MULTI ENTREPRENEUR CHANAY WALTON RE-LAUNCHES HER TRAVEL APP

Chanay Walton is the founder and owner of A Better Weigh, a medically assisted weight loss program, and My Pay Circle, an app that allows it users to organize group trips and manage payments. Photo provided by Charisse Barnachea
Chanay Walton is the founder and owner of A Better Weigh, a medically assisted weight loss program, and My Pay Circle, an app that allows it users to organize group trips and manage payments. Photo provided by Charisse Barnachea

 Multi entrepreneur Chanay Walton re-launches her travel app

BY TIA CAROL JONES
Chanay Walton created My Pay Circle in 2019. It is an app that allows its users to organize trips and payments for group travel. When the pandemic hit and people stopped traveling, she decided to pivot and retool the app, with a focus on how travel would change post pandemic. Now, she is ready to re-launch the app in 2022.

Walton came up with the idea one night when she had the word “pay” stuck in her head. She likes to travel with groups of her
friends. The next day, she called app developers to create the app.

Walton let people test out the app and those people had the same experience with organizing trips and payments. Developing
the app was a fun experience for her. She was able to meet new people in tech and was awarded the Women Tech Founders’
Women in Tech Lifestyle award in 2019.

Having the world shutdown due to COVID-19, allowed Walton to go back to the drawing board and come up with new ideas and new features for the app. “It just gives us the opportunity to kind of make it better and more robust, to kind of fit when things get back into action,” Walton said.

Walton also is the founder of A Better Weigh, a medical weight loss center that uses FDA approved medications for weight
management. Walton struggled with her own weight management issues after having her son in 2014. She likes to say, “I’m not
only the president, I’m also a client.” She also has experience as a registered nurse.

A Better Weigh offers three medically assisted weight loss programs. A Better Weigh has two Chicago locations, one location in Tinley Park and the other one in Schererville, Ind.

Walton always had a love of music and enjoyed it. She has a nephew who wanted to get into the music industry as a rapper.
She invested in him and started Boss Ego Entertainment. Boss Ego Entertainment has given her the opportunity to live out her
dream of being involved in the music industry. She has been able to be in the studio, working with different artists.

Walton is part of the tech industry, medical industry, and music industry. It is fun for her to have experiences in those industries. Her advice to other entrepreneurs looking to get started; is to do their research.

“One thing about entrepreneurship, the difference to me as far as what makes you a successful business owner, is having the confidence to follow through on your dreams. A lot of times, they will have great ideas and great business opportunities they
can get into, but they don’t have enough confidence in themselves to make the investment in themselves,” she said.

Walton said those people also might be afraid to take the first step because of fear of failure. To that she said, failure is just a motivator for her. When she started her entrepreneurship journey in 2016, it was a childcare center. It failed but that didn’t stop her from trying her hand in business again. It motivated her to learn from her mistakes, pick herself up, dust herself off and try it again.

“I think that failure is what led to the success of my future businesses, for my current businesses, because now I know what not to do,” she said. “That could’ve been a point in my life where it’s like, ‘OK, being an entrepreneur is not for me,’ but it was the opposite. It really made me want to go harder.”

For more information on A Better Weigh, visit https://betterweighmedical. com

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