Key Takeaways Lorraine Pater left an auditing job at KPMG to stay at home with her two daughters for a decade, then re-entered work on her own terms as a franchisee.
She and her husband, Todd, chose Smoothie King because it fit their active lifestyle, they were longtime daily customers and they had seen a neighbor successfully scale to 40 locations.
Starting in 2016 with one store, they’ve steadily grown to 10 locations clustered around the same area in Florida.
For years, Lorraine Pater had her eyes on the prize — making partner at KPMG, one of the Big Four accounting firms.
She had interned at the company for two summers in college and joined its ranks of auditors right after graduating. She recalls spending one New Year’s Eve doing an inventory audit of diamonds — counting them, measuring them and looking at their color and clarity to ensure they passed inspection.
“That was kind of fun,” Lorraine tells Entrepreneur in a new interview. “You audit all kinds of different stuff.”
Her main task was auditing a bank’s quarterly financials for her first two years on the job. Lorraine says that she “loved” her job, but was at a crossroads after she had her first child, her daughter Brooke. She was about to get back to work after a five-week maternity leave, and was having an anniversary dinner with her husband, Todd Pater, when he asked her a difficult question: “Are you excited about going back to work next week?”
“I started crying,” she recalls. “I was like, ‘I don’t know if I want to go back. I think I want to stay home with Brooke.’”
Todd had a copier business at the time that was doing well, so he said that she didn’t have to go back; they could afford for her to stay at home.
“It was a random conversation,” Lorraine says. “After being home for five weeks with her [Brooke], I didn’t want to leave her. So we always laugh about that.”
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