The founder of EZPZ Party Planning grew up split between two very different homes and stayed in an abusive relationship for ten years. Here is how she broke free, rebuilt her mind, and turned her pain into a multimillion-dollar business.
Kim Perrymond can plan a celebrity’s party without breaking a sweat. She has worked events for Bravo TV, singer K. Michelle, and entrepreneur Pinky Cole, and her company, EZPZ Party Planning, now trains other planners and runs a software company built for creative business owners. But none of that came easy, and none of it came first. Before the empire, there was a childhood split in two, a decade spent in an abusive relationship, and a woman who had to learn, slowly and painfully, that she was allowed to want more for herself.
A Childhood Split Between Two Worlds
Perrymond is the youngest of four girls, and her mother, who struggled with drug addiction, made a choice that shaped everything that came after: she sent Perrymond to live with her aunt. For years, young Perrymond believed she had simply been given away, an unwanted burden passed off to someone else. It took growing up to see that moment differently. “I realized later on in life that I was chosen,” she said.
Her aunt lived the kind of life Perrymond had never seen up close, one with a steady job, a nice car, and a proper home. She enrolled Perrymond in dance recitals and private schools and made sure she was in church every week. But whenever Perrymond visited her mother’s house, she stepped into an entirely different world, one with no rules and no bedtime, and something in her wanted to stay there. “I still wanted to do hoodrat things,” she admits. “I wanted to be able to smoke cigarettes because I thought all of those things were really fun.”
Living between those two worlds turned out to be the making of her. She was the only one of her sisters to finish high school, the only one to go to college, and eventually the first millionaire her family had ever known. She credits her aunt for that, not just for the discipline, but for showing her that another life was even possible. “You can’t be what you can’t see,” Perrymond says. “If I hadn’t seen my aunt have a better life, go to college, make more money, and be successful, I wouldn’t know that other side existed.”
Ten Years in an Abusive Relationship
As a young woman, Perrymond fell into a relationship that would consume the next 10 years of her life. She stayed because she believed she could change him, and because she wanted, more than almost anything, the kind of two-parent household she had never had growing up. That hope kept her holding on long after she should have let go.
When the relationship finally ended, it left her in a depression so heavy she could barely function, let alone care for her children the way she wanted to. She was not eating right, not moving, not really present, and it was her own son who first said it out loud. “I heard my son one day just telling my mom that I was not feeding them,” she remembers. “That just kind of struck me.” The shame of hearing it, of recognizing a pattern she had sworn she would never repeat from her own childhood, became the spark that finally pushed her to fight for herself.
She found her way to a personal development event called The Awakening, led by business coach Stormy Wellington, and one line from that day has stayed with her ever since: “You are not a tree, you can move.” “If you do not like your finances, if you do not like the car that you drive, if you don’t like the house that you live in, you’re not a tree,” Perrymond says. “You can move.” She stopped waiting for a different life to find her. She got up and started building one herself.
Leaving Teaching to Build a Business from Nothing
Before any of it, Perrymond was a teacher, and she loved the classroom. She loved commanding a room full of kids and watching them light up when she read to them. But love for the work could not stretch a teacher’s salary far enough to build the life she pictured for herself. “This salary is not going to get anything on my visual board,” she recalls, and she knew something had to change.
So, she searched, literally typed the question into Google, for anything she could invest in with almost no money. What she found was inflatable bounce houses, and she jumped in without fully understanding what she was getting into. The equipment showed up at her door heavier than she ever imagined, and she had no truck, no muscle, and no plan for moving it. She told FedEx to leave everything on her back porch and figured the rest out from there, one problem at a time.
That clumsy, uncertain beginning eventually grew into a multimillion-dollar event company, but the path between the two was anything but smooth. She lost her first event space to eviction after learning the hard way that hustle and talent alone were not enough to run a business. Years later, after moving to Atlanta, she handed a man a $40,000 check for what she believed would be her own event space, only to discover afterward that he never actually owned the building. “You have to grow through what you go through,” she says of that painful lesson. Today, she owns her own event space in Atlanta, built on the systems, policies, and team she assembled from every mistake along the way.
The System That Changed Everything
If Perrymond had to point to one turning point in her business, it would be the moment she stopped running everything by hand and finally built real systems. It started almost by accident. Pregnant and unable to keep up her usual pace, she began selling digital party props online just to keep some money coming in. The idea took off, earning her more than $90,000, but she was still collecting every payment through Cash App and tracking every order herself.
Once she automated that process, letting customers purchase and receive their products without her lifting a finger, everything shifted. Her business grew faster than it ever had, and she now teaches other entrepreneurs to build that same kind of structure into their own work. She compares it to a quick trip to the store: you go in for tissue, but you walk out with a pack of gum, a Snickers bar, and a Coke too. “What is the Snickers bar in your business?” she asks her clients, pushing them to find the small extra offer that turns a single sale into something bigger, and turns a busy season into steady, dependable income.
Her Advice for Anyone Starting Over
Perrymond built her network the same deliberate way she built her business, by giving before she ever asked for anything in return. She calls it serving her way to the top, and it means showing up fully for people without worrying first about what she might get out of it. “Not thinking so much of what I can get from this person, but what value can you bring to those people,” she explains. That mindset is how a sponsored event for a school, where singer Fantasia performed, turned into a client that has hired her every single year since, simply because she treated the free job with the same care she gives a paid one.
For anyone reading her story while facing their own hardship, whether it is trauma, an unhealthy relationship, or the fear of starting a new career from scratch, Perrymond has one message she comes back to again and again. “Everything that you are going through right now is preparing you for the person that you have to become,” she says. It is the same lesson she now passes on to her three sons, hoping they carry it further than she ever could.
“You are not a tree. You can move.”
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