“Whatever you invest your energy in, at the end, it has to make sense,” says 44-year-old entrepreneur Anna Ivey. “If it doesn’t get you closer to your goals, you have to make a change.” Ivey took what she considers the road most traveled. She marched off to law school and served as an attorney in Los Angeles. But one afternoon while sitting in a conference room at a company retreat, she remembers thinking, “’Whose life here do you want?” She realized she came back with a null set. While she found her way into the admissions department at a law school, working her way up to dean, she saw it as a dead end job. “I couldn’t go up, and I knew I didn’t want to go lateral,” she says.
When I work for myself, there are really no limitations on where I could go.
So she jumped ship and launched inli.ne, a platform that assists students with their college applications. She wondered why there isn’t a “TurboTax for college applications.” So she decided to build it. She also used her experience in admissions to start Service2School, a free service that helps military veterans transition to college. Her passion is making sure no one feels alone. “You find the right people along the way to build the vision and execute with you, and that’s huge,” Ivey says.
Photos: Kat Wickstrom