Our founder Jami Shapiro didn’t set out to build a company. She was just trying to figure out how to be a mother and still have something of her own.
It started with a “no.”
Before Silver Linings Transitions existed, Jami was pregnant with her first child, working a job she genuinely liked. She and another mom on her team had the same worry: how do you keep working and still be there for your kids? So they went to management together with an idea. Let them job-share the position, split it between the two of them, each working part-time. They were even willing to give up their benefits to make it happen.
The answer was no.
So they both quit. Not because they wanted to, but because there wasn’t really another option.
“When I was pregnant with my first child, I went to the company I worked for and asked if I could job-share with another mom. We both wanted to work part-time, and we were both willing to give up our benefits to do it. The company wasn’t flexible, and they wouldn’t let us. So we both ended up quitting.” Jami said.
That one conversation, and the “no” that came out of it, is part of what pushed Jami into real estate, a career she’d end up building for more than a decade.
A ten-day wait that changed everything.
Years later, with a one-year-old and a three-year-old at home, Jami learned she had thyroid cancer. She spent ten days waiting for a pathology report before she knew what she was actually facing. People sometimes call it “the good cancer.” That label doesn’t do much for the ten days of not knowing.
That wait stayed with her. It left her asking a question a lot of people ask after a scare like that, but don’t always act on: what would it actually look like to spend her working life on something that mattered to her? A few other jobs came and went before the answer took shape.
In 2014, she founded Silver Linings Transitions, a San Diego Senior Move Management company. The name comes from what she held onto after that experience, that even the hardest chapters can leave you with something worth building on.
The invisible math of being a working mom.
Jami started Silver Linings Transitions while she was also going through a divorce (read more about that here), building a new business and raising her kids largely on her own. She’s talked about one specific memory from that time: picking her kids up at the end of the day and hearing them complain that she’d had to work. The same thing didn’t happen when her children’s father picked them up.
It’s a small moment, but it’s not really about that one afternoon.
“There’s this expectation that women will go to work and still carry the majority of everything else at home, whether you’re single, married, or somewhere in between,” Jami has said.
Coupled or not, a lot of women end up carrying both roles at once. Few people acknowledge how hard that actually is.
The motherhood penalty.
Jami didn’t fully understand how deep this went for other women, outside of her own experience, until she was the one doing the hiring.
She started noticing that women who had taken time away from their careers to raise children are still paying for it, sometimes years later.
And then there’s the economic disadvantage mothers face at work. Research has found that employers are less likely to hire mothers for managerial roles and they may earn less than women without children.
And plenty of companies still aren’t willing to offer basic flexibility, the kind a woman might need to pick her kids up from school or handle whatever her family needed that week.
“I discovered that women who did take time off of their careers to be home with their children paid a penalty for that,” Jami has said. “There were employers who didn’t value their time being stepped away. And a lot of times, employers don’t offer flexibility. So if a woman needs to pick her kids up or has responsibilities to her family, it’s also harder to get hired.”
In other words: women step away to do something families genuinely need. Then the workplace punishes them twice, once for leaving, and again for trying to come back.
Jami has said plainly that this is the reason a woman-owned business matters to her at all:
“I think that the significance of a woman-owned business to Silver Linings is that I run the business from that experience.”
Why a woman-owned business runs differently.
Jami didn’t build Silver Linings Transitions to make a point. She built it because she remembered exactly what it felt like when someone turned her down for asking for something reasonable. It shows up in real, practical ways.
We don’t treat women coming back to work… like a risk. We treat them like exactly the kind of hire worth making. Schedules bend around real life instead of the other way around. A gap on a resume doesn’t count against anyone here.
Jami calls the culture that’s grown out of this a “volleyball mindset,” everybody covering for each other, nobody left to let the ball drop alone.
Several members of the team have stayed five or ten years, which isn’t common in this industry. That kind of loyalty tends to grow out of a workplace finally treats people the way they always needed, something many didn’t find elsewhere.
Nobody builds this alone.
Jami is honest that she didn’t get here by herself. A business mentor who became a sounding board. Colleagues who believed in her work early on, before there was much proof it would go anywhere.
Her own mother, who was willing to share her story publicly so other families might feel a little less alone. Women who kept choosing to invest in her, even in moments when the world around them wasn’t set up to make that easy.
She’s spent the years since trying to do the same for others.
There’s a second thread to her story, too. At 45, after her oldest child was diagnosed with ADHD, Jami started recognizing the same patterns in herself, and later, in her own mother. That led to her podcast, Grandma Has ADHD, and her book, This Explains So Much, work aimed at a group that doesn’t get talked about much: older adults discovering ADHD later in life.
And even there, she leaned on another woman to help her make sense of it. She credits fellow ADHD advocate Wilma Felman with a description that finally explained something about her own brain.
“Wilma taught me ‘squirtle’ on her episode,” Jami has said. “She says she is part squirrel and part turtle. I never realized my ‘go go go’ and then ‘hit a wall’ was something other people with ADHD did too.”
Sometimes it really is just one person, offering the right word at the right moment.
Why this matters on Women’s Equality Day.
Women’s Equality Day is a chance to notice where that work is still happening, quietly, in ordinary places. Places like a small business in San Diego, run by a woman who heard no once, and decided to spend the rest of her career making sure other women heard yes.
Jami has talked about grounding that work in the Jewish value of Tikkun Olam, the idea that each of us carries a piece of the responsibility to help repair the world. For her, that’s not really a philosophy to talk about. It’s closer to a daily habit than a belief system.
Today, Jami is a Certified Senior Move Manager and Certified Senior Advisor. She’s also an ADHD Specialist and Coach. She currently serves as President of NASMM (the National Association of Senior & Specialty Move Managers®) for the 2026–2027 term. Silver Linings Transitions holds NASMM A+ Accreditation, a distinction fewer than 10% of move management companies nationally can claim.
But if you ask her what she’s actually proud of, it’s rarely any of that. It’s that a woman who once had to quit a job just to be a mother can walk into her company and be hired because of that exact experience, not in spite of it.
She didn’t wait until she had everything figured out to start Silver Linings Transitions, and she still doesn’t wait for the perfect moment to show up for the women around her. She just keeps doing it, one person at a time.
Want more of Jami’s story? Read her full feature on The Faces of San Diego.
Facing a move or a transition of your own? Silver Linings Transitions has spent over a decade helping San Diego families downsize, rightsize, and start over with care, from a team that’s been through hard transitions themselves. We treat your family’s story with the same respect they’d want for their own. Reach out to Silver Linings Transitions to talk through what’s next. No pressure, no judgment, just help.