I Wasn't Trying to Build Her Dream

After my mom died, I did what a lot of grieving daughters do. I looked for ways to keep her memory alive.

Over the years, I tried to weave pieces of her into the things I was building, sometimes before they even really fit. I wanted to make her proud. I wanted her life to continue to mean something. I knew I probably was not going to start a foundation in her name or organize an annual 5K. I just had not figured out what carrying her legacy forward looked like for me.

Entrepreneurship was not something I inherited from watching my mom run a business. I did not.

My mom had me when she was fifteen, and for most of my childhood, she stayed home. In her late twenties, she decided to rebuild her life. She earned her GED, went to school, earned a business degree, and eventually went to work for other people.

But she was always creating.

She painted. She built things out of wood. She pressed flowers into books and turned them into art. She learned culinary arts. She made her own Kahlua. And there was an ugly brick wall in our apartment that she painted white and transformed into an entire town of cartoon animals using bottles of nail polish.

She created because I do not think she knew how not to.

I did not become an entrepreneur because of my mom. That part seems to have been in my blood. Looking back, though, maybe it was in hers too.

Years into my own entrepreneurial journey, I remembered a dream she had once had.

Like so many artists, she had tried craft fairs and vendor events, but what she really wanted was something permanent. A place where artists could belong. Where they could sell their work year round, share tools and resources, support one another, be seen, and have a better chance of making a living doing something they loved.

She never got to build it.

And strangely enough, neither did I.

At least, not the way she had imagined it.

Years later, I was building what I kept calling a social media membership for small business owners, and somewhere along the way I finally saw what was sitting right in front of me.

Community. Resources. Support. Visibility. Opportunity.

I was not building an artists' collective or a storefront. I was building a business growth community for entrepreneurs. But underneath it were so many of the same things my mom had once wanted to create for artists.

I had spent years wondering how I could build something meaningful enough to carry a piece of her forward, and then realized I already was.

That is when Plandipity Doers changed for me.

It was not just another offer or another way to grow my business anymore. It became a mission I wanted to grow into something bigger than me. A place where small business owners do not have to figure everything out alone, where people have opportunities to connect, do the work, be seen, and build businesses they are proud of.

The tools are different. The people we serve are different. The dream has been reimagined. But the heart feels very much the same.

How this became a business

2009. The beginning. After Samantha's mom died, she realized how few photographs she had of her, because her mom hated being photographed. Her husband handed her a camera and encouraged her to finally pursue something she had been talking about for a while: learning photography and creating beautiful, affordable family portraits so other families would not someday have the same regret. She spent the next couple of years learning, building the brand, and eventually launched Samantha Markey Photography in 2011.

2020. More Than Serendipity Visual Marketing. Samantha narrowed her focus to brand photography, headshots, social media marketing, teaching, and strategy. At first, social media education was also a way to grow the brand photography side of the business. But the more she taught small business owners how to show up and market themselves, the more that work began taking on a life of its own.

2021. The idea for a collective. The world had shut down, and suddenly small business owners who had spent years avoiding social media could not avoid it anymore. Samantha's training and speaking work took off as entrepreneurs tried to figure out how to show up online. Shut Up and Show Me, the book she had been writing as a lead magnet for her brand photography business, went from a great idea to what she jokingly calls a digital paperweight as her attention shifted to something bigger: the Plandipity Doers Collective. It started as a social media marketing support community for entrepreneurs who hated social media, because at the time, that was the need Samantha saw everywhere. But as the community evolved, something became increasingly clear: small business owners did not just need help with social media. They needed support building the business around it.

2026. The clarity. It took five years of building, listening, experimenting, and paying attention to what members were actually getting from the community for Samantha to realize that Plandipity Doers was never really just about social media. Business owners needed accountability to do the things they knew they needed to do, especially the things they did not particularly enjoy doing. They needed practical tools and resources when they got stuck. They needed access to expertise without having to hire an expensive consultant every time they had a question. And they needed community. Until this point, Samantha had not pushed Plandipity Doers very far outside her existing circles. When she hired a business coach to help solve what she thought was primarily a sales problem, another missing piece became clear: she did not just want to help business owners do their marketing. She wanted to help them be seen. That realization changed the vision. Plan, Create, Do, Repeat had described the system. Connect, Do, Be Seen described what Samantha wanted the community to actually do for the people in it. And that is when Plandipity Doers finally had language for what it had been growing into all along: a business growth community where entrepreneurs have the people, support, resources, and opportunities they need to move their businesses forward.