When Marianne Fink arrived in Dayton in the early 1990s, Dayton looked a lot different than it does today.
“I fell in love pretty immediately, but it was just a strange time to be here because people were just trying to get out,” she recalled. “They weren’t really trying to stay, they weren’t trying to do much with what we had here.”
But that didn’t stop Marianne from getting involved in the community where she would eventually launch her business, The Wellness Studio.
“I just really had a sense that a lot of impact could be made, and that if I just continued to put one foot in front of the other, eventually things would anchor in a way that I could grow,” she said. “Most of us that are on an entrepreneurial journey, we’re visionaries just by our nature.”
And sometimes that vision can take years to truly manifest, she said.
Marianne first launched The Wellness Studio with a business partner in Tipp City in 2015, but “the drive to want to anchor something or root something in the Dayton community was always there,” she said.
That dream came true in April 2019 when she opened her doors at 114 N. Saint Clair St.
Marianne grew up in a family of DIY-ers. Her first business foray was in high school, when she made chocolates on the down low and delivered them to classmates in homeroom.
She never expected to weave entrepreneurship into her career. But as a single mother, she found herself asking how her family could thrive, not just survive.
“If you go to New York City or Chicago, you’ve got to really have things amped up to be able to create in a town like that. I had to get really honest with myself that that’s not the life that I wanted to live,” Marianne said. “I wanted to have balance in my life, and I needed an economy that would afford me the ability to live well and grow steadily.”
She learned early on that she wasn’t cut out for a corporate job. She needed to be moving, not sitting at a desk.
A stint in hospitality taught her how to read people, a skill she ultimately carried into her work at The Wellness Studio.
“I just was always trying to be as perceptive as I could possibly be in the environment that I was in,” she recalled. “When I look at my journey to become an entrepreneur, since I don’t have a classic business education, I learned from observing other industries.”
Marianne got curious about her environment — and her community of Daytonians.
“That’s the other thing about Dayton, we have so many resources!” she said. “I don’t know that I can say enough of how how much I appreciate it. Not that you can ever really know the ins and outs of what it is to run a small business until you’re living and breathing it, but it does help light you up. And there isn’t this pervasive sense of competition. It’s only, isn’t this great, we’re doing it, and this is happening. And it may be in your market, but that is not a bad thing, that’s an amazing thing. We are actually creating this very rich environment in our community where other small businesses are flourishing.”
At The Wellness Studio, Marianne and her staff work with bodies. Services include massage, energy work, facials, life coaching, astrological readings and more — modalities that are becoming more mainstream, Marianne observed.
Because if there’s one thing you can count on in business, it’s that things will shift and change, she said.
“There’s this whole idea that you reach this place of enlightenment, and then you just got all of the information, and that’s just never the reality of business,” she said. “You’re always learning and growing.”
“Things are always changing, and there are things that are happening right now in current events that I’m paying attention to going, okay, this is going to create a big ripple, and what is that going to look like,” she said. “But you can’t live in fear and operate from that place. You have to still live in making bold choices.”
Owning a business is a calling.
“To do a business well, you almost have to be devotional to it. It holds a frequency of you, for you, of love, that keeps pulling you back in. This is why you came, this is what you’re here to do,” Marianne said. “It has to break you in some ways, too. You have to have your heart broken over it a couple of times, and come back from that stronger, and recommit yourself to to the journey that you’re on”
I am Marianne Fink, and I am an entrepreneur.
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There’s no one way to be an entrepreneur.
You don’t have to look a certain way, operate in a particular industry, or pursue specific education. You don’t have to grow up in a particular household, or spend your free time nurturing any particular hobbies — entrepreneurs grow from all walks of life.
In this series, entrepreneurs, founders, and small business owners from across the Dayton Region share their individual stories to break down pervading stereotypes about who can or can’t be an entrepreneur.
They proudly declare, “I Am an Entrepreneur” — and you can be, too.
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