she worked towards a degree in Business Administration, followed by an MBA with a concentration in human resources.

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Over the next decade-plus, Walley worked as a Human Resources Manager for her father's construction business in Mississippi, as a Financial Counselor at a local credit union, and in several human resources positions at various businesses.

As the only full-time employee of her business Make the Change, Walley conducts trainings on topics such as workplace diversity, leadership development, and managing workplace conflict for businesses in the private and public sector.

As a black woman that is a service-disabled veteran and a victim of military sexual trauma, she says she can "speak from personal experience" about the challenges and horrors people can encounter in the workplace.

She also comes from a family of entrepreneurs, which she says helped prepare her for facing challenges in the early stages of a business.

"People around me showed me that even though we weren't in the best circumstances in terms of the area where we lived and grew up, we could make the best out of that circumstance," she says. "So starting my own business wasn't as scary to me as it might have been for some people."

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She also says the National Association for the Self-Employed — a nonprofit for the self-employed and small businesses — has been "extremely helpful" as she's worked to get the business off the ground, providing a variety of resources.

Moving forward, Walley says one of her goals is to establish an internship program to help aspiring HR professionals gain training and experience.

"I love to see people to just maximize their own potential and be the best version of themselves that they can be," she says.

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