Bri Conn, CFP®: Welcome to Childfree Life by Design. Today, I’m sitting down with two business owners to talk about how they’ve built businesses they actually wanted. We’re gonna get into how they started, the trade-offs they made along the way, and the practical realities of running a small business.
Intro: From Childfree Insights, this is Childfree Life by Design, the go-to resource for building the Childfree life you want. Every episode gives you practical guidance, clear direction, and meaningful conversations to help you live intentionally and design a future on your terms. This podcast is for educational and entertainment purposes only. Please consult your advisor before implementing any ideas heard on this podcast.
Bri Conn, CFP®: I’m Bri Conn, today I’m joined by two incredible business owners. Jena Gribble is the founder of Blush Cactus, a branding and web design studio. Huzefa Kapadia is the founder of Scalar Learning, an education service company based in Los Angeles, California, focused on math education. Welcome to the show, guys. I’m gonna first have you start off by just telling a little bit about yourself and what your business does. Jena, you go first?
Jena Gribble: I’m Jena Gribble. I am the founder and brand strategist here at Blush Cactus. We’re a branding and marketing agency here in Gilbert, Arizona. We help businesses clarify who they are, communicate their value, and build brands that people actually trust. We do everything from brand strategy to messaging to websites and marketing, but strategy is really at the heart of everything that we do. I live in the Phoenix metro with my husband and our two dogs. We have a mini goldendoodle named Finley. She is our baby angel. And then we have a mini dachshund named Blueberry, and he is our little devil. Got one of each.
Bri Conn, CFP®: Perfect balance. Huzefa, how about you?
Huzefa Kapadia: So my name is Huzefa. I started a tutoring company 13 years ago called Scalar Learning, and my path to that was I used to be a software engineer out of college. Then I went to law school, and I was a patent attorney for about four years. I had a buddy of mine that started working in tutoring straight out of law school, and I’d always thought it was a cool business to own. And I’d felt connected to it. I’d always been told that I had a certain knack when it came to explaining mathematics in particular. And finally, I decided to take the plunge when I realized that patent law and the practice of law — I’m super extroverted. I love to be creative. I love to just have an idea and run with it, and it’s difficult to do that when you’re at a large law firm and you’re a cog in this entire system. And so I finally decided, “Let’s go for it.” I quit completely cold turkey. I had just actually started a new firm. I was five days in, boom, just quit. It was after a lot of contemplation. I went through an entrepreneurship workshop, and I had a lot of friends supporting me and telling me, “Hey, just do it. You’ll be all right. Eventually, you’ll figure it out.” So I went for it and I just launched it 13 years ago just by myself, just me, solo tutor in LA, knew nobody, and didn’t really have any connections in any schools or things like that. But slowly but surely just built it up and made my way around word of mouth. Also started a YouTube channel in 2016 that’s been pretty successful, and that helped push the word out as well. That’s my business, Scalar Learning, and now we have a team of tutors as well that serve other subjects. But I’m still tutoring, and I still tutor the most out of anybody by far.
Bri Conn, CFP®: Wonderful. Jena, how’d you get started?
Jena Gribble: I started about 10 years ago. In the corporate world, I’m one of those weirdos that still does what I went to college for. So I was a graphic designer by trade, and I started moonlighting, as graphic designers do when they’re working corporate. I kind of started to realize I can make more working for myself than I can at this company. And so I went out on my own, and I was a freelancer looking back at it, just taking on clients and working them on my own. And then eventually I kind of realized, hey, I’m pretty good at this thing, and I got another certification, and that kind of exploded my business. So I very quickly found myself needing help. And what started as a freelancing graphic design business where I was helping people design logos and websites exploded into more of a — I realized I was really great at strategy and helping businesses clarify what they do and then really bring it to life and build an incredible brand and following on multiple different levels. I decided that I was gonna go all in and try to build an agency and hire and expand beyond myself. And fast-forward to 2020, I hired my first employee, which was my sister. Safe hire, right? She’s gotta stick with me no matter what. And then, right now we have five employees, as I would be considered the sixth, but I don’t count myself ’cause I’m the owner. We have been kicking it ever since.
Bri Conn, CFP®: The next thing that I’d love to learn more about is when starting your business, what was the biggest freedom that being Childfree gave you?
Jena Gribble: For me, it was the ability to be flexible with our money, so I can take a lot of the profits from the business and reinvest it back into the business because we have a lot less financial obligation in our lives. And it also has allowed me to build that runway so that if we get into a slower season, because the economy can ebb and flow, and that can impact our business specifically with marketing. And so it’s really given me the flexibility to build a business where I can ask the question, “How do I build a business that actually supports the kind of life that I want for me and my employees?” So the financial runway does that, but also it allows me to spend more of my time and energy master scheming about what I want this business to be.
Bri Conn, CFP®: I love that term master scheming. Such a fun one, but important. Huzefa?
Huzefa Kapadia: I would say the number one thing — it’s the way that I operate, I don’t know what it’s like to be on the other side, obviously, if I were in that position, how you would balance it. And I know people do it, but I’ll say from my experience, I don’t consider myself to be a great strategist. I don’t really even like to consider myself a businessman. I like to create, and I like to have fun and just try stuff. And I’d say because of that, as the way that I think I made everything work over time was by putting in an insane amount of time and insane amount of hours. I know a lot of friends of mine who watched me make that transition from law into entrepreneurship, and obviously law is a pretty demanding career, especially these big law firms, but they would often say that I was one of the hardest working people they’d ever seen, and it was because I was just so invested and so excited about what I was doing. I didn’t sit down necessarily and game plan a lot of stuff. I just was like, “Okay, I wanna make a couple courses on Udemy and see how that goes,” and that took me a bunch of time, but I just did it. I wanted to build this YouTube channel. I just started firing off content. I just had different ideas. I used to run these math tournaments with this game called Prime Climb. Just anything that came to my mind, I just did it and just kept pushing and pushing. And because I think I had none of these major obligations or time commitments, I was able to pour everything in. And there was even a period of time where I was also teaching at a school while building the tutoring business for about three years, really two years, and then the last year I was there part-time. But I was getting up at 4:00 AM. I was grinding until about 6:45. Then I’d head to school. I’d teach all day until about 4:00. Then immediately I’d get on the road, and I’d hit all my clients until 10:30 at night. And then I’d get home, enter all my invoices, pass out, and repeat. So yeah, it was helpful for me because I operated that way.
Bri Conn, CFP®: The very nature of being able to go, go, go constantly and dive deep into it.
Huzefa Kapadia: Yeah.
Bri Conn, CFP®: When it comes to the day-to-day, what’s one of the most practical ways that being Childfree shows up in how you run things? Huzefa, you wanna start?
Huzefa Kapadia: Because I don’t know any different from Childfree to what it’s like to have kids, but I’ll put it like this, ’cause I just run things how I’ve always run things. But it’s essentially that I choose my schedule. I choose to have clients right now when I’m stacked during a Sunday to bill 12 hours in the day, work 12 hours straight, or work until 11:00 or midnight on the weeknights if students need be. It gives me that freedom and flexibility to run the ship the way that I wanna run it. What I’ve tried to build and develop here at Scalar Learning is basically like a white glove service. So I want my clients to feel that I’m always accessible. If I’m in a session, obviously I can’t respond to a text right away, but any time of day, any day of the week, I’m available and I’m ready to help if need be. I call them emergency tutoring sessions. A test pops up, kid didn’t realize it, but I wanna be there for them. And then of course, if you schedule a time with me, I wanna be a rock. I wanna be absolutely solid. I don’t want you to ever think, “Hey, I’ve got a test on Thursday. I booked it on Wednesday. I really hope he doesn’t cancel on me.” That will not happen. I can be an absolute rock, a foundational piece of their entire study plan, all of that goes into me being available in that way, and I think that obviously stems from the fact that I have less responsibilities on that side than parents.
Bri Conn, CFP®: Jena, how about for you?
Jena Gribble: I agree. I think that there’s a lot of flexibility baked in when you’re Childfree because you don’t have the responsibilities and the obligations of like a hard stop. I’m a rare breed in my friend group, I’m like one of the only Childfree people, and so I do see my friends who are also entrepreneurs have to clock out at a certain time to go pick up the kids from school, go to sporting events, things like that. And that’s awesome. I love that for them. I think my priority and my love is to do what I do. I like the flexibility at least to decide, I can work some extra hours if I want to here. And sometimes the seasons require it. As the business owner, it’s not always glamorous, and you have to jump in. And I have a team, so if somebody is sick, the work still needs to get done. We’re not gonna let our clients down. So who steps in? It’s me. I’m the person who does that. And given the fact that I don’t have any other obligations outside of my family, my husband, and the things that I love to do outside of work, I can make that happen with relatively little trouble or guilt. I know that for women especially, the mom guilt can creep in if the business starts to creep into regular life too much, and I feel very blessed that I don’t have that challenge.
Huzefa Kapadia: And I just wanted to add on one thing. I have a feeling, Jena, you’re gonna agree with me on this. It’s also, too, that obviously there’s people that are successful in entrepreneurship with a family life or different obligations. It’s not as though I said, “Well, I wanna be an entrepreneur, therefore I’m not gonna go down that road or have that chapter open up.” I already knew that prior to starting this business, at that point it was more deep down. Now it’s obviously I feel much more secure in that decision, but I already had a strong inclination or feeling that I didn’t wanna have kids for a number of reasons, which we can of course, I’m happy to get into. So this has just been something that I’ve exploited, the fact that I don’t have those obligations, but it’s by no means a requirement to start the type of business that I did or anything along those lines. But it’s worked out great, in my opinion.
Jena Gribble: I agree. I never set out actually to be a business owner. It wasn’t a part of my grand plan of life planning that I was like, “Oh, I definitely gonna be a business owner,” so kids just don’t fit into that picture. It was more, “I got the flexibility here anyway, so why not?” Sky’s the limit over here.
Huzefa Kapadia: I wanna add on one thing to that too. So that’s exactly right. There’s a social club I belong to in LA. It’s essentially for Childfree individuals. And we’ve been talking about this, and again, you said something that I think sometimes people miss when they maybe are trying to look at our lives from afar and think about what’s missing when I think they’ve got it flipped around and they’re missing what’s gained. Like you said, part of the reason why you embarked on this journey, you noticed that you had that freedom and flexibility, so you said, “Why not?” That is true, and there’s also other elements as well, exploring larger questions that I think sometimes it’s just more difficult to explore. I’m not saying it’s impossible to explore, but what about the deeper questions about why we’re here, about why the world is the way that it is, or why relationships exist the way that they are, just pondering some of these big questions. And I think that as Childfree individuals, we actually have a huge gift and a huge privilege where we can try to have some deep thinks and really get into the weeds about these larger questions that really I think we should all be thinking about. We just don’t always have time because of how difficult life can be.
Jena Gribble: Yeah.
Bri Conn, CFP®: Very well said. You brought up some good points of you never really started out the business and saying, “I have to be Childfree to do this.” But we often hear that many small businesses are being passed on to the next generation. Being Childfree, you don’t have that next generation to pass a business to. What are the goals for the future of your businesses?
Huzefa Kapadia: From the standpoint of passing a business along, even if I had kids, that would never be in my mind. I run this business because I pivoted ultimately to do something that I was intrinsically motivated and super excited to be a part of. And I have no idea what my niece, my nephew, if I had kids, what they would be interested in. So that would never be a motivation for me. If somebody that I know wanted to take it over, great, but that would never enter into my mind. Yeah, my motivation is to have fun. I wanna have fun and do something that I am excited on a daily basis to do, and I wanna try to be the best in the world at it, whether I achieve it or not, but that’s gonna be my goal. And I bet you Jena will agree with me on this front, but I’ve made it into something that is what I always wanted, which is, yeah, I get to work with kids and have these social interactions and teach something that I feel like I can really explain well. And then I get to make social media content, I get to make videos, I get to make infographics, all this stuff that gets me excited from that creative creation element. So that’s really all it is. And I’ve said this to friends of mine, I don’t really have a thought of selling it off, that’s just not in my mind. With how the world is changing and AI is coming in to encroach on so much of the job market, I don’t know what the future will hold, but I’m having fun and I’m just gonna run this thing until the wheels fall off.
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Jena Gribble: This is actually a question that gets asked quite a bit when you’re a business owner, like, “What’s your plan for the future? Are you gonna sell?” I will say that I grew up in a family where my parents or my dad owns a business, and it was never expected. In fact, it was never an option for us to take over the family business. It was actually expected that we kids went to college, and we made our own way, and we did our own thing, and it wasn’t an obligation we had to pick up and run the baton the rest of the way, right? So I think that even if I did have children, that would not be the expectation that they would have to take the business on unless they wanted to, unless it was something that was their passion. And I think there are a lot of different ways that, as business owners, we can choose to move forward. You make a great point about AI. I think the future feels really uncertain, and so it’s hard to say, “This is what my ultimate goal is for this business.” But I think that either I would sell probably if I built something of value to where it would make sense to sell. And I also think that there’s the option of having people who work for you, since I have the blessing of having a great team, that if you see somebody that you can invest in the long haul that comes alongside you, and they’re a little bit younger, and they have a little bit more runway to go in life, and they could be the person who maybe the agency goes to or they buy it. I’ve seen that happen. We as an agency work with branding and website, like branding other agencies, weirdly enough, and have seen that actual thing happen where somebody came up in the ranks at the agency, and they were like, “Hey, I could step into president.” And then it was like, “Okay, I guess I could buy this and be the CEO.” So I think that there’s more than just the succession plan literally of the children. We can be as creative as we want and I also just hold it with a very open hand because I just don’t know what the future is like. So trying to roll with the punches and live with the uncertainty a little bit too.
Bri Conn, CFP®: Not only rolling with the punches, but going forward in running a business as a whole, what’s one thing that you wish more people understood about running a business, especially as a Childfree person?
Jena Gribble: I wish that people knew or understood that being Childfree doesn’t mean that your time is infinitely available or any less valuable. I know that as a business owner, I think that’s true, but it’s also true for just regular folks who are out there living their lives as Childfree people working for other people. I know certainly there are Childfree people who have worked in a corporate environment, and they weirdly will get passed up for certain types of vacations during the holidays because so-and-so has kids, and they have the priority. And I’m like, “No, just because you’re Childfree does not mean that you are more available to take the crappy vacation times and things like that.” You also just don’t have unlimited bandwidth. I know that we do have the luxury of having more space to think about things and plan and sip coffee in the morning on the weekends without any obligations. But it also just doesn’t mean that there’s unlimited time for everybody, right? So I think that’s what I would say.
Huzefa Kapadia: I think what you’re actually getting at is really important, which is drawing a boundary with your time, which I think part of my brand over the last 13 years has been if I’m awake, I’ll do it. I’ve had people call at random times, as I’ve mentioned, emergency tutoring sessions. I’ve been working seven days a week. I don’t expect this from any of my other tutors, by the way. They make their own schedules. But for me, I will do it unless it’s absolutely not possible or they want a time that’s already been booked or something along those lines. And I’ve been happy to do it because I think if it would’ve been an obligation, meaning somebody was telling me I had to take these times or do these things, I think I would’ve felt differently. I feel like almost certainly I would’ve felt differently. But when I was making those decisions myself, I was excited to do it, and I still feel that way. 13 years, I mean, I’ve been doing this for so long now, but I still feel that way when I get those opportunities and I can come in and save the day. This just happen. I got a new student, we crammed for four days. This was incredible, by the way. He did so well on this final. Not trying to toot my own horn, but it was just such an interesting story. He did so well on this final that he got accused of cheating on the final. And I said, “Well, great. Ask him to do the problems in front of you.” Eventually, they pulled back that accusation. But something like that where you get somebody at the last minute, they’ve never worked with you before, they’re having a certain level of performance all year, you know you can get it up and get it out of the park. Yeah, I’ll take whatever time you can make work. I’ll take an 11:00 PM appointment. I’ll take whatever if we can make this massive adjustment. That’s just so fun to me.
Bri Conn, CFP®: I love it, and what a great story too, and also a great response of, “All right, do the problems in front of them then.” Great work there. The next thing I’d love to hear from you guys is your favorite and least favorite things about running your own business.
Huzefa Kapadia: I can start with the favorite part. Man, you get to choose your own adventure. If you want to build a brick-and-mortar business, a traditional tutoring company, the way that so many people do it, you can do that. If you wanna do it the way that I did it, which was a little wild at times, and rely on social media and make content and do all these things, you could do it. So that has just been so much fun. The least favorite thing, there are times when it can feel a little isolated, especially in the world of tutoring. Although I fixed that problem in 2024 when I found this amazing organization called the National Test Prep Association. And so until that time, I didn’t really have colleagues in the tutoring world that I could just talk about stuff that only us tutoring companies know about. These different things that may crop up that other businesses just wouldn’t understand. So I found this amazing community, then I found this other league that we have a mastermind group. We meet once a month. And so now I’ve really got no complaints.
Jena Gribble: I have two favorite things. The first is I really like being able to call the shots. I like being able to make the executive decisions and to be able to build into stuff and have the visionary ideas, and be able to actually follow those rabbits down the holes and see if we can make something work with it. So I like that. And then I also really like the fact that with building a team and hiring people to work for you, I don’t like the word boss. It just doesn’t feel right to me. It feels very power over, and I’m very power with and power to. And so I like being the leader that I feel like I never had. I always had really great mentors, my direct bosses in corporate. I was very lucky that way, and I think that’s made me a stronger strategist and designer and overall better at what I do. But the people at the very top, it felt like the good old boys club. It really wasn’t a very healthy work culture and work environment, and I care very deeply about my people, and I get to love on them, and I get to try to help. Work is work. Especially agency life is not sexy. Sometimes it’s awesome, and sometimes it’s really hard. And I get to try to build a team in a work culture, in a business where people get excited to say that they are a part of this team, and that really gets me out of bed every day. My least favorite, honestly goes with the work hours. Again, as the person who is running a team, and it is small but mighty team, is I will be the one who is left picking up some of the things when somebody’s sick or we just have a crazy deadline. I typically don’t try to make my team members work insane hours, so I usually take the fault on that. I’ll take the crazy working hours. And so I’ve tried to get better about that over the years, and part of that is building a team and delegating, and outsourcing, I suppose. But I think that is the part that I like least, is just being the person who has to work all the hours. And honestly, sometimes it’d be nice to hang up the responsibility. It’s a lot, especially when you have people, it just can feel overwhelming. But with the amount of responsibility comes the reward.
Bri Conn, CFP®: The last thing I’d like to hear from you guys is what is something that a Childfree listener who might be thinking about starting their own business should know?
Huzefa Kapadia: It’s gonna take a while, number one. You’re gonna have to pour more than you thought you may think if you’re transitioning from a traditional role, even as an attorney or something like that, where the expectations for hours are high, you may think if you put in that same effort, it will build on itself. I mean, maybe in some cases it does if you’re really strategic. I’m not, so I think you’ll have to put in almost like a double effort, at least that’s from my experience. And the only caveat I’ll put to this, though, is AI is changing things so rapidly, I use AI as much as I can in so many of the things that I do, and it has changed the game in certain ways, and it’ll continue to change the game more. But if I’m just referencing my journey back in 2013 and what that was like, I would say, buckle up and get ready to invest your whole self into it, whatever you’re pursuing.
Jena Gribble: Something similar was your business becomes your child when you’re Childfree. So you’ve got a newborn, it’s in its infancy, and then you raise it to whatever adulthood looks like for your business. And so, two things to take away from that is to have clear boundaries and values and whatever that looks like for you. If that means you love working a lot, that’s what keeps you going and fills your tank, great. But if you know your boundaries and you know your values, and you can build the business around that and know what the picture of success looks like, so you have an idea of what that adulthood state looks like. ‘Cause otherwise, I think that as Childfree folks, we can get into the trap of scaling for the sake of scaling, because that’s what we culturally always do here in the United States is bigger, better, stronger, faster. And I think that that’s a luxury that we have as Childfree people to build businesses and companies that are conducive to the lifestyle that we want to have for us and our people, whether it’s our clients or our employees. And that really comes with pausing to define what success is. Otherwise, you might find yourself somewhere that you didn’t really mean to be. And I’ve done that. I’m like, “Oh, okay, I should probably have a game plan and work toward a vision for not just business, but life too.”
Huzefa Kapadia: And Jena had said something that I wanna piggyback on as well. She said values. That’s another thing that I think is super important. I think it’s a mistake to get into entrepreneurship, really anything, and say that, “I wanna do this because I wanna make a lot of money,” or, “I wanna be whatever it might be.” And because I think you can get caught up in this idea of figuring out a way to monetize without taking the time to, whether it’s a trade or whether it’s a product, without taking the time to think about what is really important? In my opinion, it’s have a phenomenal product or have a top-of-the-line service. Cultivate that first so your main focus, in my humble opinion, should be on helping people or providing value to the world, and then you can let the other pieces come. I think there’s so much emphasis sometimes on trying to generate income. People don’t often ask the question, “Well, does your product or does your service deserve to generate income?” Maybe it doesn’t, and maybe that’s okay, and maybe you have to refine it more. But put that as the number one priority. And I think if people have that mindset, not only will they feel better, they’ll be happier. I think this is important just to elevate the way that the world operates.
Bri Conn, CFP®: Thank you guys for sharing all of your wisdom today. If listeners take away anything, I think this whole conversation can be summed up by starting a business can definitely be worthwhile, but you should be ready to invest your time and money and energy into it. For people to find you, can you share just where the best place to go is?
Jena Gribble: Our website is blushcactus.com, and it’s like the color blush and the word cactus, all one word, .com. And you can find us on LinkedIn as a company, but you can find me on LinkedIn, Jena Gribble, and it’s Jena with one N and two Bs. Like the word dribble, but with a G, Gribble.
Bri Conn, CFP®: Huzefa?
Huzefa Kapadia: You can find us. It’s Scalar. If you guys remember in math, the scalars that multiply matrices, S-C-A-L-A-R learning.com. You can also check us out on YouTube, just search Scalar Learning. We got tons and tons of free content for anybody studying for the SATs, going through algebra two, trigonometry, all that stuff. We’ve got lots of videos featuring myself, so you can see that. And if you want to explore the deeper questions, the larger questions, why are we here? What is this entire world, this entire simulation, if some people are familiar with simulation theory. My passion project right now, ’cause I have a couple different YouTube channels, is called Pink Tourmaline. It’s a wild ride. We just passed 4,000 subs, by the way, which is really exciting. So it’s starting to grow. It’s starting to pick up steam, and I’m so excited about it. I’m trying to make content on the regular for that. But yeah, if you’re curious to explore some of these deeper questions, decoding the purpose of life, check us out at Pink Tourmaline on YouTube.
Bri Conn, CFP®: Wonderful. We’re gonna have all of those links down in the show notes for you to easily find them. But that’s all for this episode of Childfree Life by Design. Remember, intentionally choosing to invest in moments of joy is just as important as investing in your future. Until next time, happy designing.
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