We’ve all had the thought. Sometimes it comes as we lie awake at 3 a.m. thinking about the next day’s to-do list. Sometimes it comes while sitting in traffic on the way to work. What if I did something completely different with my career? Maybe it’s opening a coffee shop, or maybe it’s getting a law degree or becoming a yoga instructor.
For many people, the thought stays just that: a fleeting idea before checking back into the reality of their day job. But for four Richmond women, this thought led to the reinvention of their careers and lives when they realized what they were doing no longer felt aligned with what they were meant to do.
Rachel Beanland, Author
Writing has played a role in Rachel Beanland’s life for as long as she can remember. “It was the thing I was good at and the thing I liked,” says Beanland, who lives in The Fan with her husband, Kevin, and three kids Gabriel, Clementine, and Florence.
However, when it came time to pave her career path, writing didn’t seem like a viable option. “I did not know that I could be a novelist,” she says. “I don’t think I really knew that job existed in the way we know today. I didn’t think that was a practical enough job.”
Instead, Beanland attended the University of South Carolina where she double majored in public relations and art history. “I was kind of intimidated to do a journalism major. I thought I was going to have to be asking people all these hard-hitting questions,” says Beanland. “I chose the PR track and figured I could kind of keep writing in my life. I ended up adding an art history major to give me a more creative outlet for my PR.”
The only problem was that writing press releases for her PR and marketing career didn’t fulfill Beanland the way writing in her free time did. “I loved the writing, but I didn’t like living a life in which I wrote the things I wanted to write at home and wrote the things I was far less passionate about at work,” she says. “I was always kind of straddling these two worlds and thinking about what I could be working on creatively at home.”
Beanland bounced around to different public relations, marketing, and communications jobs until 2016 when she found a marketing and non-profit management role at the Visual Arts Center of Richmond (VisArts). She recalls it being the job she enjoyed most, but she still wanted more, and she found herself questioning how to transition from doing work that she liked to doing work that she was passionate about.
During this time, she began laying the groundwork for her writing career by attending writing conferences, working on short stories and essays, and doing research for her first novel, Florence Adler Swims Forever. She also found herself daydreaming about getting a Master of Fine Arts in creative writing, so she enrolled at Virginia Commonwealth University while working full time and writing her book.
Beanland resigned from her job at VisArts in the summer of 2019 after she sold Florence Adler Swims Forever to her publisher, Simon & Schuster. “Selling a novel is hard, and lots of people try to do it,” she says. “I had this feeling if I could crack the code on novel writing and if I could sell a novel, then that would maybe give me enough runway to write a second novel.” Beanland did just that and went on to have her second book, The House Is On Fire, published in 2023, as well as her latest novel, The Half Life, which was released earlier this summer.
When Beanland reflects on the journey of her career change, she thinks of her dad who passed away when he was 58. “I think he liked his job okay, but it didn’t make his heart sing. He always thought he would get this big retirement, but he died before he could retire, so he didn’t get that third act that a lot of us talk about wanting,” she says. “I always think about that because we are not promised anything, so you better make the second act count. Our lives are just too short to be doing the wrong jobs.”
It’s clear that Beanland has taken her own advice and made her second act count by following her lifelong pull toward writing. “I’m doing the job that I am both good at and that I enjoy, and I think that’s the special sauce,” she says.
Crystal Cempron, Student at Brightpoint Community College
“I’m not what happened to me; I’m what I choose to become.”
Crystal Cempron, a Chesterfield resident and mother to daughters Audrey and Aiyoki, reminds herself of this phrase often. Despite past struggles and setbacks, Cempron has chosen to become a parent student at Brightpoint Community College.
After Cempron graduated from Huguenot High School, she briefly attended Virginia State University, but she says she “wasn’t in the right headspace for education at that time” after losing her parents at a young age. Cempron felt a calling to serve, so she considered joining the military, but instead she attended Reynolds as a pre-nursing major for a short stint. During that time, life presented a series of setbacks, leading her to leave school for a career with Wells Fargo for several years, but she still felt a calling to serve.
In 2021, Cempron’s grandmother encouraged her to heed that calling. “I didn’t pursue school because I didn’t have the capacity at the time, but [my grandmother] encouraged me to go back and do what I really wanted to do, so I went back to pursue my degree at Brightpoint,” she says.
Cempron was drawn to Brightpoint for its sense of community and her professors’ support and encouragement as she takes classes, works, and raises her daughters. “I’m so grateful because I really wanted to throw in the towel, but [my professors] reminded me it doesn’t matter how long it takes to finish the race,” she says. Cempron doesn’t deny how hard she works to do it all, though. “There are days I sit back and remember ‘my why’ — that my children are looking up to me. That’s what keeps me motivated as a mom,” she says.
Thanks to this support and Cempron’s desire to do more for herself, she’s thriving at Brightpoint, where she has a 3.9 cumulative GPA and is involved in several campus organizations: the College Attainment for Parent Students (CAPS) program, honor society Phi Theta Kappa, Future Business Leaders of America (FBLA), and Honor & Distinction: Black Student Alliance. “I’m excelling not just because of my grades, but the purpose behind it,” says Cempron. “I let my circumstances beat me down, but you’ve got to push through whatever you’re going through — anything worth having, you have to work for it — and now that’s what I’m doing. I’m focusing on getting my degree in business administration.”
Beyond Brightpoint, Cempron’s goal is to fulfill her calling to serve by opening a facility for at-risk youth, providing a safe and supportive space for those experiencing difficulties in childhood like she did. She also hopes to inspire her daughters and others with her story of resilience and changing course to give herself the future she dreamed of. “Do it scared, do it alone, do it even if you don’t know what’s on the other side, because you’d rather do it and it not work out than not do it at all and wish you did,” she says. “I wish I would’ve had that mentality back then to push through, but I’m a firm believer that everything happens for a reason, so everything worked out the way it needed to for me. Some of the most successful people have failed before they became successful.”
June Mena, Owner of Ceres Botanical
When June Mena and her family relocated to Richmond in 2021 for her husband’s job, she knew a few things to be true: she was ready for a change, she liked homewares, and she had a knack for gardening. What she didn’t know was how those truths would lead her to open her own flower shop in The Fan.
Before moving to Richmond, Mena lived with her husband, Danny, and kids Luisa and Joaquín in Brooklyn, NY, where Mena taught high school English. “I like teaching kids about reading and books,” she says. She also liked growing vegetables — something she grew up doing with her father — and combined that with education. “I managed our high school’s portion of our school garden. I started growing with my students, and I was like, ‘This is cool. I’m combining two things I like: talking to children and growing veggies.'”
Despite enjoying teaching, Mena’s intention was to leave that career behind in New York for a new venture in RVA. “Being a teacher is a really, really hard job. It felt like that career was coming to an end,” she says. “I wanted to leave before I burnt out.” But she also knew it wasn’t quite the right time to start a business as her family settled into a new city, so she continued her teaching career at Albert Hill Middle School for two years.
Around this time Mena worked at Prospect Hill Flower Farm in Louisa as an apprentice. “That’s how I got into flowers,” she says. “I was learning a ton from two really great growers. I learned to make bouquets — that was my first design foray, making bouquets for the St. Stephen’s farmers’ market. When I left the farm, I kept that design piece in the back of my mind.”
Mena continued designing floral arrangements from her dining room table as a side hustle, but she still had a vision for something more. A vacant storefront on Main Street — just blocks from her home in The Fan — presented the opportunity for a place where she could do more and her multiple interests could converge. “I always had an Etsy shop where I sold curated homewares, and then I had my flower design. When I quit teaching, I thought, ‘Maybe I can combine flowers and homewares,'” Mena says. “I thought I would have an organic vegetable farm. It sort of evolved from that, and I went with the mindset of this career shift.”
The pieces for her business began to fall into place from there. Mena left her job at Albert Hill this past May, and shortly after in June, she opened the doors to her flower shop, Ceres Botanical — named after the Roman goddess of agriculture. “I love the creative freedom and the flexibility of working at my own store. I also love meeting the people who come in and talking about products with them,” she says.
Mena considers herself a “career switcher at heart,” so she’s not exactly sure what her career will look like five or ten years from now. What she does know is that despite the stress and learning curve of starting a business, she feels “a sense of calm compared to her previous career,” and she’s glad she followed her ambition to become an entrepreneur.
Allie Wine, Owner of Bella Ballerina RVA
“It doesn’t matter how long it takes to finish the race.”
“When you’re young, getting A’s is the goal. No one focuses on happiness,” says Allie Wine, a Church Hill resident, wife, and mother of a 5-year-old daughter. It was this line of thinking that led Wine to major in finance and accounting at Virginia Tech — even though she wasn’t excited about her major — and become a CPA and financial analyst. “I was always good at math, and people kind of suggested this career path to me,” she says. “In hindsight, I wish I had explored other paths before that one.”
In addition to math, Wine excelled at dance as a kid. She practiced styles like jazz, ballet, tap, lyrical, and modern dance from ages 3 through 18. Dance was her real passion, but she’d never considered making it her career.
Wine liked that her job in finance was stable and taught her valuable professionalism and problem-solving skills, but she was also burned out. “I was crying almost every day — sometimes multiple times a day. I was so stressed,” she says. “I had been working from home for about five years at that point with very little social connection and very little fulfillment. Finally, at one point I was having a crying-all-day type of day, and my husband told me to quit.”
In May of 2023, Wine walked away from her career in finance without a plan but with a drive to figure out what she was truly meant to do. She worked with The Binocular Group, a local business consulting and leadership development company, to uncover lifelong interests or passions that she may have overlooked. “I started looking at franchise ownership because I realized owning my own business was something that appealed to me a lot, but I also wanted support, and franchise ownership was the perfect blend,” Wine says.
Her career coach also helped her answer the age-old question, What did you want to be when you grew up? “It felt really silly to me at first. The answer to the question was to be a dance teacher,” says Wine. “And when I was a kid, I played ‘open up a business,’ so it all was an ‘aha moment’ that fit together.”
With this revelation in mind, Wine began researching franchise opportunities that incorporated her passion for dance and love of working with kids. That’s how she found Bella Ballerina, a children’s dance school that originated in Northern Virginia. Wine says she “fell in love with everything about the studio” and moved quickly, opening her first studio in Chesterfield in February 2024, a second in Short Pump shortly after in September 2024, and her Forest Hill location in August of this year. “One thing I realized in all of my career searching is I like being busy, and I like moving fast when I feel good about something. I don’t dislike working; I just didn’t like what I was doing,” she says.
Now, Wine doesn’t just like what she’s doing, she loves it. “It all feels so natural, and everything is exciting, and every day is fun. I truly feel like I’m finally where I was supposed to be, and I’m being myself there,” she says. “You can go from burnout to finding the perfect role. You can find something that feels really good and fun.”
A Common Thread
Beanland, Mena, Cempron, and Wine took very different paths, but they all arrived at the same realization: the work that fulfills you isn’t always something you discover overnight. Sometimes it’s a passion you’ve carried with you since childhood. Sometimes it’s a calling that refuses to go away. Sometimes it’s simply the feeling that you’re meant for something more. Their stories show that finding a more meaningful career isn’t necessarily about becoming someone new — it’s about giving yourself permission to become who you’ve been all along.
