A mouthful, right? NeJame is (pronounced: “Knee” + “James without the ‘s’”), but I answer to all sorts of pronunciations that sound much fancier.

I’m a mom, small business owner, and writer.

At 26, I realized the corporate grind wasn’t for me and promptly quit my job to start my first small business. In 2004, I sold that company to relocate from New York to Boston.

When I decided to move to Boston, there was no real plan and tiny dependents to feed. Today, if I were advising someone deciding anything without a plan, I would lie on the pavement in front of the moving truck to stop them.

Luckily, I’m pretty lucky.

For 21 years, with three boys in tow, my husband Lou and I have built CertaPro Painters in Boston into a place where employees are treated like clients. One year, our team was the #1 CertaPro office out of 350 locations. A small pond, but it was still a pretty proud moment.

In 2022, I was one of the writers of the bestselling book The Carbon Almanac. Once the book was finished, I still had some juice and managed the team that published the companion kids’ book Generation Carbon: It’s time to start.

In 2023, I released the book Drift: How to (accidentally) create a life you don’t want, which has hit a nerve with readers young and old.

You can read a free copy of the entire book here with the passcode friend (all lowercase). I’m giving this edition of Drift away because spreading the message is more important to me than book sales.

Here’s some recent press for my projects.

Nice to meet you!