It Ain't Over (33 page)

Amy’s makeshift spiral organizer served her well for a few years; and once Kyle and Natalie were both in school, she decided to turn her brainstorm into a business. She began by showing her idea to the owner of her local copy store; together they sat down with one of his designers to translate the handwritten book into a digital format.

“As we perfected the design,” Amy explains, “it became obvious that we were not creating a business planner that people would just add their personal chores to,” she says. “It was created specifically for a family, by a family. And that made all the difference.”

Amy placed an order for a print run, producing 50 simple versions of her planner. Holding that first one in her hands, she was simultaneously proud and nervous.

“I was probably more scared than anything,” she says, “because I knew the print bill was coming right around the corner! But I said to myself, ‘Okay, you made it, now you’ve got to go out there and sell it.’ ”

But what if they didn’t sell? she wondered. “I remember telling my husband, ‘If no one buys them, we’ll just hide them up in the attic, and someday our grandkids will find them and say, “Oh, look, another one of grandma’s harebrained ideas.” ’ ”

Amy decided to give away most of that first batch of planners in order to get feedback. “It was like an expensive focus group,” she says, “but it paid off big, because the original design evolved and improved.” Then, once she decided the planner was finally ready for prime time, she took a breath and followed her old marketing instincts, calling the head buyer for calendars at Barnes & Noble in New York.

“It was a cold call!” she says. “They transferred me about five times, but I finally got through to him. I later discovered that he never took those types of calls. I still don’t know why he took mine.”

But he did take the call—and he was intrigued.

“He asked me for a real prototype, which would cost real money, and I said sure. I hung up and thought,
Yikes!
I called my husband and asked him if we should invest the money—a couple thousand dollars. He said—and I’ll never forget this, because it was probably the nicest thing he’s ever said to me—‘I will put my money on you every time.’ Boy, he did not realize what he was getting into!”

The buyer recommended some changes to the prototype, and after Amy made the tweaks he agreed to carry the calendar at Barnes & Noble, sold under the name Amy Knapp’s Family Organizer.

Amy was ecstatic. “It was incredible to see that my idea had become a reality,” she says, “but it was also scary. On one hand you have this great success, but on the other hand you suddenly have these huge pallets of organizers being delivered to your house.”

But Amy was jazzed—and when those first three pallets landed in her
driveway, groaning under 40-pound boxes of planners, “I turned our living room into a shipping warehouse. In that first year, I repackaged planners for every Barnes & Noble across the country. I put six planners each into individual boxes, printed shipping labels, then hauled them out to my garage to get picked up. My neighbors thought I was insane.”

Then she started doing business with local retailers, and launched a website—
TheFamilyOrganizer.com
—to begin direct sales. And in 2004, she struck gold, traveling to Arkansas for a meeting with a buyer for Walmart, who agreed to carry Amy Knapp’s Family Organizers in its stores. In a single year, the business she had created with a Sharpie and a spiral notebook sold $1.2 million worth of calendars.

But then things took a downturn.

“The recession struck,” Amy says, “and Walmart eliminated many of its smaller vendors, including me. That was a big shock for me. No one plans for the day that half your business disappears.”

To make matters worse, a number of her smaller retailers went under because of the bad economy. But Amy doubled down and fought her way back. Although it took another full year for her to adjust her sales strategy, today her business, though small, continues to thrive.

“Our yearly sales are around $328,000,” she says, “and that’s okay. We’ve gone from tiny to huge, then smaller, then back to making some money. But you know what? I don’t have to make a ton of money. If I was working on the company all the time, I would miss being with my family—and my family was the reason all of this began.”

So Amy the organizer is organized once more. She divides her time between tending to business and keeping up on all the family activities, including going to Natalie’s softball games (now 18, Natalie plays in a league for children with disabilities).

“Would I have liked to maintain Walmart?” asks Amy. “Absolutely. There’s a little bit of mourning for things that won’t happen. But you have to accept that and make the best possible opportunity for yourself that you can. I tell my kids, ‘Eighty percent of life is made up of things you do not sign up for. But you can take that 80 percent and turn it into a blessing.’

“I didn’t sign up to be a parent of a child with disabilities,” she continues, “but I am so thankful for Natalie. And it’s the same with my business. I didn’t sign up for what happened after the recession, but, had my business not changed the way it did, I would have missed out on so much time with my family.”

What also gives Amy great pleasure is connecting with the families who use her calendars and share with her how invaluable they are.

“Many people tell me they save them as a record of their family’s activities over the years,” Amy says. “That makes me feel like they’ve invited me into their home to be a part of their family.”

And for the ultimate family organizer, that just might be the ultimate success.

“I was a woman on a mission, and nothing could stop me.”

Lois Heckman, 63

Saylorsburg, Pennsylvania

T
hat’s it? That’s my wedding?

Lois Heckman couldn’t believe she was walking out of the mayor’s office with a ring on her finger and a new husband at her side only two minutes after she’d walked in. “It felt like two seconds,” she says.

To Lois, the brief, sterile ceremony was a poor reflection of the relationship she had built with Kent. “One of the reasons I fell in love with Kent,” Lois says, “is the way he folded my son and me into his life so readily.”

Twenty-four years later, the disappointment of that ceremony still stung.

In 2003, Lois and Kent were listening to NPR on their car radio when a story came on about a gay wedding. “The reporter kept referring to the ‘celebrant’ who had performed the ceremony,” says Lois. “I thought,
What is that?
” It was clear that he wasn’t a priest, a preacher, a minister, or a rabbi—but he wasn’t just a city clerk either. Instead, he was a professional officiant who delivered a meaningful, loving, secular wedding service for a couple in love.

Someone like this,
Lois thought,
would have been the perfect fit for Kent and me back in 1979.

And it felt like the perfect job for her now. It spoke to all of her interests: performing (she and Kent had supported themselves for two decades playing in a band); advocating for social change (Lois was currently working at a center for victims of rape and domestic violence); and spirituality (Lois had been a religion major in college).

Kent laughed, and Lois knew he was thinking what she was: “It’s me!”

But how, exactly, did someone become a celebrant? As soon as Lois got home, she went online to find out. She learned that the ordination involved months of serious study and training to learn how to perform not only weddings but also funerals and other “life ceremonies” for anyone who wanted to bypass traditional religious institutions. It was a new and growing field, but one that CNN and
Money
magazine had named the third best job for people over 50, in part for its flexible hours, meaningfulness, and good pay—as much as $80,000 a year.

The more Lois learned about celebrants, the more she was drawn to the job. While a celebrant-led service could incorporate religious rituals like the breaking of the glass or sharing of the wine, it also offered a more personalized experience than a traditional worship service. “The heart and soul of any celebrant wedding is crafting words about the couple,” Lois says. A celebrant might spend hours interviewing two people about their history in order to weave parts of their story into a ceremony.

The same was true for funerals, an idea that greatly appealed to Lois, who had felt a sense of intimacy missing from many of the funerals she’d attended over the years. She flashed back to a memorial for a friend’s mother, where the pastor clearly knew nothing about this woman over whom the entire room was grieving.

“He was reading a bunch of prayers, and it had nothing to do with her life,” she says. “Sitting there, I was angry. I thought,
This is not the way it should be
.”

A few weeks after hearing the NPR story on the radio, Lois enrolled long distance at the Celebrant Foundation and Institute in Montclair, New Jersey, where she could pursue her study at night and on weekends.

The training was rigorous: Lois was assigned to read about cross-cultural customs, history, and anthropology, from
The Power of Myth
by Joseph Campbell to
On Death and Dying
, by Elisabeth Kübler-Ross. She attended a variety of religious ceremonies—Presbyterian, Roman Catholic, Jewish. Perhaps most important, Lois wrote her own sample ceremonies. “I learned to recognize not just the big stuff, but the little details that make a ceremony personal and genuine, and that touch the hearts of those who are present.”

The years she had spent working with victims of abuse came in handy. “If I learned anything working at the women’s center, it was how to listen,” she says. “A celebrant’s first job is to learn about your clients. After all, the day is about them.”

Lois’s years of experience performing on stage as a musician also helped. “When you marry a couple, you’re not just reading a script,” she says. “Colloquially, we say we
perform
a wedding. A good officiant—whether a minister, priest, rabbi, or celebrant—is able to move people emotionally.”

In 2004, a year after she first heard the word “celebrant” on the radio, Lois graduated and was ready to officiate. “I felt like everything I had done in my life led me to this,” she says.

Now Lois had to build the business. She bought ad space on wedding websites, left her business cards at wedding venues, and created her own website that reflected the kinds of ceremonies she could provide.

“Instead of using generic, flowery words or images of roses and doves, I spoke about myself and my background in a more direct and authentic way. I felt that was the best way to connect with people who were looking for someone to officiate their important day,” she says.

Within a month of her graduation, Lois performed her first wedding, and by the end of the year she had married 24 couples. After many painful years of working with abuse victims, Lois found this work healing. “I was meeting people who talked about how much they respected and supported their partners,” she says.

When a couple hires her for their wedding, Lois interviews them for more than an hour, then has them fill out a questionnaire: How did they meet and fall in love? What are their hopes and dreams? What parts of their religious and cultural backgrounds do they want to share with their guests? They can make the ceremony, typically a half hour, as traditional or as creative as they want it to be.

A huge portion of Lois’s clientele are interfaith couples, lapsed churchgoers, or people who consider themselves spiritual but not religious. “They do believe, but they don’t feel right having a church wedding,” she says. “Or they say, ‘We really don’t believe, but our parents do.’ Then the big question
is, ‘How do we honor your parents and make them feel respected without selling out your own beliefs?’ ”

Lois might ask the parents to stand, thanking mom for carting the bride to dance class, or telling dad how much those fishing trips meant to the groom, before asking them, “Do you support your child in marriage today?” and waiting for a parental “I do.”