Shirlonda Evans
Standing in front of her home, clutching her young son and watching it go up in flames, Shirlonda Evans felt like her dreams were going up in smoke too.
A real estate agent, Evans had completed theClubhou.se’s based Startup Life program in Augusta, GA, launching a new career as a life and grief recovery coach. As part of that business, she’d just helped organize a massive cleanup of her downtown neighborhood during her year-long Love and Prayer Works campaign. “But when that fire hit, it took everything out of me,” she says.
It took a few months, she says, but one thing theClubhou.se taught her was the word “pivot.”
Evans joined Make Startups to help figure out her options. In many ways, that fire wasn’t an end, but a beginning.
“Now I’m successful,and I’m supporting my family.”
Even when she was doing life coaching, theClubhou.se kept her focused on the reality of what she was doing: Are you able to support your family? During Make Startups, she accepted the answer, which was no. “I’d always had to use the real estate money to fund the coaching business,” she says.
So, “let’s do this again,” she told herself. She leaned on the skills she already had in real estate to become a real estate investor in both short- and long-term properties. She now owns five, which she has rehabbed into beautiful, modern spaces with granite countertops and hardwood floors—all in downtown Augusta, the Turpin Hill neighborhood and Harrisburg. She chose those neighborhoods on purpose, she says, so she could help improve the housing and bring up those communities.
Though she had participated in entrepreneurship programs before, Make Startups helped her fine-tune what she’d already learned, including how to find and use capital to get her business started and to establish business credit. “Startup Life introduced me to running a business, but Make Startups gave me confidence. It helped me to understand business, and not to be afraid to take the money.”
Now, only one of her five homes has a mortgage. And the answer to that question is now yes. “I’m successful,” she says, “and I’m supporting my family.”
In addition to supporting her family, she is using her coaching skills and real estate acumen to help others find a pathway to home ownership. “Thanks to Make Startups, I was able to learn how to use what I already have to be able to turn it into what I wanted,” adds Evans. “People don’t get around to what they want to be if it’s hard for them to get there. It’s hard to be somebody who you never saw. But Make Startups gets us to the table. They bring everybody into the room so you can shake hands with people you otherwise would never have the opportunity to shake.”
