- July 19, 2025
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Miranda Monahan stood outside her ex-husband’s car one night in 2017 in a Lakewood Ranch Medical Center parking lot, crying. Her three young daughters sat in the car, staring back at their mom.
A drug addict at that point in her life for some two decades — something she kept secret from most people as she built a multimillion-dollar tech firm in Manatee County — the then 40-year-old had just left a Narcotics Anonymous meeting at the hospital.
The Florida Department of Children and Families was in the process of opening an investigation into Monahan. With her future in doubt that night, her ex told her to say goodbye to the kids while they sat in the car. “I could see the concern in my girl's eyes,” Monahan says of her kids, then ages 10, 9 and 6. “I told them I was going to fix this. And my youngest daughter said, ‘I know you will, momma. I believe you.’
“It was a defining moment for me,” says Monahan — who was soon cleared by DCF of any wrongdoing.
Monahan’s 25-year plus odyssey in battling a drug addiction while building, then losing, a successful company contains several other defining moments. Her story is one part resilience, one part grit wrapped around leadership skills that come up often in these columns: admitting failure, vulnerability and overcoming difficult circumstances.
Monahan worked for tech giants such as Hewlett Packard and ASI System Integration for nearly a decade early in her career. She founded e-waste and electronics recycling company M-PowerTech in January 2011. The firm, also known as an IT asset disposition company, safely and properly destroyed, refurbished and recycled technology hardware products and data. In a 2014 interview with the Business Observer, Monahan says she had an ‘oh crap,’ moment when she launched the company in a Lakewood Ranch office in 2011, realizing the weight of having to close sales.
But it grew rapidly. By 2013 it did $4 million a year in revenue, and in 2014, the firm, then with six employees, did $2 million revenue a quarter. She was a Business Observer 40 Under 40 winner in 2014 and the firm received several other regional and national accolades for growth.
Yet in 2017, Monahan sold M-PowerTech. On the buy side of at least four mergers while the firm’s CEO, Monahan says her exit was forced due to her addiction and related issues and “as a result I got very little for it.”
Monahan is now a sales executive with Dynamic Lifecycle Innovations, a larger IT asset disposition firm. She’s been with the Wisconsin-based global company since 2018, working from her east Manatee County home. And beyond resilience and grit, her still-going comeback story, she says, is also part cautionary tale, part spiritual and part pay-it-forward. Now in recovery for nearly nine years, Monahan, 48, raises her three daughters with her ex-husband; works her high-leverage sales role; and, notably, is CEO of Grace Recovery House, a faith-based nonprofit in Sarasota that supports men and women recovering from substance misuse disorders.
Monahan’s message for anyone — in business, life, anywhere — facing addiction is simple but requires serious stick-to-itiveness: never quit. “I lost everything. I lost a multimillion-dollar business. I lost my husband. I lost relationships with my family. I lost my dignity,” she says. “But all is not lost if you are in the grips of addiction.”
She cites a popular recovery line that became her calling card: “It’s hard when you are using. And it’s hard to stay clean. So choose your hard.”
Monahan says she’s telling her story now for two reasons: to bring attention to Grace Recovery House and to let others facing what she faces know there’s life worth living in recovery. “I’ve lived with a dirty secret for years,” she says. “I’ve lived in shame and guilt since I was 13. But shame and guilt have no place in recovery.”
Monahan was born in Colorado, the daughter of Egyptian immigrants. “My dad was a very hard man,” Monahan says. “My life was all about trying to please him.”
She recalls coming home with a second place medal in a race, excited with her result. Her dad wanted to know why she was excited about being No. 2.
Her first dip into something illegal was taking a swig of her dad’s Johnnie Walker whiskey. She was 13. “Nothing ever made me feel that good,” she says.
Then she went to college, at the University of Colorado in Colorado Springs. In her freshman year she was at a party with some friends when they heard a louder party downstairs. There were more people there. And cocaine. Monahan tried it. “I was hooked,” she says. “I found my new love.”
By her 30s Monahan had been in and out of rehab multiple times. She lasted anywhere from 90 days to nine months, she says, “but could never hit that one-year mark before relapsing.”
Soon before the parking lot wakeup call with her kids and ex in 2017, Monahan overdosed after a cocaine-fentanyl binge. When she woke up in the hospital, she lamented to her addiction sponsor: “I can’t live right, and I can’t even die right.”
Her sponsor suggested she pray to God. Monahan responded that “I can’t find God, and even if I could he wants nothing to do with me.” Her sponsor, she recalls, told her to “pray for God to find me.”
So Monahan prayed. That, she says, was another defining moment. And now in recovery she talks about her kids, her work and more — with one eye always on what she and other addicts in recovery call the “no matter what club.” That’s the idea that in recovery from drug and alcohol addictions, whatever challenges come your way you never return to your drug of choice — no matter what.
“I’m an addict who needed 100 times to learn that my disease is not curable,” she says. “I’ll never forget where I came from and what my rock bottom looks like. I don’t ever want to see that rock bottom again.”
That personal mission, and her spirituality that saved her life, led Monahan to Grace Recovery House.
Another factor is what her close friend and current boss at Dynamic Lifecycle Innovations, Chris Mammano, says: her kindness. Mammano recalls one night the two of them were at a restaurant in New York City when they noticed some young people looking like they were about to leave without paying the bill, oblivious to nearby police officers. Monahan went up to the manager and paid the tab for the would-be dine-and-dashers. “She’s got the biggest heart of anyone I know,” Mammano says. “I know that's a big part of her recovery.”
Monahan discovered Grace Recovery in 2016, when it was a halfway house overseeing three properties in Sarasota called the Spartan House. In addition to her on-and-off recovery, Monahan was then mourning the death of a close friend and colleague to a fentanyl overdose and her parents due to health issues. “Overwhelmed by grief and driven by a renewed commitment to my own recovery,” Monahan writes in an email, “I realized I needed to do something meaningful — not just for myself, but for others facing the same battles.”
The organization was financially flailing. Monahan was brought on by the previous owners to look at the books and she suggested some ways to save money. By 2018 Monahan had taken over operations. Now under Grace Recovery, it operates eight homes, all in the Kensington Park neighborhood about three miles northeast of downtown Sarasota. The homes, says Monahan, provide a safe, substance-free environment, peer support, structured living, access to faith-based or 12-step meetings, life skills development, essential resources and dedicated staff and house managers.
Today the properties — four for women, four for men — house about 80 people, plus one manager per house. Grace Recovery, mostly from donations and grants, buys the homes, pays the electricity bills, sets up a washer and dryer. The houses are near a bus stop and close to GraceLife Church of Sarasota, where many residents attend 12-step programs. Grace Recovery, says Monahan, is also a preferred provider for Sarasota’s drug court and several other local organizations.
“These people come in here with nothing,” she says. “They’re on probation, they have other issues.”
Having lived through that despair motivates Monahan. “I want to create a safe place and a safe environment where people could be loved and that allows people to get treatment they can afford,” she says, adding Grace Recovery has brought her “a sense of purpose and fulfillment I had never known. … When someone is helped (in recovery) that light is amazing. It makes me keep going.”
