The story of Karina Owen Part 1 of 3: At the End of the Night

A Instagram notification. A new follower. @staynclassyowen.

We had been circling each other for the better part of a year by then, the way people in this business do. Two people working in cigars, on two different continents, exchanging messages about a collaboration that never quite got scheduled. Friendly. Professional. Going nowhere in particular, that first year.

Then, from nowhere, she started telling me about her life. Not all at once. A little at a time, over weeks, in the gaps between working days.

I asked if I could tell it here. I will be honest and say I pushed a little, and that I do not usually push. It was not because it makes a good story, although it does. It was because reading it made me put the phone down and sit with my own life for a while, my own father, my own children, the hours I spend working and where they go. Very little I read does that.

She was not sure. She took her time with that question, and anyone would. In the end she said yes, and we decided to do it together. This is the result.

She was four years old the first time she went to work.

She was twelve the first time she had to. By then she was washing dishes at a sandwich shop, handing over money that went to food and bills, and she had already understood something most children never have to: that her family needed her.

She was going to be a doctor. She had read the books. She was in clinicals, in scrubs, on her way. Then meningitis went through her family, and the last one of them to fall ill was her.

Today she runs a consulting firm in the cigar industry, the same industry her father built a name in. She does not use his name. She has never used it. Everything she has, she has under a name she married into and made her own.

I have read her answers more times than I have read anything else this year. What follows is mostly her, in her own words, at the length she chose. I have tried to stay out of the way. This is the first of three parts.

Table of Contents

Four years old, on the road

She answered these questions in writing, over several weeks, in batches sent late at night. Some of them she wrote between customers during a working day, and one arrived with an apology for missing my call because she had been on her feet since morning. I mention it because it shows in the answers. They are not media-trained. They run long where something still hurts and stop dead where it does not. I have interviewed a lot of people in this industry. Almost nobody writes back at eleven at night about their father.

“I don’t remember my first trip as a business trip. I remember it as an adventure. I remember my mother getting me ready with a smile on her face, the sun shining through the window, the birds chirping, and her waking me up saying, are you ready to go work with Daddy?

“And I was thrilled. I’d bring my Barbies, my dolly, or My Little Pony, packed like I was going on some grand expedition. I’d wear my overalls, my hair fixed in pigtails, and I was ready for whatever adventure was waiting for us.

“Then I remember him. A man with slicked-back black hair, gel in it, a mustache, like Magnum PI, a big smile, a sports jacket, and a cup of Dunkin’ Donuts coffee in his hand. He’d roll his shoulders, we’d get in the car, and we’d hit the road. I could barely see over the dashboard. But I didn’t care. I was sitting next to the man I thought was the greatest person in the world, my dad, my hero.”

Her father sold cigars. In practice that meant accounts, shops, vendor meetings, and a girl in the passenger seat with a job of her own.

This was the trade before email did most of the work. You drove. You sat down with a retailer, you smoked something, you wrote the order by hand and you came back in three months to do it again. We still tell the story that way, with some pride, and mostly it is still true.

What we leave out is the back seat. She was in it. Picture a small girl in a chair by the counter in a shop that smells of cedar and smoke, hands in her lap, saying nothing for an hour because that is her job, while men she calls Uncle decide things she does not understand yet. Hours of it. Years of it. She was not being taken along for company. She was being taught, and nobody told her that until she was old enough to look back and see it.

“Sit down in those stores, be quiet and wait until Daddy finished his business. Sometimes they’d give me candy. Sometimes I think they felt sorry for me because I was always this little girl sitting patiently while the adults talked.

“But I wasn’t miserable. I actually understood the assignment. I knew that if I was good, Daddy would take me on the next adventure. And if I was bad? Well, let’s just say my father had no problem putting a foot to my keister. So I learned very early to behave.”

The men and women in those rooms became family by default.

“I remember people seeing me and picking me up, giving me these huge hugs. I had absolutely no idea who most of these people were. But I called them Uncle. Sometimes their wives would be there so I called them Aunties.”

What she took from it was not the travel.

“Looking back, what strikes me most isn’t just the places we went. It’s the way people reacted to my father. They respected him. And it wasn’t just because he was my dad. People in the cigar world respected him and they still do today.

“At four years old, I didn’t understand business. I didn’t understand distribution, relationships, negotiations or what it took to build a company. I understood one thing. I was going on the road with my hero. And without realizing it, those road trips were giving me my first education in business, relationships, loyalty and people.

“I thought I was just bringing my Barbies along for the ride. I was actually watching my future being built right in front of me.”

What nobody can teach you in a classroom

Most of her answers run to several hundred words. This one does not. It reads like something she has repeated to herself often enough that it has worn smooth, the way a lesson does when you have needed it more than once.

“You can teach someone how to read a contract, but you can’t teach them how to read a room. I learned when to speak, when to listen, when to shake someone’s hand and when someone’s word meant more than a piece of paper. Most importantly, I learned that your reputation enters the room before you do.”

It took her another twenty years to see what she had actually been watching.

“As a child, I thought my father was simply good at business. As an adult, I realized he was good at people. He understood relationships, timing, loyalty, negotiation and trust. He understood that business wasn’t just about selling something. It was about creating something people wanted to be part of.”

The price of the thing he built

The business grew into one of the names in the trade. That part of the story gets told often. She tells the other part.

“The cost was simple. His family. The sacrifice was time, and time is the one thing money can never buy back.

“My brother and I would climb into that car, and Dad would be on the phone talking business while we knew our job was to be quiet. If that phone rang, we’d stop mid-conversation. Dad was working. And we respected that.

“But then, all of a sudden, the trips stopped. There were no more adventures with Dad. He was gone a lot more. We would only see him on certain days, and those days became precious to us. Sometimes vendors would come into town, and we’d have dinner with them on the days we were able to see our father. So, in a way, we shared our father’s time with the people he was building the business with.”

She does not tell it as a grievance. She tells it as arithmetic.

“As children, we didn’t resent it. We understood that he was working. We respected him, and we knew how important what he was building was.

“But as I grew older, I began to understand something I couldn’t have understood as that little girl in the passenger seat. Time doesn’t come back. You can make more money. You can build another company. You can recover from a bad deal. But you cannot buy back a day you missed with your children. You can’t recreate a childhood.”

This is the part of any founder’s story that rarely gets printed. We celebrate the man who started with a phone and a basement, in every trade there is, and the story usually ends at the point where it worked. What the house was like while he built it belongs to the people who were in it, and they are the ones who almost never get asked.

She does tell me it was fine. She also tells me the trips stopped. Both are in the same answer, one sentence apart, and she does not seem to find that a contradiction. Anyone who has built something while raising a family will recognise the arithmetic, and will not much enjoy recognising it.

She is insistent that the business was worth building, and that her father did not build it alone. Her mother was there from the start, raising children beside a man starting a company from nothing. Relatives gave hours, ideas and money. One helped design the logo. One was the first employee.

“There was no spotlight on most of them, and they weren’t doing it for recognition. They simply showed up.”

Twelve years old, washing dishes

“Some children remember their first job as an experience. I remember mine as a responsibility.”

One detail is worth pausing on. The sandwich shop does not get named. She had every reason to name it, because it would have made the story rounder, and she refused on the grounds that they were kind to a twelve year old and that is theirs to keep. That instinct, protecting people who are not in the room, comes up again and again in her answers. It is also, not incidentally, what people in this trade say when they explain why they do business with someone. The people there were good to her, and she is not willing to turn them into a detail in someone else’s story.

“They gave a young girl a chance, and they helped me when I needed it. Every dollar mattered.

“My mother worked nights. My brother needed care. I learned quickly that every dollar had a purpose. It wasn’t spending money. It was necessities. I wasn’t working because I wanted to grow up. I was working because I understood something very young. My family needed me.”

Twelve. Think about someone you know who is twelve. Then read that answer again and notice which word she chooses to describe it. Not hard, not unfair, not too young. Responsibility.

Her father, she says, asked nothing extraordinary of her.

“He wanted me to get good grades, be a good person, and understand the value of hard work. My mother wanted the best for me too. She loves us deeply, and she raised us with everything she had.”

The job did not give her money. It gave her something she has never put down.

“I stopped seeing work as something you simply had to do and started seeing it as something that could give you power, independence and purpose.

“The little girl washing dishes had no idea she was building the foundation for the woman she would become.”

You have to earn your sleep

Her father had a phrase. He used it to end the working day.

It recurs throughout everything she has sent me. It turns up in answers about business, about her children, about advice she would give a stranger. It is the closest thing she has to a creed, and she got it from a man who used it to say the working day was over.

If you work for yourself, read the next few paragraphs slowly. This is the passage I have gone back to more than any other, and not because of how it is written. It is because it asks a question I would rather not answer on most days, and it asks it in the voice of a father closing his briefcase at the end of a working day, which is to say in a voice a lot of us know.

“When I was little, he would say it at the end of almost every conversation. I knew exactly what it meant. It meant we were finished for the day. It was time to go home.

“I can still picture it. I’m that little girl sitting beside my father, watching my hero roll his shoulders, take a drink of his coffee, and get ready for whatever road was ahead of us. With his sports jacket on.

“Funny enough, as I’ve gotten older, I’ve tried to stop myself from saying it. But I still catch myself saying those exact words. And now, as an adult, I understand them very differently.”

Somewhere along the way it stopped being about going home.

“At the end of the night isn’t just about leaving. It’s about reflection. Because eventually, every day comes to an end. The phones stop ringing. The meetings are over. The noise gets quiet. And you’re left with yourself.

“You have to ask yourself, did I do the best I could today? Did I show up? Did I do right by the people who depend on me? Did I give something to myself?

“You don’t have to win every day. Some days you lose. Some days you make mistakes. Some days you simply survive the day, and honestly, sometimes that’s enough. But at the end of the night, I believe you should be able to close your eyes knowing you gave that day what you had.”

“You have to earn your sleep.”

She thinks her father taught her that without meaning to.

“No matter how old I get, no matter how much life changes, there will always be an end of the night. There will always be that moment when we put everything down, close our eyes and trust that we did enough.

“Today that reminds me to be grateful for every day I’m given. I want to wake up knowing I did something worthy of the life God gave me, and go to sleep thanking Him for one more day with my children, my husband, my family, my friends, and my church. Because the truth is, we are never promised tomorrow.

“And that’s why those words still come out of my mouth. Because when I say them now, I don’t just hear myself. I hear my own family’s legacy. And for a moment, I’m that little girl again. The little girl who thought her dad was her hero. The little girl who didn’t understand business, sacrifice or what it meant to build a life. She just knew she was safe sitting next to him, and that another adventure was waiting for them in the morning.”

The girl who was going to be a doctor

The cigar business belonged to her family. Medicine was hers alone.

“I was a kid of the ’80s, so I watched a lot of Doogie Howser, M.D. growing up. But medicine wasn’t just something I saw on television. It was something I genuinely loved. I was fascinated by how the human body worked. I was reading medical books when I was young and studying them long before anyone expected a child to be thinking about a career.

“I wasn’t pretending to be a doctor. I was studying to become one.”

There is a particular kind of child who reads adult books about a subject nobody has assigned them. It is usually the child who has already worked out that the world will not hand them anything, and has decided to go and get it. She was that child at an age when most of us were still being told what we were good at.

That the dream was not handed down mattered to her, and still does.

“I grew up in the cigar industry, so that world was part of my upbringing and my family’s legacy. But medicine was something I chose for myself. I’ve never wanted my life to simply be a continuation of someone else’s story. I respect my family’s legacy deeply, but I also want to build my own.”

Arizona

She was in clinicals when meningitis went through her family. All of them ended up in hospital. She was the last to fall.

She tells this flatly, without asking for anything in return for it. It is the hardest chapter in her answers and one of the shortest, which is usually how you can tell someone is telling the truth rather than performing it.

Now read it against the beginning of this article. A car is where this story starts. A little girl too short to see over the dashboard, sitting beside the man she thought was the greatest person in the world, going somewhere together.

Years later she drove her family home, turned the car around and drove an hour back to the hospital to check herself in. Alone. Sick. Nobody in the passenger seat.

She does not point that out. She lists it as a detail, in brackets, so I would understand the distance. I have not been able to stop thinking about it.

“For two to three weeks, I lived between the hospital and school. I went to clinicals, went to class, slept at the hospital, showered there, changed into my scrubs, and went right back to taking care of my family. I did it day after day because there was no question in my mind, I was going to be there for them.”

Then she got sick, and went to class anyway.

“I still went to clinicals, trying to convince everyone, and myself, that I was ok. But you can’t fool medical professionals. One of my professors saw me sitting there with flushed cheeks, my head down on the table, and immediately knew something was wrong. They assessed me and told me I needed to leave class and check myself into the hospital. And they were right.

“As my family was being discharged, I was being admitted. I drove my family home, drove myself to the hospital alone.”

The hospital was an hour from where they lived. She made that drive by herself.

“That experience changed my perspective in ways I never expected. It changed how I looked at life, family, sacrifice, and even the path I thought I was destined to take. But there is one thing it never changed. I didn’t quit on myself.

“Sometimes life doesn’t take away your strength, it shows you just how much of it you have. If anything, I doubled down.”

She changed degree. She did it like someone keeping her options open on purpose.

“I made sure I was locking in my credits so that if I ever wanted to return to the medical field, I had kept that door open.”

“I wasn’t closing the door. I was leaving it unlocked.”

“I went on to graduate with honors and earned my place in the National Honor Society based on my academic performance. That mattered to me because I wanted to prove to myself that changing direction didn’t mean lowering my standards.”

She refuses to file that chapter under failure.

“I don’t believe it was a dream I abandoned because it was too difficult. It was a chapter that shaped me. The medical field was one path I was prepared to walk. Life ultimately put me on another. And honestly, I don’t believe time is wasted when you’re becoming the person you’re supposed to be.

“The discipline, the education, the ability to work under pressure and the desire to help people, none of that disappeared. I carried all of it with me. So no, I don’t think I stopped being that woman who wanted to go into medicine. I just became someone who found another way to make an impact.”

Does she think about the doctor she never became?

“I think about her sometimes, but I don’t miss her. I respect that version of me because she represented ambition and the willingness to work for something difficult. But my life took me somewhere I never could have planned. I think sometimes the life we planned isn’t the life we were meant to build.”

The dream got bigger

What she wanted at twenty-five is not what she wants now.

“When I was younger, I thought success had a very specific definition. A title, a certain career, a certain level of financial security. Now I see success differently. I want freedom, impact, meaningful relationships, and the ability to create opportunities for other people. My dream didn’t disappear, it got bigger.”

The unfinished one has a name on the door. It is the only time in five thousand words of answers that she brings up her own company without being asked, and she describes it as something she wants to outlive her involvement in it, which is a strange ambition for a consultant and a very familiar one for the daughter of someone who built a business.

“Building Consigliere Consulting into something that becomes bigger than me. I want it to be known as the person you call when you have a vision but don’t necessarily know how to get it into the right rooms. I would like people to recognize me as, she was good on her word, she came through. She’s good people.

“And honestly, I’m still building my own story too. There’s a lot I haven’t done yet.”

When the bill comes before the payment

Every dream has a stretch where it costs more than it returns. Hers came more than once.

“There have been times when I’ve worked multiple jobs, invested my own time and money, driven hours for an opportunity, and wondered whether the return was ever going to justify the sacrifice.

“But I’ve learned that sometimes you’re not being paid in money yet. You’re being paid in relationships, experience, reputation, and access. The knowledge you gain is priceless watching what you do when some of the people you started off with start to rise up and forget about you.

“So I kept going because I knew I was building something, and I knew quitting would guarantee that I would never find out where it could take me.”

One line in that answer is the only bitter note in five thousand words, and it is over almost before you catch it. Watching people you started out with rise, and forget you. She does not name anyone. She does not linger. She puts it in the middle of a sentence about what experience is worth and moves on, and that is somehow worse than if she had spent a paragraph on it.

She has no patience for the version of this advice that circulates online.

“Just quit your job and follow your dream. That’s romantic advice, but it’s not always responsible. Sometimes following your dream means working your job, paying your bills, taking care of your family, and building the dream at night until it can support you. There’s nothing wrong with having a practical bridge between where you are and where you want to be.”

What do you actually do in the meantime? She answers like someone who has done it.

“You work. You keep pushing. You maintain a steady income, maybe in a job that parallels what you’re doing. You build relationships. You learn. You save money. You reinvest when it makes sense. You take the meetings. You make the calls. You use your nights and weekends if that’s what it takes. I’ve never believed that having a dream means you get to stop being responsible.”

There is one question she puts to herself when something stops working.

“Resistance doesn’t automatically mean you’re on the wrong path. I ask myself, do I still believe in the purpose behind this, or am I just attached to proving somebody wrong? If the purpose is still there, I keep pushing. If I’m only holding onto something because of my ego, fear, or pride, it’s probably time to reassess.”

And one habit she rates above talent and above contacts.

“Follow-through. I’m willing to make the call, send the message, show up, follow up again, and keep my word. Talent can get someone’s attention. A contact can get you an introduction. But follow-through is what makes people trust you with the next opportunity.”

Who gets to hear it

“Tell people who have demonstrated that they want to see you win. Tell the people who were standing in the corner when you had nothing in your pockets. The people that don’t run a running tab on you.

“You don’t need everybody’s opinion. Some people will hear your dream and immediately give you ten reasons it won’t work. Other people will hear it and ask, okay, how can we make it happen? Those are the people you want around you.”

For anyone who has never said theirs out loud, the instruction is deliberately small.

“Write it down. Keep it to yourself. Then make one phone call, send one email, research one person, make one introduction. One action that makes the dream less imaginary. You don’t need the entire blueprint. You need the first step.”

What she would tell you

The last thing I asked her in this first round was what she would say to someone whose dream everybody around them thinks is unrealistic. She began with the doubters.

“First, I’d tell them to have compassion for the people who don’t understand their dream. Sometimes people aren’t trying to hurt you, they simply can’t see what you see. And sometimes, unfortunately, the people closest to you can be the ones who believe in you the least. That can hurt. I know what that feels like.

“But don’t confuse someone else’s inability to see your path with your inability to walk it. And I say that with a smile, because I’ve learned that you don’t have to convince everybody. The Art of War teaches us that the greatest victories aren’t always won by fighting every battle. Sometimes the smartest thing you can do is quietly prepare, keep moving, and let your results speak for you.

“I’ve been working since I was 12 years old, washing dishes. So I learned very early that nobody is coming to hand you your dream. You have to be willing to work for it when nobody is watching, learn what you don’t know, get back up when you get knocked down, and sometimes keep believing in yourself when you’re the only person in the room who does.”

“Your dream doesn’t have to make sense to everybody. It has to make sense to you.”

She wrote that late at night, from a phone, to someone on the other side of an ocean she has still never met face to face. Between customers. After a full day standing up. About a childhood that took things from her, a dream that did not survive, and a life she has built anyway, and she got through all of it without once asking to be admired for any of it.

That is the part I keep coming back to. Not what she has done. How little she asks for it.

And then the part nobody photographs.

“Everybody loves the exciting part. The big event, the celebrity, the announcement, the photograph. Nobody sees the hundreds of phone calls, emails, introductions, late nights, disappointments, and conversations that made that moment possible.

“The dream is built on ordinary days when nobody is applauding.”

Part 2 follows the years that took her into behavioral health, into work with children and inside the prison system, and into the business she runs today.

Karina Owen runs Consigliere Consulting, based in Pennsylvania. She advises cigar brands, retailers, event organisers, and individuals launching their own labels. Instagram: @staynclassyowen.