“My resume got me job interviews, but it seems when I pulled up my wheelchair no one wanted to hire me. The conversations became about special accommodations or how I would perform certain functions of the job rather than what value could I add to their organization.”

***

Kaney O’Neill wasn’t lacking in savvy or business acumen. She had a degree from Northwestern University, the prestigious Chicago-area research institution. She had years of experience learning her family’s trade. And she was a United States Navy veteran.

But one event, a nearly-deadly “freak” accident that occurred years before, while she was only 21 years old, seemed to keep others from giving her a shot. It kept her from realizing her professional potential.

It was 1999 and O’Neill — a sailor at the time — was working in the shipyard, on the USS Nimitz when the winds of Hurricane Floyd blew her off the balcony she was standing on. The fall left her with a permanent spinal cord injury.

“I went outside to look at the rain, and the next thing I knew I was laying on the floor,” she told news reporters back in 2014.

Out of the service and with no employer willing to get past her disability, she decided after a year of applying to turn the process on its head. She decided to employ herself.

In 2007, she founded ONeill Contractors, a roofing business, continuing the tradition her brother and her uncle both pursued as well.

“[They] said they would help me,” she told Fortune.

They did, but about eight years after she hung her shingle, she found her business in a stall. The modest business loan of $25,000 was the thin financial ice she was skating on, despite promising contracts with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and Boeing.

She applied to be designated by a number of programs, including ones for women-run small businesses and service-disabled veteran-owned businesses but was denied every time.

So, just like O’Neill had done in her life many times before, she summoned her courage — something she clearly has in droves — and dug deep. She faced her dilemma and, rather than complain, assessed her problems and worked out a plan to fix them.

“It was heartbreaking. I was so discouraged, but I set up the business myself, so I made a lot of mistakes in how I set it up.”

She owned the situation. She owned her mistakes. Then she took control, and officially became one-hundred-percent owner of her business.

She started taking classes again. She took advantage of programs and organizations willing to improve her skills — like Bunker Labs (“a nonprofit business accelerator for military veterans” in Chicago) and Operation Hand Salute, which is affiliated with AT&T and hosts disabled business owners.

This from Fortune:

It worked. O’Neill met with an SBA lending representative at a community bank in Illinois and managed to get a $250,000 line of credit via SBA-backed 7(a) loan in January 2015. Soon after, she was named the National Veteran-Owned Business Association’s 2015 Woman Vetrepreneur of the Year.

Today, O’Neill has transformed her two-person company that began with her mom helping her, into an 18-person-business that has worked on multimillion-dollar contracts — including one with the Edward Hines Jr. Veterans Administration Hospital, where O’Neill had spent time recovering after her accident. She also earned the SBA designations which she had previously been denied.

Last month, Kaney was approved for a $900,000 SBA-backed loan in the form of a revolving CAP Line of credit.

She hopes to grow her roofing business to $10 million in annual revenues by 2019.

To learn more about Kaney’s business, you can visit their website by clicking here.