The situation
Berekti came to Career Pursuit in December 2025. She was running her own mobile optical practice - a business she'd built from the ground up and genuinely believed in, already carrying a real book of clients.
The business was working. It just needed room to grow.
Like a lot of founders in the build phase, she wanted to add stable income alongside the practice - cash flow that would give the business runway while she kept growing her client base. Not a replacement for the dream. Fuel for it.
That put her at a fork a lot of entrepreneurs know well. Bring in supplemental income and keep building, or set the business aside and go take a full-time job.
How does an entrepreneur step back into the job market without giving up the thing she's building?
The diagnosis
Most coaches would have told her to pick a lane. Get a full-time job, shelve the business, come back to it someday.
You can't tell that to a real entrepreneur. When someone has the drive to build - and has already proven the concept works with paying clients - "just get a job" isn't advice. It's asking them to walk away from something that's already working. The move wasn't to choose between the business and a paycheck. It was to find a way to have both.
The actual obstacle was translation. Berekti's background was scrappy and non-linear - self-built, entrepreneurial, nothing that fit a standard corporate mold. A self-directed run as an immigration consultant, years as an optician, then founding her own practice. She had genuine range across all of it. What she didn't have was a read on how that range translated to the market - which roles it fit, and how to present it so an employer saw the capability instead of an unconventional resume.
That's the gap. Not a lack of skill - a lack of translation. The many hats she'd worn weren't a liability to explain away. They were range that hadn't been positioned yet.
The strategic move
We started with the Career Pursuit Career Audit - a 90-minute deep dive that pulls out what a client actually has to sell. The work wasn't writing. It was finding where her real strengths lived, and where those strengths matched roles that actually existed in the market - specifically, a fully remote, part-time role that would bring in income without eating the time she needed for the business.
Then we built the multi-persona play. An entrepreneur wears a lot of hats, so rather than bet the whole search on one identity, we built out several - bookkeeping, customer service, sales - and calibrated her positioning for each. More hats, more surface area, more shots.
Then we built the engine and ran it at volume. Tailored applications, decision-maker outreach, network mapping, interview prep. We expanded her network and opened doors she sensed she might belong in but didn't yet know how to walk through. The unlock was positioning - showing her how to present at the level those roles were actually hiring for, so the range on her resume finally read as an asset.
The setback
Reaching above your comfort zone brings doubt with it. That's the part nobody talks about.
The roles we were positioning her for were a stretch - bigger than what she'd have applied to on her own - and stretching invites second-guessing. There were real moments where she wondered whether she was reaching too far.
The work in those moments wasn't strategy. It was anchoring - back into what she was actually capable of, and into the attitude that carried this whole engagement: optimistic, willing to roll up her sleeves, willing to do the work. That's what kept the engine moving when the doubt showed up. Not every obstacle is out in the market. Sometimes it's just the nerve it takes to reach.
The outcome
Berekti didn't have to choose. She kept everything.
She landed a fully remote bookkeeping role - stable, flexible income that gave the business the runway it needed. And then she reached for something bigger: an Executive Director role at a business association. A leadership seat that stretched her, that we positioned her into and prepped her for. She won it.
Two part-time roles, both landed, stacked on top of the optical practice she never set aside. The business kept growing. The runway was there. And she added a leadership title to her name along the way.
In her words: she got "access to a virtual role and also reached for a role that seems a bit intimidating." The steady move and the stretch, in the same run.
Under three months from her first message to signed.
