Megan Czarnyszka has done everything from driving Uber to securing more than $500,000 in grants for nonprofits. With a resume that could fill four pages, how did she figure out which of her skills she could actually make money from?
Megan Czarnyszka told me her resume could probably be four pages long.
And after hearing about all the jobs she’s had, I believe her!
Healthcare, rental car sales, grant writing, marketing, nonprofit leadership, web design, substitute teaching…the list goes on.
Today, Megan runs Anchored Strategy Collective, where she helps nonprofits and mission-driven businesses with strategy and operations.
Now, how exactly did we get from all those different jobs to business consulting? And when did Megan realize she could make money from everything she’d learned along the way?
Because I had questions.
From healthcare to Uber to running her own business
Megan originally went to school for nursing and became a certified nursing assistant. After working in a few other industries, she eventually found herself back in healthcare, this time doing administrative work at a clinic.
Things were going pretty well until 2018, when the clinic went through some major changes. People were getting laid off, the workplace was becoming competitive, and Megan was dealing with health issues on top of everything else.
She’d had enough and decided to try something different.
Uber and Lyft.
Now, I probably wouldn’t have guessed rideshare driving would be the next stop after healthcare, but for Megan, it made sense. She was raising her daughter on her own and needed work that fit around school drop-offs and pickups.
Plus, she actually liked talking to her passengers.
She told me about a woman who got into her car crying. Megan handed her a tissue, and the woman was so grateful you’d have thought Megan had given her a million dollars.
I thought that was such a sweet story, especially because it says a lot about the kind of interactions Megan enjoyed having with people.
But the conversation that eventually introduced her to digital marketing happened somewhere completely different.
At her daughter’s bus stop.
Megan kept seeing another mom who always seemed to be working on her phone. She finally asked what the woman did, and learned she worked in digital marketing.
Apparently, that was enough to send Megan down a whole new rabbit hole.
She started looking into digital marketing herself, using free resources online, including YouTube.
And she had a particular reason for being interested.
Growing up, Megan had benefited from nonprofit assistance programs. She knew how hard it could be to find out what help was available, even when organizations were doing good work in the community.
She started wondering whether marketing could help those organizations reach more people.
Once she realized learning digital marketing could have an impact on how these nonprofits reached more people, she was even more invested.
One skill kept turning into another
Nonprofits notoriously struggle to fund programs even when they’re doing good work, but it’s even more of a challenge to pay for the marketing and administrative work needed to support those programs.
Megan started learning about grant writing because the organizations she worked with needed money.
She already had a few things going for her. She was good with words, understood data, and had a gift for recognizing patterns. Megan is also AuDHD, meaning she’s autistic and has ADHD, and she credits some of those strengths to the way her brain works.
But she’d never formally studied grant writing.
She looked at what other grant writers were doing, studied their work, and taught herself.
And she’s pretty damn good at it.
In her first year and a half, Megan says she secured more than $500,000 in grants.
EXCUSE ME?!
Half a million dollars in funding, and she learned how to write grants by studying other people’s work.
Of course, I wanted to know more about that.
Getting the funding was great, but these organizations still had programs to run. Somebody had to deal with registration, keep track of participants, and figure out how everything was supposed to operate.
Megan ended up helping with those things too.
At some point, she went from learning how to market nonprofit programs to writing grants and managing the operations behind them. She eventually became an associate executive director at a nonprofit.
And the variety of work didn’t stop there.
Today, her clients include a nonprofit fundraising consultancy, a law firm that helps survivors of human trafficking, and a physical therapist.
I’m looking at that client list thinking, what do these businesses even have in common?
But when Megan explained what she does for each of them, it started making more sense.
One client might need help managing operations. Another needs marketing support. Someone else needs newsletters or help organizing programs.
Megan has enough experience across those areas to see how the work connects.
She describes herself as a connector, which feels like a pretty accurate description for somebody who’s spent years learning how different parts of a business operate.
Funny enough, she didn’t go into all those jobs knowing she’d eventually become a strategist. She was learning things because she needed to know how to do them.
And it would take her a little longer to figure out how to turn all that experience into the consulting business she runs today.
She took a year away from business and came back with a different idea
By this point, Megan had been working independently for years, but business wasn’t always going the way she wanted.
She’d gotten caught up in the pressure to constantly market herself and create content. If she wasn’t posting enough or staying busy enough, she worried her business would never succeed. She was exhausted.
And when work slowed down, she decided to take a year away from the business and become a substitute teacher.
She enjoyed it, too. She worked in her daughter’s school district and connected with the students so well that a group of kids started following her around. Her daughter jokingly called them Megan’s other kids.
During that school year, Megan did very little business work, aside from some occasional one-on-one wellness coaching.
When the year ended, she felt ready to try business again. So she started looking at all the things she’d learned how to do and thinking about what tied them together.
Websites, copywriting, marketing, operations. She understood how each piece worked and could spot where organizations needed help.
That’s when she decided to focus more on strategy and consulting through Anchored Strategy Collective.
This part of her story hit close to home because I know how easy it is to list all the things you’ve done without knowing what to call yourself.
I’ve worked across several industries myself. Sometimes the challenge is explaining what you can do in a way that makes sense to someone who might hire you.
Megan’s experience gave her a different way of describing the value she could offer.
Now she had to find clients.
Her first move was a desperation post on LinkedIn
That’s literally what she called it.
Her school-year income was ending, and she needed to get back to making money through her business. So she got on LinkedIn and made a post explaining her situation and listing all the things she knew how to do.
The post got shared, and people started reaching out.
But there’s another reason that post worked…Megan already knew people.
She’d spent years connecting with nonprofits and other consultants in her area. When those people shared her post, it reached business owners who were already thinking about getting help.
One friend referred her to a physical therapist who needed marketing support.
I loved hearing that because I’d recently made a post myself about needing to rebuild my income.
And I’m sitting there thinking about all the things I know how to do that I’ve never actually told people I can help them with. We can get so used to our own experience that we forget other people have no idea what we’re capable of.
We can get so used to our own experience that we forget other people have no idea what we’re capable of.
Megan also brought up something else I run into when talking with business owners.
Sometimes people explain their work using language that only makes sense to others in their industry.
She gave the example of saying you’re a copywriter vs. explaining that you write the words on someone’s website. The second explanation makes it a lot easier for someone to understand what they can hire you to do.
Megan’s current income comes from her operations and marketing clients. Under Anchored Strategy Collective, her business model allows her to collaborate with other independent professionals when projects require skills beyond her own.
She doesn’t want to run a traditional agency with employees. Too much to handle.
Instead, she wants to partner with people who set their own rates. Her strategy fee covers her work, and any additional professionals charge for theirs.
Working with partners instead of running an agency protects her biggest priority, which is having control over her schedule.
For years, she needed work that allowed her to take her daughter to school, pick her up, and get her to dance classes. Now that her daughter is older, she has more flexibility, but she still likes deciding when and how she works.
She even told me about signing up for a beginner pickleball lesson at 11 a.m. on a Wednesday because she happened to have the time.
I mean, being able to decide you want to try pickleball in the middle of a Wednesday sounds like the perk I didn’t know I needed!
And now she’s back in school
Toward the end of our conversation, I asked Megan what she was choosing for herself now that she might not have chosen ten years ago.
Her answer surprised me a little.
She’s back in school, pursuing a bachelor’s degree in finance. She explained that she didn’t grow up learning much about wealth and wanted to better understand how to build it.
But there’s another reason this experience matters to her.
Megan is an eldest daughter and a solo mom. She’s spent much of her life taking care of other people. She remembers walking into class after summer break and realizing that this was something she was doing for herself.
She wasn’t there because somebody needed her to learn another skill or solve another problem.
She wanted that degree.
I loved hearing her talk about that moment. After everything she’s already done, she’s still interested in learning something new.
And who knows what she’ll do with it?
She might use that finance degree in her business. It might lead to another kind of work. Or maybe she’ll just be glad she went back to school and learned something she wanted to understand.
She doesn’t have to know all of that right now.
When I think back on our conversation, I’m still thinking about Megan’s four-page resume.
For years, she was picking up skills wherever she found a reason to learn them. Some came from jobs she took. Others came from problems she needed to solve.
It took her a while to recognize that her experience could be valuable in ways she hadn’t considered.
And I wonder how many women have a whole collection of skills they’re barely using because they can’t figure out what to call themselves.
Or because their experience doesn’t seem to point toward one obvious next career.
I’m curious how many possibilities we’re overlooking when we only think about our experience in terms of the jobs we’ve already held.
Megan found one way to put hers to work. And judging by that finance degree, I doubt she’s done adding to the list.
Watch the full conversation to hear more about Megan’s path from healthcare to consulting, how she taught herself grant writing, and why she went back to school.
CONNECT WITH MEGAN
Website: www.anchoredstrategycollective.com
Instagram: www.instagram.com/anchoredstrategycollective
LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/meganczarnyszka
Megan Czarnyszka is the founder and lead strategist of Anchored Strategy Collective, a Milwaukee-based consultancy that helps purpose-driven founders and nonprofits build the operations and marketing systems their growth depends on. She started her business in 2018 without a traditional degree, building her expertise inside nonprofits as an associate executive director, communications manager, and operations lead. Today she partners with women, neurodivergent, and chronically ill service providers who handle execution, which gave her the capacity to go back to school full time for a BBA in Finance at UW-Milwaukee. Watch her full conversation with Elle Mills on She Chose Again, an Out of Edits interview series about women making different choices in how they live and work.
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