Shauna (Stewart) and Ryan Nokes have had a very busy year with a lot of changes. We are living about an hour outside DC, in northern Virginia. Last spring I started teaching piano lessons to 2 teenagers. Since that time, my number of students has grown to 16! In early November Ryan's company moved most of their operations down to South America and they gave us a choice: move to Chile (though there's no guarantee they could ever bring us back to the states), or get laid off. We opted NOT to move to Chile. As is so often the case in life, the Lord was in the details and we had started looking several months earlier at other business opportunities.
When the day of lay offs came we already had a plan and we purchased a painting franchise called Five Star Painting. We officially bought the business in December. The past 6 months have been a whirlwind of obtaining contractor licensing in VA, hiring painting crews, networking, and for me, obtaining a hands-on business education! I have left my previous employment to work with Ryan (more) full-time (still teaching piano though). It has been a bumpy ride, and we've never worked so hard. We have talked often about how so many of the principles of missionary work apply to what we are now doing. Diligence, dedication, follow-up, committing people to a timeline, talking to people about their families and lives, etc. We've even had some missionary opportunities both with customers and also with painters we employ. This has all required an immense amount of faith and trust in the Lord, but we both see the hand of the Lord in our lives daily as we've taken on this challenge of business ownership.
Shauna & Ryan Nokes
