Failure is a feeling that often rings loudly. Adversity is a chapter in every person’s story. And the comebacks are the stories that we keep close to our hearts, that strengthen us for the future.
Tamar Gakharia, Nigel Tunnacliffe and Ebonee Brown have built careers in vastly different worlds—finance, driving education and travel, respectively. But some of the most enduring structures of their careers weren’t built during seasons of ease, but emerged from the moments when they had to start over from the ground up, a step in building their skyscraper mentality.
Tamar Gakharia, © Sophia Papiashvili
For Gakharia, her life’s deepest lessons “come not from success, but from collapse.” Now advancing the country of Georgia’s financial and economic stance as chief financial officer of investment management firm LLC GIS Group, she can’t forget her greatest, yet most transformative, setback: the aftermath of her country’s turbulent fight for independence from the Soviet Union.
Courtesy of Nigel Tunnacliffe
Similarly, Tunnacliffe knows that panic is our first instinct when things go awry in life. But he learned a trick to counteract that response immediately: “Time to go to work.” He adopted this thinking tool from his driving instructor, while learning to ride a motorcycle in his late teens. He would later apply this tactic to his business, driving education school Coastline Academy.
“If you look at the oncoming car, or you look at the edge of the road, that’s where you’re going. If you think, ‘Don’t panic,' you’re going to panic,” Tunnacliffe says. “If you think, ‘All right, time to go to work’—boom. Just focus on what you need to do, then you can get through it.”
Courtesy of Ebonee Brown
And for someone who works in the unpredictable world of travel, Brown, a former higher education recruiter turned InteleTravel adviser, learned early on to hold a strong front and remember that obstacles are part of the itinerary. “In the travel world, typically [perfection] is not the outcome. There’s always some type of obstacle or thing that we have to overcome in order to be able to get the final result,” she says.
These three professionals faced unpredictable paths and rebuilt with a shared mindset, using resilience as their momentum.
Catalysts for Redirection
Growing up in post-Soviet Georgia in the ‘90s, Gakharia witnessed economic and financial failures firsthand—hunger, poverty, broken infrastructure and a perished economy. These severe times shaped her mindset as a child and how she would contribute to and uplift her country as an adult. With over a decade of experience in corporate finance, financial consulting and investment, her career path was deeply driven by her wish to make an impact.
While finance was a route to establishing herself and shaping a successful career, it was also about change. “I saw that finance was not just about profit or policy.... It is about survival and about the sovereign entity of a person and the sovereignty of the business,” Gakharia says. “And when a nation loses its economic footing, it loses its confidence in its ability to dream.”
For Tunnacliffe, his positive mindset switch isn’t just for driving moments. It’s for any challenging situation—namely, rewriting the course for Coastline Academy.
The company was created to educate future generations about driving safety and reduce car crashes through new technology. However, their product didn’t gain enough traction, and they decided to pivot.
“We were probably a year into being an actual driving school,” he recalls. “I was still teaching driving as an instructor, and we were sort of figuring out all the pieces of the business, and around the beginning of the second year—when everything sort of started falling into place—we were able to find the instructors that we needed.”
Brown’s shift into travel began by helping create travel plans for her close family and friends, sparking a potential side hustle. What started out as an annual holiday getaway every Martin Luther King Jr. weekend—she and her family would plan a vacation to a new destination each time—became a possible, full-time opportunity.
She’s planned trips to destinations ranging from the beaches of Puerto Vallarta, Mexico, and the Dominican Republic to the slopes of Breckenridge, Colorado. “It was a public group,” she says of the initial travel group. “I invited everyone on social media through Instagram and Facebook. I invited them to join, put out a flyer, and I got a lot of feedback.”
Her passion and clientele grew, and at the time, her husband was battling cancer, making her career switch a logical transition that allowed for a better-managed schedule and more time for her family.
Perseverance Through It All
Their adaptability wasn’t only for undefined moments; it carried them through uncertain ones, too.
Gakharia’s resilience became a guiding leadership principle: “Leadership is [the] ability to find clarity in such kind of chaos and build structure when you have all the ruins around you.”
She believes that personal breakthroughs are formed through fueling hunger for knowledge and self-development, transparency, accountability and eagerness to grow—layers that build stability over time.
Tunnacliffe says Coastline’s gateway success would not have been possible without their core values: being people-first, transparent and efficient. Their team emphasizes taking care of each other and putting customer service first. “People-first culture has to be really built into our systems,” he says.
And staying true to being people-first wasn’t easy during COVID-19. They were three years in and realized they couldn’t operate as they were before. “Six-foot social distancing doesn’t work inside a car,” he says.
Transitioning into a temporarily closed period, they decided to let many of their driving instructors go and focused on rebuilding their company. Since their reopening, they’ve scaled and entered a new pilot partnership with the U.S. Army, helping future recruits—who may be waiting longer to learn to drive—obtain the civilian licenses required for military careers.
The future is unpredictable, but Tunnacliffe’s “time to go to work” motto is what keeps his outlook steady.
Brown, running a one-woman operation, knows resilience is her anchor when advocating for her clients. The travel industry is full of last-minute changes and urgent problems. Brown knows the commission-based job isn’t always reliable as her income varies monthly. She emphasizes that a sustainable business requires integrity, growth and a people-first mentality, not just a focus on the numbers.
“I definitely think that it does take a special person to be in this type of role, and I don’t take it for granted when someone is entrusting me with such a great, monumental trip or a milestone trip,” Brown says. “And they’ve spent thousands of dollars. And they’re wanting me to make sure that it goes as effortlessly as possible.”
This article was first published in theMay/June 2026 issue of SUCCESS Magazine. Get your copy here.
Featured images: Tamar Gakharia, © Sophia Papiashvili; Courtesy of Nigel Tunnacliffe; Courtesy of Ebonee Brown
