It takes a particular type of courage to knock on a stranger's door…repeatedly.
You don't know who's on the other side or if they'll be kind or irritated, open or closed. You only know that you showed up and that what happens next depends entirely on your ability to read the room.
Sharonda Stewart has been practicing that skill her entire life.
Long before she became the owner of The Appliance Gals, an Atlanta-based appliance repair and sales business with a 4.8-star Google rating and 230+ reviews, Sharonda was logging thousands of hours at the front doors of strangers. Raised as a Jehovah's Witness in the Mid-West, she spent her childhood, adolescence, and early adulthood canvassing neighborhoods as a pioneer — the religion's most dedicated category of door-to-door outreach. As a regular pioneer, that meant 90 hours of knocking on doors per month.
"I was in it because I thought I was actually saving people's lives," she says now, with a clarity that only comes from hindsight. "Because that's what you think. I'm actively saving this person's life. So, I was definitely all in."
She was all in, and without realizing it, she was also building one of the most powerful business skills there is: the ability to sense the needs of others and then meet that need.
What a Lifetime of Knocking on Doors Actually Teaches You
Before Sharonda could name what she was learning, she’d already spent over 3,000 hours doing it.
Door-knocking as a Jehovah's Witness wasn't just evangelism. It was training in public speaking, preparation, repetition, and presence. Members were graded on their presentations. There were five-minute talks, role plays, study sessions, and a core rhetorical principle she still carries: repeat for emphasis.
"Repetition for emphasis has stayed with me all my life," she says. "That was one of the things they always said: ‘you've got to repeat things to emphasize it.’ So you say the same thing over and over again."
She also spent those years traveling through vastly different communities from Chicago's South Side to rural Indiana, and eventually all across Georgia, accumulating what most business schools would call market research, but what Sharonda simply calls knowing people.
"I've seen the ugliest of people. I've seen the nicest of people," she reflects. "I grew up in Chicago and in Indiana, so I have an understanding of diverse people. I'm in the houses with the red hats and in the houses that are Black Panthers. Essentially, we are all the human race. Our homes look the same. Our fridges look the same. Our laundry detergent is the same."
This is the insight at the core of everything Sharonda has built. A genuine orientation toward people and an understanding that the person in front of you, regardless of what they look like or where they live, has the same fundamental needs. And when you know that, service becomes natural.
Why She Left, and What She Took With Her
Sharonda left the Jehovah's Witness practice in her early twenties without a plan, but with a whole lot of conviction. She'd fallen in love with a woman, and the doctrine told her that meant God hated her.
"That feels like some bull," she says. "God hates me because of love? I know the all-loving God we’re talking about. So, once you get a crack in your system, then more cracks will happen."
She lost nearly everyone when she left, including members of her immediate family, community, and her entire social architecture. But the upside of that season of deep grief is that Sharonda was finally free to figure out who she actually was. She worked retail, waitressed, did customer service for ATA Airlines, got her real estate license, and bird-dogged investment properties in Chicago — going inside vacant houses to photograph them for investors before anyone asked her to.
Looking back now, the thread in Sharonda’s journey is unmistakable. Every move was the same: show up, figure out what's needed, and serve from that knowledge.
"I can see it now," she says, reflecting on the pattern. "I’ve actually always been about customers. I could think about the times where I was the over-the-top server. I got good tips, but it wasn't because I was going for the money. I just naturally am that way with people."
How She Turned "Just Figuring It Out" Into 15 Years in Business
Sharonda's entry into appliances was almost pre-destined. Her grandmother and great-uncle had migrated to Chicago and started a used appliance and furniture shop. Her uncles became repair technicians, and by the time she was 23, her brothers recruited her to help with securing a family business license.
But what she built from there wasn't just a continuation of a family trade. It was an expression of everything she'd always known how to do. She studied the market the way she'd studied neighborhoods, noticing what people undervalued and seeing what others overlooked. When she moved to Atlanta and started from scratch, she took a strategic approach to the business. She went to already-established used appliance shops, took better photos of their inventory, looked up actual market value, and started selling their merchandise for them online.
"I just want them out the door," she says of one early supplier who had gun safes sitting in an appliance shop, not understanding what they were worth. She saw the value, did the research, and made the move.
Eventually, Sharonda found her way to repair, which became the heart of The Appliance Gals. She started delivering appliances and noticed customers were just replacing their broken appliances. She reframed the pitch: fixing your appliance is the same as buying a used one, except you know what you're working with — and a service model was born. Nearly 15 years later, her business runs on the same principle it always has.
"My most proud accomplishment is that I'm honest," she says. "I stick to honesty. I say I don't know when I don't know, and I think my business is better for it."
Steal These Moves
Sharonda's story is about much more than appliances. It's about what happens when someone spends a lifetime invested in genuinely serving people and then points that skill at building something.
Here's what her path teaches anyone building on their own terms:
Your formative experiences are data. Sharonda spent years in a context she eventually had to leave, but she extracted real, transferable skills from it. The door-knocking taught her to read people. Public speaking taught her to communicate with repetition and emphasis. The service work taught her that showing up fully for people isn't a strategy, it's a way of being. Before you dismiss a chapter as irrelevant, ask what it actually taught you.
Care is a competitive advantage. In a market full of repair services competing on price, Sharonda competes on trust. A 4.8 rating after 14+ years is the compound interest of showing up honestly, every time. In most industries, that kind of transparency is rare enough to become a differentiator.
The move that saves you might not look like a business decision. Leaving her religious community wasn't even a career strategy. It was a boundary Sharonda drew around her own humanity. But that decision to trust what she knew to be true about love and people over what an institution told her is the same instinct that runs through every smart business call she's ever made.
Nearly fifteen years in business. Thousands of appliances repaired across Georgia. A career built on a deep, lifelong habit of paying attention to people.
Sharonda Stewart's one move was never about appliances.
It was about knowing that every door you knock on is opened by someone who just wants to be seen — and building an entire life and business around the fact that she's genuinely glad to meet them..
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