The path to business ownership began for Rebecca Tuminelly because her life experiences required her to develop resilience and adaptability while pursuing continuous personal development. She grew up in a close-knit family that included strong women who demonstrated resourcefulness, which taught her early perseverance skills that would later help her succeed through nontraditional means. She has worked in three distinct fields throughout her career journey because she has progressed through numerous educational paths, healthcare work as a respiratory therapist, and print industry knowledge acquisition.
The COVID-19 pandemic frontline work she performed during her time as a respiratory therapist served as her life-changing experience, which made her examine how she should achieve balance between work obligations and personal health and life purpose. She started her entrepreneurial journey when she purchased Riteway Business Forms & Digital Printing through Impossible Kitty Enterprises Inc. Today, she is leading her organization according to the principles of trust and stewardship and respect for established practices, which enables her to maintain traditional methods while introducing new ideas.
Rebecca’s story goes beyond her professional development because it demonstrates how people can live purposefully and lead organizations while they establish their own definitions of achievement.
Discover how purpose-driven pivots can redefine your path and leadership journey.
Roots That Run Deep
Rebecca grew up in the suburbs, surrounded by a large, tightly knit extended family. It was the kind of childhood that teaches you things no classroom can. It teaches you resilience, adaptability, and the quiet strength that women carry across generations. After losing her husband, her grandmother raised seven of her fifteen children entirely on her own. Her aunts filled the house with laughter, good food, and hard-earned wisdom. These women did not just survive; they flourished.
Those early years planted seeds that would take decades to fully bloom. She watched the women around her adapt without complaint, and she internalized that lesson completely. “Those early lessons shaped my values and work ethic and continue to guide the way I approach both life and career,” she says.
After high school, she pointed herself towards teaching, a natural fit, given her instinct for communication and her desire to help others grow. But the traditional classroom did not hold her. What it did was clarify something essential: she understood how people learn, and she wanted to work in spaces where that understanding mattered. That realization carried her into a role as a marketing and trade show coordinator, where she encountered the print industry for the first time. The experience lit something in her.
From there, she moved into a blueprint company, learning the language of paper and production, how raw materials transform into finished pieces, how an idea on a screen becomes something tangible you can hold. The process fascinated her.
A Detour Through the Emergency Ward
But Rebecca’s story is not linear. Long before she ever thought about owning a print company, she pursued a deep personal goal: healthcare. She earned a Bachelor of Science in Respiratory Therapy from St. Catherine University in St. Paul, Minnesota, in 2008, followed by her Certified Respiratory Therapist credential the same year. By 2011, she held her Registered Respiratory Therapist credential. In Fall 2020, she became a Chronic Pulmonary Disease Specialist, and in Fall 2021, she earned her certification as a Tobacco Treatment Specialist.
Then COVID-19 arrived, and she found herself on the frontlines, working as a respiratory therapist at a hospital designated specifically for COVID-19 patients. She did not watch the pandemic from a safe distance. She was inside it, treating patients during the most critical period of the crisis. It was necessary, important, and grueling work.
Eventually, the patient-facing education role she had transitioned into was eliminated. In the silence that followed, she did something courageous: she chose her own mental health. “I came to recognize the importance of protecting my mental health. This realization led me to seek opportunities outside of bedside care,” she reflects. It was not a retreat; it was a reckoning, and it changed everything.
Inheriting Legacy, Accepting the Charge
The search for a new direction led Rebecca and her former husband to explore business ownership, a path that offered the independence, flexibility, and sense of purpose she was looking for. What they found was Riteway Business Forms, a company being sold by the son of its original founder.
From the moment she learned about Riteway, she knew. The company has a strong history, a loyal customer base, and a reputation built on quality and trust. These were not just business assets; they were values. “I was drawn not only to what the business had achieved, but to the care and craftsmanship that had sustained it for generations,” she says.
She took ownership with a clear intention: Not reinvention. No disruption. Stewardship, the art of honoring what came before while guiding it carefully into what comes next. In a business culture obsessed with disruption and novelty, this is a quiet but powerful act of conviction.
Today, Riteway operates Monday through Friday, working primarily with printing brokers. The structure itself reflects her philosophy that builds systems that support people, not the other way around.
The Case for Print in a Digital World
Ask Rebecca what drives her, and she answers without hesitation. She talks about digital fatigue, the exhaustion that accumulates when every surface of modern life is a screen demanding attention. She talks about the power of print: its weight, its permanence, its ability to sit at a desk and wait patiently for someone to pick it up.
“While an email may be deleted within seconds, a printed piece, a postcard, brochure, or flyer is often picked up, glanced at, and set aside as a reminder,” she points out. According to her, even brief moments of engagement matter because print has a presence that lingers. It does not disappear when you close a tab.
This is not nostalgia. She is not pining for some earlier era. She is making a sharp, contemporary argument: in a world saturated with digital noise, the physical object has become rare. And rare things carry power. Print, she believes, is experiencing a quiet renaissance, not despite the digital age, but because of it.
She became a member of Girls Who Print in 2026, joining a community of women shaping the industry’s future. In December 2025, the Worldwide Women’s Association accepted her into its ranks—recognition of her growing influence both inside and beyond the print world.
Leading With Trust, Living with Balance
Rebecca runs Riteway with a management philosophy that feels both practical and rare. She trusts her team. Not as a management strategy, but as a genuine expression of how she sees people. She listens. She pays attention. She creates space for employees to work with flexibility; if someone needs to come in late or leave early, she finds a way to make it work without penalizing them for being human.
“This trust allows me to focus on leadership and long-term planning while also preserving space for my personal life,” she explains. The company’s Monday-through-Friday structure means evenings and weekends remain protected, for rest, for family, for the kind of recharging that makes sustained performance possible.
She is candid about her own challenges, too. For years, she carried more than she needed to, hesitant to ask for help because she knew she was capable. “Being capable does not always mean being the best person for the task,” she says now, with the clarity of hard-won experience. She has learned delegation and discernment, two of the quieter forms of leadership strength. She has learned to prioritize her own recovery—time at the gym, evenings unwinding at home with her cats—understanding these are not indulgences but necessities.
Wisdom From the Journey
When Rebecca speaks to those who aspire to leadership roles, she resists the instinct to offer a dramatic master plan. Instead, she offers something more sustainable. She talks about pausing to breathe. She talks about the smallest achievements, the ones that build confidence quietly, cumulatively, until they open doors you did not even know were there.
“Opportunities do not always look valuable at first glance. Keeping an open mind allows growth to happen in unexpected ways,” she says. A meeting that seems irrelevant might introduce the connection that changes everything. A conversation that feels casual might contain the insight that reframes a problem. She encourages curiosity, openness, and a willingness to engage fully with each step of the journey, not just the destination.
Her mantra to those watching is to stay organized, connect with your team daily, and protect your own energy the way you protect your most important business relationships. She emphasizes the importance of prioritizing self-care multiple times a week, even if it’s just 30 minutes, to recharge and stay motivated.
And finally, her most distilled piece of advice for entrepreneurs: “You are the expert on the big picture of the business you run. Take help whether you feel you need it or not, and spend your time on building the future and solving today’s problems that need you.”
A Craft Worth Carrying Forward
Rebecca Tuminelly defies easy categorization. She is a respiratory therapist turned print entrepreneur. A healthcare frontline worker turned steward of a creative craft. A woman shaped by the resilience of the women who raised her, now raising a business and a legacy of her own.
She does not claim to have all the answers. She does not position herself as someone who has conquered uncertainty, she has simply learned to move through it with intention. Her story is a reminder that careers rarely follow a straight line, that pivots born from self-awareness are not failures but recalibrations, and that the most meaningful work often begins with asking: what do I value, and how do I want to build around it?
At Riteway Business Forms, the press keeps running. Forms get printed. Brokers get served. And in every tangible piece that leaves the shop, she carries forward a tradition she did not start but has fully committed to, with the kind of purposeful, patient dedication that great legacies are made of.
