When people speak about ‘accidental entrepreneurs’ the moniker fits Terri-Karelle Reid much more than others. Reid, who wanted to become a veterinarian, acquired a Doctor of Veterinary Medicine from a Cuban university to fulfill that dream — yes she is actually Dr Reid — but has never worked a day in her life as a vet.

The affable woman who wears an aura of confidence said her “first love and only love” is the sciences, a fact that has always caught people off-guard, and through that, becoming a veterinarian has always been her desire.

“Funny enough, when I was about three or four I was very clear that this is what I wanted to do — help animals. By the time I was about five or six I was already cleaning wounds on animals and bringing strays home and feeding them,” she reflected with a glint in her eye as she gesticulates in one motion as if to rehearse cleaning wounds.

It was a passion that was fed by her mother and grandmother, and Reid said at about the age of eight or nine she wrote to Howard Cooke, Jamaica’s governor general at the time, to let him “know that one day I will not only be a veterinarian, but I will have an animal shelter that will take care of all the animals in Jamaica”.

“And he wrote me back and he said, with the love and passion that you have, he’s certain that I’ll be a great veterinarian.”

Reid would eventually get a scholarship to study in Cuba, but when she returned to Jamaica in 2007 to do the board exams she was told Jamaica no longer accepts the Cuban qualifications and was directed to go to The University of the West Indies in St Augustine, Trinidad or Tuskegee University in Alabama, USA, for another three years of study, after already doing six years to the doctoral level, before she could be accredited to work in Jamaica.

“My mother cried in the parking lot where the veterinary board is located, and she said, ‘What you going to do? You only have the sciences. This is all, you know.’ And I looked at her and I said, ‘I don’t know,’ because my blinkers were on, and all I wanted to do was vet med. I didn’t even at the time have a resume.”

But Reid said she saw the rejection as a redirection into something else.

A decision to enter the Miss Jamaica World competition in 2005, which she won, and a year taken off from school to fulfill the obligations that come with the crown were about to propel her career into what it is known for today.

“While I was reigning [as Miss Jamaica World], I was invited to be an ambassador for a golf invitational here in Jamaica. Steve Harvey was there. Anthony Anderson was there. And while I was there I was interacting, I was speaking, I was hosting. And two years after, while I was disappointed about not getting the opportunity to practise vet med, I got a phone call from a gentleman I met at the golf tournament and he said, ‘Hey, have you ever considered public relations?’ And I said ‘Public relations? I don’t even know what public relations is.’ But he believed I related so well with the guests, and asked me to consider it.”

This job offer was with RISARC Consulting — a California-based health consulting firm — but Reid would be based in Jamaica for the work she did with them.

Then another offer came in, this time from Spartan Health Club — a gym and fitness facility based in St Andrew. That offer was for her to be the general manager for the company, even though she had no management experience.

“One day Mickey Haughton-James [the then proprietor of Spartan Health Club] called me into his office for a meeting and said, ‘I think you’d be very good as a general manager,’ because every summer I would come home [while studying in Cuba] and I would be a chaperone for the Miss Jamaica World finalists. And because of my help he said he realised that every single year it got easier for him until he wasn’t doing anything — I was handling the media, I was getting everything ready, I was organising the schedule. But when he invited me to be the general manager, at first I told him, ‘I don’t have the experience.’ And he said, ‘Sometimes we already do things. We have the skills and the traits and the attitude for a particular title, but we just don’t know it.’ And so I became the general manager of Spartan Health Club.”

While at Spartan, Reid was told by one of the Digicel Rising Stars competition judges, Nadine Sutherland, that auditions were being done for hosts, and she should try out. This was 2010. Reid went to the auditions during her lunch break and got “number 70 something” and waited her turn. All who were trying out to be hosts were given papers with lines for the audition, and Reid said she studied the lines and went and delivered, and went back to work.

Later that evening she was notified that she was selected as one of five shortlisted people for the role, with the proviso that each would be given a parish for the audition before a final decision was made by viewers in a vote about who would host. But Reid said she had to withdraw because Spartan Health Club, which had an affiliation with the Miss Jamaica World competition, was having conversations with Flow — a telecoms company which is a competitor for Digicel — to be a sponsor.

“One year later, I am still working at Spartan,and I got an email saying, ‘Would you still be interested in hosting the Digicel Rising Stars?’ “

She said after conversations with her boss about it, he gave her his blessing and the rest, as they say, is history. Reid has now been hosting the competition since then and is the longest-serving host.

However, as she hosted the programme, Reid said people began to tell her that she could explore other avenues, including events hosting.

A year later in 2012 she took up a role at The Gleaner as the online brand manager, and as the requests for hosting were coming in quick and fast, she began to contemplate. Events which clashed with her day job were turned down. For others, she said she was picky.

“I think it was my fifth year working at The Gleaner [when] I said, “What if I did this thing, this entrepreneurial thing? Which was never something I dreamt of or thought of…So even while I was doing this events hosting on the side I never acknowledged it as a business. I wasn’t thinking of it as business because I was never educated in that manner,” she readily admits.

She said she started second-guessing herself and the viabilty of having a business built on hosting events.

“I told myself, ‘Events are seasonal,’ and wondered if after having a good run one year, what would happen the next year if nobody invites me to host an event? How would I live? How would I eat? So, you know, I had this tug war that I think everybody who is in a nine-to-five has when they want to leave a job for another opportunity. And I just remember asking myself, ‘But what if? What if you are now able to scale and accept and choose the jobs that you want, the ones that you couldn’t do because it falls within your nine-to-five?’ “

Reid said after thinking through long and hard about starting her own business she decided to take the plunge and has never looked back since. She left her job at The Gleaner in 2017 and registered her company, TK Dreams Holding, deciding to have as broad a scope as possible, “Because I want to do other things. So I didn’t want it to just be Terri-Karelle. I wanted to expanded outside of Terri-Karelle.”

Through her company, Reid said she has been all over the world hosting events, as far away as Singapore. In the region she name drops territories such as Puerto Rico, Guyana, Trinidad, The Bahamas and Barbados as places she has hosted events under her brand, and through it has met world and business leaders.

But as she hosted, Reid said people began to tell her that she could also be a guest speaker at events. She started taking jobs in that capacity and was also a speaker on a TEDx Talks in 2021, at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic.

“My whole trajectory has been something that I have not planned. I cannot sit down here and tell you I’ve always wanted to be an entrepreneur, or that I had a five-step plan, five-year plan, 10-year plan projections, or anything like that. I’ve just been an accidental entrepreneur. A solopreneur really…where I have become the business, the brand and everything.”

“I’ve had to learn to navigate the spaces and learn the business — and this is another thing that creatives need to understand as I consider what I do as part of the creative system. It’s great for you to be talented and to be gifted but a lot of creatives I hear always talk about not really liking the business side, saying they are on the creative side. If you truly want to have a viable, sustainable business and you’re here, not as a fly by night or a one-hit maker, and you want to actually have something that is legacy-making and something that is going to have longevity, you have to understand the business of it, which means outside of your gift you have to know how to deal with clients. You have to know how to be efficient with how you respond to emails and how you invoice, and speak with clarity, and honour what you agree to.”

But getting gigs, especially at the onset of the pandemic, was not easy.

“[The year] 2020 was supposed to be my biggest year yet as a host, because now I had gotten more international requests, and I was like, ‘Wow, this is gonna be a great a year’. Then bup, March lick and I started to get emails saying, events cancelled. And so for five months I sat down there and I said, ‘Well, okay, what am I going to do with all this free time?’ “

She said in that time she did two things, wrote a book and built her website. She still maintains her website herself to this day.

The decision to build a website was to be a masterstroke for her. As the panic at the early stages of the pandemic subsided and clients were looking for hosts for their virtual events, she was found on the website — which chronicled her body of work — and after five months of no work the floodgates opened, with people from as far away as Malaysia contracting her to host their events.

“And I would put myself together from head to toe. Makeup done, everything. If I wanted to stand, I was fully dressed — no pajama bottoms. And when I started to post the events and how I looked, people said, ‘Well, she takes the job really seriously. I treated online hosting as if I was on a stage, and that is how I went through. And the more I presented myself in that manner, the more jobs I got, and so 2020 was a great year for me.

“And so for me it is all about preparation. No drama, no mix-up, and no bad vibes. I’m a very simple person who gets up and recommits to the job that I do every day.”

Asked where she will take the brand to next, Reid said it depends on what is happening, opening herself to being flexible about her options as she goes along. Always open to learning and being trainable, she is ready to take on any job.

“When one door closes it’s an opportunity to go through another,” she said. “Rejection is redirection.”