Coleen Weeks

I have been working since I was seven. I put myself through college on loans that were never enough, sixty hours a week against a twenty hour course load, and I ended up in the hospital twice from sheer exhaustion.

Taking Embarcadero public took seven years, not one good year. Three hours a day commuting. My daughter was six weeks old when it started. I do not tell people about the IPO without telling them that part.

Then I built Nevaeh, a boutique spa and salon, in a brand new center. An expensive build, anchored by a Fortune 50 restaurant, every space leased before I opened my doors. The economy collapsed weeks later. For the first two years I was the only business in that center. Over eight years I watched nine of them come and go. I was the only one that survived.

There was a morning I pulled up outside Nevaeh and did not want to walk in. Five of my eight stylists had left, more than half the business, and it cost fifty thousand dollars a month just to open the doors. I thought I was done. It felt like an impossible mountain to climb. I got up the strength and went in anyway. Two new stylists called that same day and joined, and they brought fresh energy, fresh direction, and fresh revenue. I did better after those five left than I had before.

Then I bought this one. It looked like sixty-five thousand dollars a month in profit. Eight weeks in it had nearly collapsed, and I was making payroll out of my own pocket.

I rebuilt it around AI and automation, roughly eighty thousand dollars of my own money so far, and I renamed it Koru & Ivy. The old name described one narrow corner of this industry, and what the system does now works for far more than that. I have watched a lot of businesses go under. Nine in that one center. I also worked inside a venture capital firm and a few of its portfolio companies. In one of them I could see the work that needed doing was not being done, and I said so to the man who owned the portfolio. He acted on it. I know exactly what happens to the ones that do not move in time. The businesses that build their systems now will own their markets in three years. The ones who wait will be playing catch-up.

So that is what I am building here. AI-powered, but human at its core. Built for freedom, not burnout. Built for the owners who are exceptional at what they do, and deserve a business that matches.