FLORIDA MOM MAGAZINE - October '08 - Bianca Evans - Baymeadows DestinyBy: Michele Gillis Photos: Carrie-Lynn Smith
 Bianca Evans, a business broker with Transworld, always knew she was going to adopt a child. It was just a matter of finding the right one.
“I just knew that there was a child that wasn’t biological to me, but that was meant to be with us,” said Evans. “I just needed to find that child.”
Evans said the first time she ever thought about adoption was in her early teens. “I believe I saw ‘The Josephine Baker Story’ where she had adopted all these children and had a rainbow colored family,” she said. “I said to myself that one day I’m going to adopt. Ever since that time, I’ve always wanted to adopt.”
Evans and her husband, Michael, a financial analyst for the Mayo Clinic, met in high school.
After their daughter Amelia, now 5, was born, they decided they were ready to adopt a child from China. “I had read a lot about the girls in China not having the same status in society as boys and that they really didn’t want their girls,” said Evans. “I almost always knew I was going to adopt from China. When we started the adoption process, we considered other countries, but every time we looked at different options, we kept coming back to China every time. So, it was like, ‘Ok, this is meant to be.’”
They decided to go with an adoption agency, Great Wall China Adoptions. “There is a lady here locally that helps with paperwork and helps facilitate the process,” said Evans. “So, we hired her and started the process.”
The process to adopt usually takes about a year to a year-and-a-half, but Evans’ wait kept getting extended. She decided to approach the situation differently. “I had always wanted to look at children with special needs,” she said. “I knew that every special need would not be right for me, but I decided to ask for the ‘list’ of special needs children.” Their first two adoptions fell through, but Evans didn’t give up. “They called me and said they wanted to try a pilot program to expedite adoption of special needs children,” she said. They contacted her with a list of three children. “One was a boy and we were looking for a girl,” she said. “One was four years old and we had a three-year-old and we had been advised not to adopt outside birth order,” she said. “The third one was about eight months old and had a heart condition. I didn’t even see her picture and I said, ‘Yep, she’s the one.’”
Most of us would shudder at the thought of taking on a child with a heart condition because the fear of losing her would be too great, but Evans knew better. “Prior to doing business brokerage, I was the sales manager for a manufacturing firm locally,” she said. “I would travel both domestically and internationally and I would physically be in surgery watching our product. Our product was used in a lot of surgeries, but our niche was pediatric cardiac surgery. So, I saw babies a few days old having heart operations. I saw all kinds of kids getting heart surgery, so I think I was less afraid than someone else would be.”
They started the adoption process and eventually went to China to bring Emme, now 2, home. “When we were over there, Emme was very ill,” she said. “She had some sort of terrible cold, but it turned out to be Respiratory Syncytial Virus (RSV). She was in the Intensive Care Unit and we were horribly scared. Michael had to go back and take care of Amelia, so that night I spent in the emergency room was probably the longest night of my life.”
Emme was in the hospital for five or six days. “I said to my husband, ‘I feel like I should be the one staying with her, but I can’t tell you why, I just feel like I need to go home,” she said. “He said ‘Ok’. So, Amelia and I left as scheduled and he stayed.”
She got them home the Friday after Thanksgiving. “When I came home, I slept for like an entire day,” she said. “I thought something is not right. I remembered I had an old pregnancy test and didn’t even know if it was expired or not. I thought ‘No.’ Then I thought ‘Could it be? No.’ I took the pregnancy test at 7 a.m. and I just started crying.”
Evans couldn’t believe she was pregnant. She waited until her husband came home from China to share the news that she was pregnant with Triston, now 14 months. “I said ‘Oh by the way, I’m pregnant,’” said Evans. “He said ‘I can’t talk about his right now’ and went to take a shower. It was just so weird. It didn’t even cross my mind that I could be pregnant. We always knew we wanted a third but, we hadn’t 100 percent decided and we certainly weren’t going to do it that quickly. It was just so funny.”
Emme had her surgery a year ago and is doing great, barring a few speech problems. “When we first adopted her, I noticed that the quality of her voice was a little odd,” said Evans. “I took her to an ear, nose and throat doctor who put a scope down her nose and discovered one of her vocal cords was paralyzed. So, she’s a little speech delayed, but she is a smart cookie. We go to speech therapy and she is absolutely perfect.”
Evans has a bachelor’s degree in psychology, with a minor in German and business from the University of Florida. She grew up in Central Florida and moved to Jacksonville when she and her father bought an awning company. She decided to get out of the awning business and become a business broker when her first child was born.
As a business broker, Evans specializes in business sales. “If a business wanted to sell, we would help them list their business and sell it,” said Evans. “We do it confidentially, so the employees won’t find out. If an employee finds out you are for sale, they are going to get very nervous and try to go somewhere else. You don’t want customers to know you are selling because then they will be uneasy and wonder why you are selling.”
She lists the companies on a multiple listing service just for business brokers and on various business-for-sale Web sites. “I do a lot of financial analysis,” she said. “I look at tax returns, profit and loss statements, cash register receipts or whatever is necessary to establish a value for their business.”
If someone is looking to buy a business, they contact her company. She would have them come into the office to discuss options and financially pre-qualify them. They sign a confidentiality agreement saying that they won’t talk about the business being for sale. After that is in place, then she gives them the details of where the business is located and what the specific financials are.
She has sold everything from cafés, manufacturing companies, distributing companies, restaurants, HVAC companies, retail and everything in between.
As far as a support system, Evans says her husband and parents are very helpful. “We are an old fashioned traditional German family,” she said. “We have a house where we have part of it and my parents have their own master suite on the opposite end of the house. With my husband and I starting our relationship so young, he kind of grew up with my parents. When we were in college, I commuted from the University of Florida and he lived with my parents while attending a community college. I lived with my parents too, but we had separate rooms. After we were married, we lived with them for a while.”
Evans said for the next few years, they lived with her parents on and off and finally decided that was the way it worked best. “We just decided to keep living together and bought a house in Deerwood,” she said. “Without my mom, I couldn’t do what I do. There is no way. It’s kind of a communal house. Everyone has their roles. I always knew I was going to work outside the home. In today’s economy, it’s hard not to work. My husband is very active with the children and takes them to their extracurricular activities. We just make it work.”
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