Connections Brought Us Together. Connections Keep Us Going.
Meet Our Co-Founders
Chief Executive Storyteller & Creative Strategist
Brandy M. Miller
I didn’t come into my adult life knowing how to form strong, lasting connections with people or even understanding the power of doing so. At 32, I made a decision to change the way I measured my success from being about money, possessions, titles, and degrees, to being the quality and quantity of the relationships I formed with others.
That decision led me to connect with Joylynn M. Ross in 2018 at an Experienced Writers Retreat where I’d been invited to present on my unique style of editing using spreadsheets and a popular video game called The Sims. The hostesses also invited Joylynn, who gave a presentation on The Business of Storytelling. I knew after listening to her we would be working together one day, even if I didn’t have a clear vision for how.
We began working together in 2019, and she became more than a business connection. She became a friend. We’ve counseled, cajoled, and challenged one another to grow as we worked together to face business challenges and celebrate business successes. She believed in my Breaking Open Abundance™ program when I launched it in July 2022, enough to be the first person to invest in it.
That program helped her to break past some of the biggest blocks she’d faced in her business. Following the strategies I provided to her, she started gaining traction at networking events where she’d been ignored and sidelined in the past due to confusion over the value of storytelling and publishing for government, corporate, and educational institutions. Rather than giving up on the gold mine we knew we’d uncovered, we chose to rebrand and relaunch under the Path To Connections™ label.
With our logo designed and our path mapped, we started introducing our new brand by leveraging our connections to SBDC and SCORE where we were able to take our email list from 0 to over 2,000 names with a single webinar.
We continue to leverage those connections and build those relationships by cultivating our contacts and helping them connect their stories to their future success.
Chief Executive Officer & Subject Matter Expert
Joylynn M. Ross
As a national bestselling author who sold books through traditional publishing deals and as an independent publisher, I got tired enough of seeing struggling authors getting taken to the cleaners that I decided to step in and do something about it. That’s what led me to start Path To Publishing in 2000. I wanted to empower my fellow authors to achieve literary – and financial literary – success, no matter how they defined it.
I knew the value of getting mentorship and forming relationships, so I chose to get a SCORE mentor early in my business formation. That decision was one of the smartest I made. It saved me from making a lot of critical mistakes that could have hampered my business’s growth.
I kept cultivating relationships in the industry but one of my big frustrations became how often I found myself overlooked or ignored at events meant to connect small business owners to government agencies, corporations, and educational institutions in need of my services. People just couldn’t see the value of acquiring my company’s services to serve their entity’s needs – and I struggled to make that value clear.
Brandy got my attention out of all the people I’d connected with because of her sincere interest in helping me succeed. And she didn’t just talk about wanting to help me. She invested her time, energy, money, and efforts into proving that she meant it.
Brandy’s Breaking Open Abundance Program™ came at the perfect time. I felt so discourged about my business it made me literally, physically sick. Something needed to change…and it did!
Within a few short months of working with Brandy on the program, the doors began to open and my connections started to pay off. I became a SCORE media spokesperson, was admitted into Amazon’s Black Business Accelerator Program, and became a recipient of J. P. Morgan Chase’s Advancing Black Pathways Program as well.
And now, Brandy and I are assisting our clients in breaking through the barriers keeping them from connecting to their success.