Every day looks a little different for Christine Traylor, but here's how her morning typically starts: Traylor wakes up around 6:15 a.m., leaves the two-bedroom innkeeper's apartment that she shares with her husband and two young kids, and heads upstairs to the 10-bedroom Swann House bed and breakfast.
She begins preparing breakfast for a handful of guests (her favorite thing to make right now is bacon, egg and cheese sandwiches on English muffins with sharped aged cheddar). By 8:30 a.m., she is welcoming people for their first meal of the day.
From there, Traylor manages a staff of four, including housekeepers, a guest services associate and an associate innkeeper to "make sure everything's as perfect as it possibly can be."
"It's different every single day," Traylor, 40, tells CNBC Make It, "which is not so different from my international development days."
In early February, after years of planning, Traylor left behind her 15-year career in international development to run a bed and breakfast in Washington, D.C. It's "something I always wanted to do," she says.
She grew up in Richmond, Virginia, and was charmed by Southern hospitality. Friends referred to her as a "consummate host." She enjoyed cooking and baking for loved ones.
Realistically, owning a B&B didn't seem in the cards, and she pursued a career in international development after studying psychology and religion in college.
"I loved my job very much," she says of her former role as a government contractor, which involved starting and overseeing projects that supported the U.S. Agency for International Development, which delivers billions of dollars in humanitarian aid overseas.
Her feelings changed in 2022 after the Russian invasion of Ukraine ratcheted up the stress and internal politics in her job, she says. She needed a change.
"I did think that a bed and breakfast would be super fun to run. I just never really thought the means would align with the desire," Traylor says. "Then, when I really thought I needed a change in career, it was like, 'Maybe the means now are there for me to take a chance on that.'"
Taking a chance on a career change
Traylor spent the next two years thinking about what she wanted to do outside of her international development career. She eventually settled on translating her entrepreneurial and organizational skills to working in the hospitality industry.
Traylor began looking at properties in the D.C. area in February 2024. On a whim, she reached out to the owners of Swann House, a boutique hotel located in the historic Dupont Circle neighborhood. Traylor had never visited before but recalled her brother and sister-in-law having enjoyed a previous stay there. As luck would have it, the owners "very fortuitously were interested in selling," Traylor says.
From there, it took almost exactly a year to iron out the finances, draw up arrangements and officially take over the business in early February.
Traylor and her husband contributed roughly $1.3 million toward the purchase of the property, got a small-business loan for $5 million, and another loan for $779,000, according to documents reviewed by CNBC Make It.
They sold their six-bedroom house outside D.C. in October 2024 to help fund the purchase and planned to take up residence on the B&B property.
Throughout the year, "there were many times where we thought it was going to fall through," Traylor says. She and her husband, who works for a senator, ran the numbers multiple times to make sure they'd be able to continue supporting themselves through Traylor's career shift.
"I was never going to put my family in a situation where we were going to be in the red for the foreseeable future from an operating cost standpoint," she says.
Traylor's new pay is solely dependent on how well the business does, but she's hopeful she can recover most of her previous six-figure earnings.
Rooms at the Swann House generally go for $200 to $450 per night; the B&B hosts roughly four to six guests each weekday, and upwards of 16 on weekends. Big events are great for business, Traylor adds — the B&B was fully booked for inauguration weekend. They look forward to hosting guests for the upcoming World Pride celebrations beginning in May and the nation's 250th anniversary of independence in 2026.
Some of Traylor's personal costs are now covered by her job — she lives on the premises of the B&B and doesn't have a mortgage, plus utilities and some food costs are coupled with business expenses.
"It's very modest," Traylor says of her new home, adding that her family sometimes uses the B&B for dinner when guests aren't there, and they had their own Christmas in the space. "It's all we need."
Big risks and big rewards
Traylor has only officially been in her new job for a few weeks now, but she already feels happier than she was in the latter part of her career: "I don't want to say that this is better at large, it more feels like it's better for where I am personally [now]."
She still believes in the field of international development: "The work is so important," she says. Her exit happens to come at a challenging time for those working in the federal government and private employers that support their work. The dismantling of USAID through the Trump administration's mass firings of some 2,000 staff members, and thousands of others put on leave, is "absolutely horrific," Traylor says.
Since Traylor was not a federal employee, she was not impacted by the layoffs. She had been planning her career change for years before the recent tumult and felt this was the right moment to go. "There was never a time where I second-guessed, 'Oh, maybe I should stick it out and get through this rough patch and I'll be fine,'" she says.
"With big risks come big rewards, but not trying to be so dissuaded by the setbacks was the biggest lesson for me," Traylor says.
"The biggest surprise is how it can turn really sunny at the end when everything comes through," she adds. The business is "yours, and you're operating it, and you're able to make the changes that you think will really benefit the business in the end. I'm shocked every day about how great that feels."
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