For over 25 years, I built my career backstage — not in the spotlight, but in the exacting, invisible architecture that lets talent become art. As a General Manager, I turned chaos into choreography: budgets and egos held in one steady hand, contracts signed, seasons calendared, opening nights delivered on time, every time. I knew how to build a show.

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Then 2014 came, and my mother needed me. First leukemia. Then dementia. I packed up a life defined by cue lights and call sheets and moved to the suburbs of Dallas, where my days became pharmacies, lab results, and midnight checks to make sure the breathing in the next room was still there. I knew stages. I didn’t yet know how to become one — for someone else’s decline, without losing myself in the process.

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That chapter didn't stay contained to 2014. Eighteen months ago, my mother's health took a turn serious enough that I stepped fully away from BusyGal - no gradual scale-back, no soft landing, just a full stop while I sat in hospitals and care facilities making decisions no one prepares you for. If you noticed the silence, that's where it came from. It was never the business failing. It was a daughter choosing, without hesitation, to show up.

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What theater had taught me came back to me slowly, in that Dallas quiet: what an audience sees as one seamless performance is actually a mosaic of small, unglamorous decisions — fittings, notes, taped-down spike marks, quiet adjustments no one applauds. Caregiving was like that. I came to realize entrepreneurship is too.

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I missed the roar of an opening night. I missed the shorthand of a production family, the certainty of union rules and rituals I’d spent decades mastering. But a different certainty took root: I still knew how to build a show. The audience would change. The craft would not.

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I didn't just build a company that teaches women to lead through hard seasons. I lived it in real time - coordinating a care team the way I used to coordinate a stage crew, holding steady when nothing around me was. Coming back to BusyGal isn't me returning after the storm passed. It's me returning because I finally understood, from the inside, the exact thing I'd been teaching all along: thinking like a CEO isn't a skill for when things are easy. It's what gets you through the seasons that aren't.

 

BusyGal was my answer to the question every woman in that hush eventually asks herself:  Who am I now, and what do I build next? It’s not a slogan. It’s the same production values I brought to 25 years of Broadway seasons, now aimed at your next act instead of mine.

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You are not starting over. You are starting from experience. I should know — I did too.

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Felicia Marie Lopes
Founder & CEO, BusyGal, LLC