Welcome back to A Great Curiosity, a podcast where we explore the highs, the lows, and everything in between on the journey of entrepreneurship, creativity, and personal growth. This is a space for honest conversations, reflection, and discovering meaning in the messy, beautiful process of becoming. Today’s episode is a little different—and very special to me—because my guest is my sister, Janelle Bremer. We grew up in a small town in Western New York, stocking shelves at our grandparents’ hardware store, painting houses with our dad, and picking cherries on a farm. Eventually we left for college. I went to Syracuse University and eventually found my way into fashion and retail. Janelle studied accounting at Case Western Reserve, moved around a bit, and eventually landed in Hawaii with a duffel bag and no real plan. Along the way, our paths crossed again in my tiny basement apartment in Pittsburgh, where we spent our free time reading business books, cooking gluten free, taking outfit photos for my tumblr blog, and dreaming up questionable business ideas—including an underwear company we got far enough into developing that there was an actual prototype board involved. And then, we both became entrepreneurs. I started Sweet & Spark after spending a summer antiquing with our dad. Janelle started cooking meals out of her apartment for women at her CrossFit gym—a side project that eventually became Good Clean Food Hawaii, a company she would build and run for more than a decade and eventually sell. What followed were two very different but constantly intertwining entrepreneurial journeys. We watched each other start with almost nothing. Build teams. Find money. Open physical spaces. Make mistakes. Navigate partnerships. Hit the limits of our own resourcefulness. And eventually face the much harder question of what happens when you can keep something going—but aren’t sure you want to anymore. Janelle has also been a quiet force behind so much of my own entrepreneurial journey. She invested in Sweet & Spark, helped me build the financial systems I still use today, and sat beside me during some of the hardest decisions I’ve ever had to make in business. And I’ve had the incredible privilege of watching her life evolve too—from cooking meals in her tiny apartment kitchen, to building a real operation in Hawaii, getting her MBA, opening another business in Florida, eventually selling Good Clean Food, and now pursuing a PhD studying entrepreneurship itself. We’ve spent nearly fifteen years living these stories beside each other but we don’t often spend very much time actually sitting down and making sense of them. So that’s what we did in this episode! Together, We Explore: * Where Our Entrepreneurial Instincts Came From: Growing up in a family of small business owners, leaving our small hometown, discovering entirely different worlds through college and travel, living together in Pittsburgh, and the early experiments that taught us we could actually make things ourselves. * Starting Before You Know What You’re Building: Neither Sweet & Spark nor Good Clean Food began with a grand business plan. We talk about following what caught our attention, starting with the resources we had, and how experiments—antiquing with Dad for me, meal prepping for friends for Janelle—eventually became real businesses. * The Limits of Resourcefulness: We are both very good at figuring things out. But eventually, our businesses became bigger than what sheer effort could solve. We talk about hiring teams, creating systems, accessing capital, understanding your numbers, and learning that growth requires a completely different set of skills than starting. * Separating Yourself From Your Business: This might be my favorite thread of the conversation. Janelle helped me understand during one of the hardest chapters of Sweet & Spark that I had a future separate from the business. We talk about the difference between asking “Can I keep going?” and “Do I actually want to?”—and what staying with a business asks of your time, money, energy, and life. * Partnerships, Pivots & Starting Again: We both eventually experimented with building alongside other people and learned that partnership comes with its own opportunities and challenges. Janelle shares what happened when she left Hawaii, started a wine bar with a friend in Florida, and found herself navigating an entirely different kind of entrepreneurial ending. * What Entrepreneurship Has Taught Us About Being Human: Today, our work has strangely converged again. Janelle is pursuing a PhD studying entrepreneurial careers and wellbeing, while I’ve found my way into coaching, writing, and helping people better understand how they’re uniquely wired to work and create. After all these years of building businesses, we’re both now trying—in very different ways—to understand and support the person behind the business. Entrepreneurship has given both of us incredible freedom, possibility, challenge, heartbreak, confidence, and a much deeper understanding of ourselves. But maybe one of its greatest lessons has been learning that being capable of making something work doesn’t mean you’re obligated to keep making it work forever. Sometimes the business changes. Sometimes you change. And sometimes everything you learned building one thing becomes the raw material for whatever you’re meant to build next. I’m really grateful to have a sister who has been a rock beside me, and I’m very curious to see where both of our paths take us next. Maybe someday we’ll finally work together or live near each other. Oh and, maybe there will be a puppy in my future too! You can connect with Janelle on LinkedIn. You can also listen to A Great Curiosity on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. Past Episodes: This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit jillianbremer.substack.com
