I Wanted to Burn Down My Business in 2022

I was stomping my feet in our home office like a toddler having a meltdown. My husband looked up from his desk - middle of a weekday, he was working from home - and we'd had this conversation so many times before that I could see him bracing himself.

But this time I was actually hitting the wall with my fists. Crying. Angry. And the words just came out: "I want to burn it all down to the ground."

Twenty years. Who does the same job for twenty years anymore? Certainly not millennials in this current day and time. No one I knew had stayed anywhere that long. I fantasized about working in local entrepreneural retail. Folding clothes in a store and setting up pretty displays where someone else made every single decision and I could just do things without carrying the weight of everything on my shoulders.

I wanted out.

From the outside, Harmony Garden Music Therapy Services looked successful. A team of seven music therapists. Nearly two decades serving Jackson, Michigan with a steady client flow. But inside? I was drowning. Every single day was the same exhausting loop: see clients, handle admin, manage the team, put out fires, never feel caught up, repeat.

I loved the work when I was actually in sessions with clients and families. I loved those moments. But everything leading up to them? I hated all of it.

And I couldn't see a way forward that didn't involve just... continuing. Forever. Until I completely broke.

Obviously I didn't burn it down. But something had to change, and that something was me.

I started doing my own healing work.

I found a local holistic vocal coach who taught an extensive sound healing certification class. She was this renowned person who worked globally - mostly online - and I just happened to google her name and discover she lived in my community. We met for coffee. I joined her class - which for real was way more than a sound healing class… My life started shifting.

I also started working with a local music therapist trained in Guided Imagery and Music. As a client, not a practitioner. In 2023, the Association for Music and Imagery conference happened to be less than an hour from my home. A national conference that could have been anywhere in the country. But it was practically in my backyard. I went. I fell in love with the modality.

For a while I considered pursuing the training seriously. But then the practical questions showed up: What would a master's degree actually do for me as a small business owner in 2023? It wasn't going to make me more money unless I jumped back into full-time session work. Which I had just given myself permission to step away from.

So, no.

What actually changed everything wasn't another certification. It was finding people who understood business.

In 2024, I got accepted into the Local Fellows program at The Lean Rocket Lab here in Jackson. An entrepreneur hub. They connected me with people who got it - not music therapy, but business. They listened to my litany of broken systems. My bottleneck issues. And there were so many. They didn't tell me I needed another degree or that I should just work harder. They gave me resources. Books. Brainstorming sessions. And most importantly, they normalized something I'd been quietly experimenting with: using AI as a thought partner.

Everyone at the Rocket Lab was using AI. An endless possibility tool. I started using it to brain dump and organize thoughts.

The unsaid agreement of normalizing this tool was life changing. For seeing patterns. For building systems. It was completely normal in that space to say, "I used Claude to make my prompt response more accurate," or "ChatGPT helped me think through this bottleneck problem." I was still early in figuring out how to use it for entrepreneurial thinking, but I wasn't alone in it. That made all the difference.

One day, someone at the Rocket Lab handed me a book. Rocket Fuel by Gino Wickman and Mark C. Winters. They looked at me and said, "You're a visionary. You need an integrator."

I took that book home. Read it. And everything changed.

The idea is simple but it hit me hard: some people are visionaries who see the future and generate ideas. Some people are integrators who implement and execute. Most entrepreneurs try to be both. Most fail at one or both because the skill sets are fundamentally different.

I was trying to be both. I was failing at both.

So I started building actual systems. I created SOPs for my team so the knowledge living in my head could exist outside of it. I communicated more consistently with my music therapists, who are absolutely amazing by the way. I couldn't have done any of this without them. It took time for them to realize their own abilities to operate Harmony Garden at the level that was actually required. It took time for me to trust them implicitly. But I do now, and I tell them that all the time. And one of my clinicians took on an added role of my integrator. She, I, and AI are amazing together.

I've had many different clinicians over the years. I loved each one of them for different reasons. They each taught me things - for better or worse.

But this current team? I want to keep them. I'm doing everything I can to keep them.

I kept creating policies. More SOPs. I just kept moving forward even when I couldn't see exactly where forward was leading.

It's 2026 now. I've reached what I'd call nervous system regulation, though that phrase doesn't fully capture what it feels like to no longer be stuck. For years I told anyone who would listen that I felt stuck. In my business. In my role. In my own head.

I didn't realize until recently that what I'd been missing wasn't more training or better time management. It was understanding my own skill set. My confidence. My visionary creative way of moving through the world. I needed to stop trying to be someone I wasn't and start building systems that supported who I actually am.

I still love the clinical work. I've chosen to return to seeing a small number of clients on my own terms, with heavy parameters around who I take and why. But the business runs without me now.

That's the difference. I'm not the bottleneck anymore. I'm not the only person who knows how things work. My team doesn't need me to answer every question or solve every problem because we've built infrastructure that holds that knowledge collectively.

I started doing my own healing work - sound healing, GIM, and eventually stepping into intuitive practices I'd been circling for years.

I don't have it all figured out. But I know this: if you're a music therapy business owner who's drowning right now, who can't see a way forward, who's fantasizing about burning it all down and starting over somewhere simpler - I've been there.

I stood in my home office stopming my feet, physically hitting the wall, and crying because I couldn't hold it all anymore.

You don't have to burn it down. But you probably do have to change something fundamental.

Maybe it's your nervous system. Maybe it's your systems. Maybe it's finally admitting you can't be both visionary and integrator forever. Maybe it's finding people outside the music therapy bubble who understand business in ways our field doesn't teach.

For me, it was all of those things. And also this: giving myself permission to stop performing the version of business ownership I thought I was supposed to want, and starting to build the one that actually worked for how my brain works, how my nervous system works, how I actually want to live.

The business I have now isn't the one I thought I was building twenty years ago. I didn’t really know what I was doing… I now know that it's better. It's more sustainable. And most days, I actually fully love it.

I want to hear your stories. I want to help you dream and find peace in music therapy business ownership. If this story resonates with you, I’d love to set up a free 45min consultation and have a conversation.