I emailed both proposals to Lorraine at 11:47 p.m. on Saturday—13 minutes before her deadline.
Monday morning, client one—the Finch Hotel in the Domain—replied: Let’s do it.
Tuesday afternoon, client two—Blue Bell BNB in Wimberly—replied: Can we start next week?
$9,000 in the pipeline. More than I’d earned in any single month of my life.
I quit the barista job that Friday. Denise hugged me over the espresso machine and said, “Go be somebody, sugar, and send me a client if you can.”
I printed the LLC certificate at an Office Depot on Lamar Boulevard and pinned it to the kitchen wall, right next to the $1,750 check from the canceled hotel project—my wall of evidence. Not of failure. Of becoming.
Things didn’t get easy after that. They got fast.
By August, three months after filing the LLC, Huitt Creative had four clients. Monthly revenue: $22,000.
I hired my first contractor: a copywriter named Becca, who’d just moved to Austin from Nashville and wrote headlines the way some people write poetry—clean, sharp, inevitable.
I paid her fairly, because I remembered what it felt like when someone didn’t.
October: seven clients.
Lorraine introduced me to the Austin Hospitality Alliance, a network of hotel owners, restaurant groups, and tourism boards who met quarterly over overpriced salads at a place on West 6th. She told me to prepare a 5-minute presentation on social media ROI for boutique properties.
“Don’t charm them,” she said. “Show them numbers.”
I stood in front of 40 people in a borrowed blazer and showed them numbers. My hands shook for the first 90 seconds. Then the data took over: Big Tony’s foot traffic increase, the Finch Hotel’s 200% rise in Instagram engagement, Blue Bell BNB’s direct booking revenue up 41% in two months.
By the time I finished, three people had left their business cards on my chair.
December revenue for the month: $38,000.
I hired a second contractor, a graphic designer named Will.
We moved out of the studio on East Riverside into a two-bedroom apartment on South Lamar. It had a separate room I could use as an office. A real desk. A real chair. And a bed—queen size, solid oak frame from Article—that we assembled together on a Sunday afternoon while Marcus played Coltrane on a Bluetooth speaker.
Gerald sent an email.
Merry Christmas, Sienna. I hope Austin is treating you well.
I replied—the first time in 6 months.
It is. Merry Christmas, Dad.
Short, but not closed. Not anymore.
Every invoice I sent felt like a sentence in a letter I was writing to my future self.
One year in Austin: Huitt Creative, 12 retainer clients, two full-time employees besides myself, and a revenue number I had to read three times on the spreadsheet before I believed it.
$480,000 gross, not profit. I want to be honest about that. After salaries, software, contractor fees, and taxes, the take-home was a fraction.
But the trajectory was real. And for the first time in my life, the graph was pointing up because of something I’d built with my own hands.
We leased a small office—800 square feet—on East 6th Street, a converted storefront with exposed ductwork, polished concrete floors, and a glass front door.
Marcus designed the logo himself: Huitt Creative in clean sans serif, slate gray on white. We had it printed on the glass.
The first morning, I stood on the sidewalk and watched the Austin sun hit those letters, and the light cast the name across the floor inside like a shadow in reverse.
That was the month Marcus proposed properly.
We’d been engaged since before the wedding. That quiet Tuesday night proposal in Hartford felt like another lifetime, but we’d never had a ceremony.
He took me to a rooftop bar on Congress Bridge at dusk, right when the bats begin their nightly migration—a million of them spiraling into the pink sky.
And he said, “We should make this official. Not for anyone else. For us.”
We got married at the Travis County Courthouse on a Wednesday. 15 guests.
Lorraine was there in her navy blazer. Denise brought a cake she’d baked at the coffee shop. No Vera Wang. No imported orchids. No $250,000 budget.
A $90 filing fee and a promise.
Two weeks later, an email from the Austin Business Journal.
Ms. Hewitt, you’ve been nominated for our annual 40 Under 40 list. Would you be available for an interview?
I said yes.
I had no idea who else would be in Austin by the time they held the ceremony.
Meredith moved to Austin in October. Not by choice.
Trent had been offered a position at a hospital system affiliated with UT Southwestern. Offered was the word Meredith used. I later learned the truth was less flattering. His department in Hartford had encouraged a transition after an HR complaint from a colleague.
The details didn’t reach me then. They didn’t need to. The result was the same.
Dr. Trent Cole was relocating to Texas, and Meredith was following.
They sold the colonial in West Hartford. The house my parents had gift-wrapped with $250,000 closed at a $65,000 loss. The Connecticut market had softened steadily since they had bought, and they’d financed the rest at a rate that aged poorly.
By the time the closing check cleared and the realtor took her cut, Meredith and Trent walked away with almost nothing.
A quarter of a million dollars gone. Not stolen. Not gambled. Just slowly, quietly dissolved by a market that didn’t care about wedding gifts or parental promises.
Meredith didn’t know I was in Austin. I had no public social media under my personal name. Huitt Creative had a website and a business Instagram, but Meredith wouldn’t have been looking for a marketing agency. Our worlds didn’t overlap.
Or so I thought.
