Meet Marianna
I spent years thinking I needed to choose one path. Instead, I kept following the things that challenged me, interested me, and made me better. Looking back, what seemed scattered at the time was actually building toward the same place.
The Timeline
None of these chapters felt connected while I was living them. Looking back, each one gave me something I would eventually use
in the work I do today.
SUMMER 2019 | I started my first personal training business.
At 18, I moved to a foreign country for college with every intention of building a business at the same time. As you can imagine, life humbled me quickly. Trying to navigate school, a new country, and entrepreneurship all at once turned out to be far more difficult than I had anticipated. During that period, I experienced severe poverty, homelessness, and serious mental health struggles.
WINTER 2019 | I came back home defeated and became an English teacher.
With no money and no realistic prospect of starting another business anytime soon, I took a job teaching English. It was not where I had imagined myself ending up, but for the time being, I needed stability more than I needed another big plan. Teaching gave me that, while developing skills in communication, patience, and explaining ideas clearly that I would end up using far beyond the classroom.
SPRING 2020 | Having saved some money, I started building again.
I wanted to do something bigger and more impactful, and by then I had already learned enough from my first business to know how difficult it was for independent personal trainers to handle everything on their own. I thought I could help by taking sales and marketing off their plate, so I launched a brokerage service for fitness professionals.
The response was immediate. Within the first three months, I had 30 trainers on board and the business was growing quickly. Then COVID hit, gyms shut down, and our operations came to an abrupt stop.
It was my first real lesson in how quickly a good business can be derailed by something completely outside your control.
SUMMER 2020 | The bankruptcy
After months of fighting to keep the company alive, I eventually had to let it go. With no money coming in and debt continuing to pile up, there was simply no realistic way to save it. I filed for bankruptcy and closed the business.
It hit me like a ton of bricks. I felt like a failure, and this time the weight of it felt much heavier because I did not feel as though I had only failed myself. There were people who had trusted me, worked with me, and relied on the business for income, and I carried that with me for a long time.
SUMMER 2020 | Entering nightlife
I needed work, desperately. COVID had changed the economy almost overnight, and the job market was brutal, so I applied for just about anything I could find. Somehow, that led me to a job managing a nightclub.
It was not exactly a natural fit for me, especially given how much I value structure, health, and balance, but I had debts to pay and a life to rebuild. So I did what I had to do, and in the process gained a tremendous amount of experience in sales, management, hiring, conflict resolution, and working with people under pressure.
WINTER 2021 | Freedom
I had finally paid off my debts, and for the first time in a while, I was free to ask myself a much better question: what did I actually want to do next?
I needed a change of environment badly enough that I decided to go as far as I reasonably could and moved to New York City. I built a freelance business in marketing and copywriting, which gave me the stability I had been missing, and little by little, I began making connections in the fitness industry again. Eventually, I returned to working independently as a personal trainer.
This time, it worked.
SUMMER 2024 | Starting to put it all together
While working successfully as a trainer, my interest in medicine and creativity started pulling me in again. I decided to pursue medical education with the long-term goal of becoming a pediatric neurosurgeon, and around the same time, I picked up a camera for the first time since I was a teenager.
That was when something finally clicked. The things I had spent years treating as separate interests were never really separate at all. I could build a life around all of them, and more importantly, I could make them useful to other people.
SUMMER 2026 | Marianna Ross launches
By then, I had spent years building my portfolios, expanding my network, and learning across every area I wanted the brand to represent. For the first time, I felt like I had enough experience behind me to stop preparing and actually build the thing I had been circling around for years.
That is how we got here. I officially launched my personal brand with the intention of continuing to build it alongside my medical education rather than putting one part of my life on hold for another. For the first time, everything I had learned had a place to live under the same name.
How All the Pieces Became One
For most of my adult life, I’ve never been able to give a straightforward answer to the question, “What do you do?” It has made me laugh uncomfortably more times than I can count because, realistically, how do you explain that writing, photographing people, spending years in fitness, studying medicine, and building businesses can all belong to the same career?
For years, I was called crazy, overly ambitious, obsessive, weird. There was always some version of the same advice underneath it: do less. Pick one thing, commit to one career, climb the ladder like everyone else and stop making life so complicated. At one point, I started wondering whether they were right.
I’m very glad I did the exact opposite.
Had I listened, I would not have accumulated nearly as much knowledge, experience, or as many useful skills as I have now. I may have missed a party or two because I was too busy studying whatever had captured my attention that month or working on one of my businesses, but boy, was it worth it.
I love business, and I have an almost compulsive need to solve problems. Eventually, I realized that instead of trying to force all of my interests into separate boxes, I could build something around the fact that they belong to the same person.
That is how Marianna Ross came to exist.
Advisory. Coaching. Studio. Editorial.
Nothing less and nothing more than what I am, what I know, and what I have spent years learning how to do well.
Shrinking myself was never the answer.
Systemizing it and making it useful to other people was.