Welcome to Getting Rich Together. I’m your host, Shama Bunton. This show was born for my own journey. Coming out of a divorce, I reached out to 50 women to talk to them about money.

95% of them did not want to go there. That’s when I realized we need spaces where wealth isn’t hidden in silence but shared in possibilities. Here, you’ll meet women from all backgrounds, trailblazers, risk takers, visionaries, each expanding what wealth can look like. This is your place to be inspired to discover new pathways and to remember that we rise by building wealth together. Getting Rich Together is a wealth catalyst production.

At Wealth Catalyst, we bring together education, networks, and great opportunities for women to build wealth and change the world. Now, on to today’s show. Today, I am joined with someone who I believe has the power to change the world. Placie Hall, you are someone from the moment that I met, exudes this power and this kindness and this love. You have done things, I think, on this planet and have inspired people in ways that you may not even know what that legacy will look like.

That is very exciting. You’re not stopping. It almost feels like, despite your incredible career and successes, you’re also just getting started. For those of you who don’t know Placie Hall, she is a powerhouse entrepreneur. She’s built and exited multiple seven-figure businesses across a variety of verticals. She has changed the lives and has trained thousands of founders around the world through incredible partnerships with global brands that we all know like Amazon, Nasdaq, USAA. She is now at the helm of Stella Foundation, an incredible organization that serves tens of thousands of female founders around the world globally. Placie, you’ve also helped to move over $200 million of capital into those who are satisfying their dreams, changing the world, and redefining what it looks like to be a female entrepreneur.

Thank you for being here today on Getting Rich Together. It’s been a long time overdue. It has. We’ve been trying to do this for a year. Life. It’s not like we’re busy or anything.

Yeah, no joke. I’m so excited to dive into all the things that are happening today. But before we get to today, I want to start off with a little girl, Flossie, someone who was maybe at one point 10, 12 years old. Maybe it was pigtails, ponytail. Maybe you were a tomboy. Maybe you were a girly girl.

Double click onto a young Flossie. Where did you grow up? What was life like around you?

And what were some of the money stories and things that you were picking up at this very young age? So young Flossie had no front teeth. I actually lost my four front teeth from the time I was four until I was almost, I think, nine years old. So I was toothless Flossie for a little while. I grew up incredibly poor.

So money is a very emotional and substantial part of my life, like many others. I was raised by a mom who didn’t come from much, dropped out of school, I think in 6th or 6th grade. Had me as a teenager. I’m the oldest. I have a younger brother and sister. We all have different dads. We grew up pretty day to day as kids.

But you don’t know that, you know, until you get a little bit older in high school and things like that. So it was pretty hard watching my mom struggle from, you know, job to job. We moved every single year as a kid. We never owned a home. We went from apartment to apartment to apartment.

It was really unstable. We didn’t have the things that other kids had. We didn’t have name brand groceries, which I thought made you super rich. We didn’t have a vehicle.

My mom used to walk to work. We were so poor. And we didn’t have people around us who had money either. The kids that I saw at school that had houses and cars and, you know, the name brand clothes and Tommy Hilfiger and Ralph Lauren, I was like, Oh, those are the rich kids. But I was still a very headstrong, smart, pretty, popular kid, even for being the poor kid on the block.

My kids and my mom especially like to say that I used to run this town. That used my grit in my brains to get the things I wanted out of life. Yeah, it was tough.

Tough as a kid. When you were in high school, I feel like high school, I feel like up until high school, there’s a lot of things we don’t know. And then all of a sudden in high school, it’s like, Oh, you know, I remember when I was in high school, the popular kids with money or Abercrombie, you know, was like such a thing. I was like, I guess I’m just not that girl.

I can’t afford it. And so I started to find and craft my identity almost at a young age because you’re forced to say, like, who am I without these things that other people might have? And so in high school, did you find yourself gravitating to academics? Was it independence?

Let me get a job. How did you start to define who you were? And what did you think of yourself at the time?

Like, what did you know yourself to be? Looking back, I have a lot of opinions, but I think like in high school, just like you said, there were the haves and the have nots, we were definitely the have nots. And because I used my power per se, being the popular girl in school, I was also incredibly kind to everybody, even though I was popular. I lifted up those that were picked on and stood up to those that thought they were bigger than me and they weren’t. But as a teenager, when you get into those high school years, I realized that it didn’t matter.

My family’s identity didn’t define me. The things that they saw in my house, it wasn’t my house per se. It was my mom’s house, right?

Even though I grew up there, I never thought it was a home. But I knew that those things didn’t define me. I know that wasn’t who I was. And it was really hard. And I actually became a mom as a teenager in high school. So I didn’t really have the choice of what I wanted to do in life. I was forced to step out at 17 and get a job and get an apartment and go financially be viable. But the very first thing I did, I said, I don’t want my child to grow up the way that I grew up.

I’m going to go work and I’m going to fight. I’m going to do everything I can to make sure he has a better life. And I still, to this day, he’s 26. I say, we grew up together. And I did the best that I could.

But fast forward these 26 years. And I feel like I did all those things I said I would do. It was hard. But I made it to college. I worked three jobs. I did all the things that he always had a safe roof and a clean home and nice things and food.

And he didn’t struggle the way that I struggled. So I think as a teenager, I didn’t have that option to be like, this is what I think I’m going to do. I was always forced into those situations.

But I’m a tough cookie. And I think it was never not an option for me to just go work my ass off and get everything I thought I could earn. And I knew I was like, if I can see you doing it, I could do that too. And I used to just identify people in other rooms. And I would go stand next to them. And I’d say, teach me everything you know, I’ll learn, I’ll work harder than anybody else that I know. And every job I got, I worked up really fast. I was like, okay, I got brains. I got hard work.

I could figure this thing out. So even if you start at the very, very bottom entry level, minimum wage, you know, bottom of the barrel, you can work your weight up if you have brains, heart and hustle and want to. So starting early, my relationship with money from my family on to making my own family was always the center of everything I did.

Wow, flossing. You know, I feel like there’s this part of the brain when all of a sudden you feel the sense of deep responsibility that if it’s going to be, it’s up to me. And it’s something that John actually says a lot from when he was younger, like this feeling that, you know, you are so self sufficient, or you have no choice but to rely on yourself that it’s almost like some parts of the brain sort of shut off and you’re like, all right, it’s go mode and, you know, you’re building and you’re learning so much about yourself and what you can do. And it’s almost like the bigger you dream or the further you see out, the faster you get there and the more you can achieve.

And then all of a sudden, feels like it becomes a game of not can I, but what do I want to do, right? Or what, what, what is the thing that I’d like to choose to apply myself to? As you found yourself with a luxury of being able to support yourself and get yourself to university, which is not an easy feat for anyone who’s just navigating that, let’s say, just without financial support from their family, but also with the great responsibility and pleasure of being a mother and navigating through this journey. How did you decide what you wanted to study?

I mean, obviously, it feels like there are the practical, you know, can you do these things to get these kinds of jobs? Was it that sort of thinking? Or was it more like, I’m interested in exploring this?

How did you take advantage or leverage and use the education that you were providing for yourself? So my bathroom is kind of odd because I was supposed to be a doctor. And as a, you know, young teenage mom, I rolled into the university and I, you know, was looking at courses and I love science and human biology and I’ve always been an uber nerd. And I said, I want to go to medical school. And the very first thing that the admissions woman told me, she goes, you know, why don’t you just be a nurse?

And I was like, is nursing and doctoring the same thing? I’m curious, you know, because why are you asking me that? Because I came here and said I wanted to be a doctor.

I the beginning, I was kind of told that you can’t, why do that? Who wants to go to school for eight years and it’s going to be long and hard. And I said, well, what else am I going to be doing in eight years? I just want to know I could go on to be a nurse and then get my bachelor’s in nursing or, you know, become a nurse practitioner. But even if I climb that ladder, that’s still eight years of schooling. So why wouldn’t I just go do the thing I want to do? And from the beginning, I was never afraid to like reach for the highest possible rung I could see still to this day in my life.

I don’t really have ceilings. I’m like, yeah, let’s go do it. And I have this audacity to think I can go do it. I’m like, if I don’t, then I land somewhere in the middle, or I try something else. What’s that saying?

Like shoot for the stars and maybe you’ll land among them or something, right? That was me. So I wanted to go to medical school. I wanted to be a doctor. I got my EMT license. I studied genetics in college.

I have published research. It took me a very long time. I had more kids while I was in college to get there. It took me almost 10 years, I think, to get through school, to get my two undergraduate degrees because I had to ramp up and ramp back and ramp up and ramp back.

But I did it. For you to keep going, what was your published research on? I want to know. What were you geeking out about and like so into that you were researching about?

Tell me. So a secret fact, I am the University of Michigan 2012 Distinguished Researcher of the Year. I used to do genetic and toxicology research. So I have one set of research that’s been published in a toxicology textbook. I used to study bacteria that cause food poisoning. We were trying to find a mechanism of action to create an antidote virtually or essentially.

And then a second set was genetic testing on butterflies that were dying out and testing this bacterial genetic deformation that no matter what the government was doing to repopulate these butterflies, they were going to die anyway. I’m a super nerd in my core. That is so cool. I love all of this so much, Flosy.

I love this. Okay, so you have more children. You make yourself through two undergraduate degrees, which is getting through one is difficult without children.

So getting through two with children and managing a life like that is, I imagine, even more challenging to do when you found yourself then ready and finished with university. What did you do next? Obviously, by this point, you know you’re smart. There’s nothing that can stop you from doing anything. And so at this point, knowing that you’re smart, knowing your aptitude, what is it that you decide and how do you start to approach life next?

What does it start to look like? So honestly, after I graduated, my husband was in the military. So, you know, he dragged us to Southern California. We were in San Diego.

I had four kids under the age of 12, and I had just taken my MCATs. And I said, you know, he is getting deployed again. And I said, there’s no possible way I can do this right now. I said, I worked this hard. I got to here.

I’m gonna have to wait again. Like I was always last. And I felt very defeated. I felt like I worked my ass off. And I kept having, you know, other people’s needs put ahead of mine, like my spouses, the military, as my children’s. And I felt very defeated. And I was unemployed and trying to figure out my life. And I accidentally started a business out of my home kitchen in military housing. And I did it out of pure necessity of an opportunity and needing money. And I was like, you know, I can’t work the hours that a job requires me to with these kids by myself.

And I need money. So somebody had offered me to meal prep for them, which I was doing for my family every week anyway. And once I told other friends I was doing it, my inbox exploded. And within a few months, I was making $30,000 a month out of my home kitchen. And I had no idea what I was doing.

So no idea. But you know, how do you go from making, you know, 20 or 30 meals a week for your family of six to, you know, three, four, five, seven, 800 out of, you know, a home kitchen with one stove and one refrigerator. And again, like I don’t, I don’t have ceilings. So I was like, yeah, sure, I’ll do it.

I’ll figure it out. It opened up this world to me of health and wellness still, which was in my core. I was a big healthy person, healthy food, preventative medicine, like I always believed your lifestyle could really help with the way, you know, your body reacts to diseases. So I was already very preventative health focused. And I was like, well, maybe this is a band-aid to get to medical school, maybe I can help feed people healthy, nutritious, affordable food. And I can make a difference in people’s lives by giving them something that’s cheaper than McDonald’s, but healthy and home cooked. And the first company was called Healthy Mama, which was my livelihood for a few years. But I found that I was really good at scaling and operations and people and leadership.

And I could scale really, really fast, meeting mentors and business advisors. Everybody was like, wait, you did what with what? And like everybody was dumb founded. And I was like, yeah, I just did it. And years later, I understand my brain just operates a lot faster than most people. I can attest to that. Your brain does operate a lot faster. I can pull the plan really quickly, but I also can execute it very quickly. But I also am not afraid of failure in any way.

I mean, you fail every day big and small, and I’m not afraid to fail. My life pivoted really, really quickly from this medical Dr. Flossy path to stay at home mom, defeated military spouse to newfound business owner, where I had to Google every single thing about business that I had. So it was a whole turning point that has just continued to climb until today where I’m at. Amazing. You know, it’s a big deal to go from, I don’t have any money right now to I’m going to give this a shot to holy bananas. We’re making $30,000 a month. And then obviously there are these inflection points in a business and their business inflections, but they have like real material personal outcomes.

All of a sudden it’s like, oh, maybe Flossy can buy the name brand groceries for the house. And you know, so when you started to see this exponential increase in your personal revenues, obviously we know certain points in the business, you have to re-invest. And so it’s not always this linear sort of growth, but there are moments where all of a sudden things feel different and they can look different. And so how did you and what did you do with your resources when you first started to feel some of those inflection points? So I think the most important part was the second that I could pay myself and dictate what I was doing and how much I was making.

That light bulb was what changed my whole world. I didn’t have to follow anybody else’s rules. I’ve never been a rule follower. I was did it my own way.

Bossy, flossy. But the second that I learned I was barely hireable out of college for 20 bucks an hour working in a lab to I can go work a few hours a day around my kids schedule and make all this money. It was incredibly powerful and it’s a feeling that I knew I would never give up.

And the autonomy that money then gives you to do those things, to say I am only going to work so many hours today or I’m going to take a family vacation, things we had never done, get out of debt, all the things a young military enlisted family of six, you don’t have a whole lot. Suddenly we didn’t have to struggle. We didn’t have to go to USO food handouts for cases of diapers. We could pay the bills.

We could eat as much as we wanted to. And growing up poor, it’s a different kind of freedom that people who’ve never not had money, they don’t know what that feels like to not be able to buy groceries or to walk in with $50 and say I have to use a calculator for everything I buy because this is literally the only dollars I have to feed my kids for the week. So money is freedom, but making your own money on your own terms and dictating the amount is power and that changed my whole life.

Ah, that is so powerful. And so how did you then, these years that you were building Healthy Mama and growing this organization, really this was the beginning and you said this so clearly, this was the beginning of unlocking this unlimited possibility and unlimited potential. You want to get to know God, go become an entrepreneur.

You want to know, really test yourself and all the things and come up against all your stuff, like go run a business and you’ll quickly sort of figure things out. But your career obviously didn’t stop then. And so how did you, and I think sometimes really interesting for most business owners, and I see this a lot with women founders that I know, they start their first business and they think it’s going to be their last. And it’s like, and there is like heart, mind, money, everything sort of goes into this business as it needing to be the last business, the retirement business, it’s all in there. And certainly for you, this was just the beginning.

So can you share with me a little bit about this transition out of this first business and how you began to exercise this muscle of, I’m a creator, I create companies, I create movements. And to keep doing that over and over again. It’s true. You immediately, it’s your identity, right? This is me. I am healthy mama, healthy mama is me.

Who am I if I’m not healthy mama? And there was some time because my husband was being restationed, you know, also as a military spouse, I don’t always get to dictate my life. The military does that for you. And I built a brick and mortar facility with staff that required me on site in a city where my husband was not going to be living anymore. So sometimes your hand is forced based on lifestyle, but as much as I loved what that business did, we produced a half a million healthy affordable meals in San Diego. And I’m so proud of it.

I hated it. I work 20 hour days on my feet in a, you know, mass production facility, literally cooking thousands of pounds of food. And no matter how many employees I had, I had over a hundred employees at one point, I was still never not in that kitchen.

And I just was exhausted. But I had been shown, like behind the curtain, I was like, Oh, this is how you build businesses. This is how you make money. This is, they’re meant to be bought and sold and bought and sold and created and sold. And, you know, the same, I guess, psychological disconnect that allowed my strength and stability as a child where I can like partition emotions and operations.

I was like, things I have to do versus things I feel. I brought that to business. And even to this day, my staff, my team, my family have all worked for me.

My sister-in-law is my daughter. I compartmentalize business as business and personal as personal. And it’s just a business, you know, identities will come and go, businesses will come and go, jobs will come and go. And it’s totally okay. And some serve a purpose for a while and some don’t, some succeed and some fail.

And that’s okay. I’ll never stop building businesses. And I have some that are open to this day that I just pop in to make a little bit of money and pop that out. And I’ll never scale them.

I’d probably never sell them, but it’s okay. I just knew that that first company just gave me a taste of what I could go do. And I was insatiable. I was like, oh, what else can I learn? There’s all these other industries out here. And I realized I was really good at the 80% of business. I learned the rules, pots and sales and money and revenue and legal.

And I was like, I can apply that to any industry. I was excited to go build again and see also, was I really good like I thought I was, like that validation piece. And then when I did it and then did it again and then did it again, I was like, oh, okay, I’m really good at this.

I love that so much. It can relate in so many ways. It’s like the, oh yeah, like I got this. Oh yeah, I got this.

I got this. It’s like, it’s like. Good, I’m good. You know, we’re turning like, Doubt Creeps in a little bit. You’re like, nevermind. That’s so funny.

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Now back to the show. So obviously your career has been dotted by such different kinds of roles and supporting different kinds of organizations. There’s been this really wonderful through line of work with military spouses and sort of working on behalf of those who are in service. And I think it’s such a beautiful through line, but yet the roles and the companies that you’ve supported and built have all been really different. As you were moving within these identities, right?

Creating some, deleting some, creating others. You know, can you sort of share any moments that became further inflection points for yourself? At this point, it’s easy to say, once you’ve done this a couple of times, oh, I understand frameworks and I can kind of drop in and apply the frameworks.

And so in some cases that’s really fun and exciting, but then also some frameworks can get boring, right? You’re like, all right, I know how this goes. And like, here’s the process and here’s the path. And here’s what my income can look like.

And it’s so funny. It’s almost like when you can reverse engineer the whole thing and see what your take home actually looks like versus your effort, you can actually make a really interesting decision as a human to say, is it worth my time and my energy? What were some of these inflection points where you had some big aha moments and also where things maybe started to materially change for you guys? Where all of a sudden there was like another moment or another pop that happened.

What did those look like? Luckily when my husband retired from the military, all of a sudden he had a retirement check, he had a disability check, he moved into a whole nother career. I was at the peak of my money making career. And suddenly not only did we do really well at making money before, we were doing really, really well at making money. And it can become a grind that you get stuck in where I am pretty visible and I am grateful for people who wanna work with me.

But I said, yes, a lot more than I should have. And I realized I can work myself 18, 20 hour days. I’m used to that. And I realized I just didn’t want to anymore. And when my husband retired, I was like, what is this threshold?

How much is good enough money? But I also don’t touch my computer after five and on the weekends. Like now I’m traveling and now I’m napping and now I’m dating my husband again. So I think one of the biggest inflection points when you do grow up poor, you have that mindset of like, when is enough enough? Because you’re always afraid the rug’s gonna be ripped out from underneath you and it’s all gonna fall. And lots of therapy and great strategic investments to build yourself a little nest and understanding that life isn’t all about work. It’s also about enjoying what your work does and enjoying the money that you make.

Somebody once said, you’re never gonna lay on your death bedding. Say I wish I had worked more. And every day I just log off because there’s always more work to do, always.

And I just am okay with what gets done in a day and I choose not to do more. And I think another big inflection point was really that businesses surf me in a different way. I can go make money with companies that I don’t feel good about and I didn’t like that. It didn’t have a mission component.

It didn’t have a feel good component. I mean, there’s companies who sold jobs or just to go make money. And a couple of those contracts or opportunities, I was like, yeah, that’s icky.

I don’t like that. And I quickly gravitated back to doing good and doing well. It’s where my balance stays in the middle. So I have three buckets.

This is what I say now in this current phase of my life. I have one bucket where I make like no money, but it’s something that I love to do. It gets a little bit in it. I have my middle bucket where I do good stuff and I make some money, right? There’s a balance.

Then I have the third bucket, which has a little bit in it. It’s something I do just for the money. So it’s a really good money. I just do it once or twice a year where I’m like, okay, thank you, but I try to stay in that middle bucket where I can balance, you know, it’s never gonna pay me a zillion dollars, but I’m grateful to do the work that I do every day. And I balance the two smaller buckets, things that don’t pay me, but I love to, and then things that do pay me the hate.

Yeah, what a wonderful way of organizing your life and also like your energy, like how to organize your energy based on like, what these outcomes and also like, what will serve your spirit and your heart make you feel good. And your life today is certainly different from the life in which you grew up in. And I’m curious from the standpoint of being a family of six and having had your family also grow up with you, right?

And so there’s so much that’s like connected in terms of everyone’s identity and new experiences. And I’m just so certain that your children think you’re a superhero and probably like, they’re probably like, my mom goes out every day to save the world. But how have you guys sort of approached money conversations at home? Like are the kids involved in these conversations? You know, is it something that is spoken about?

What are the philosophies or conversations that have permeated through the household over these years? Yeah, so my oldest is 26 and my youngest is 14. So, you know, I say my oldest is my first pancake. You get it right by the fourth one, right? So by the time I got to the fourth kid, she’s never known struggle, right?

She’s decked out in Lulu Lemon and Uggs and in Ski Club and, you know, is trying to book a trip to Paris for Christmas, right? But my oldest has experienced us living in like a one bedroom apartment when mom worked three jobs. It’s a different type of what they’ve experienced from their own life, but we do talk about it. The rest of my family, you know, still is not in the same position we are.

We happen to retire back in the hometown where I grew up. So they’re confronted with people that I knew when I was young, flossy, who now work at their schools and are their nurses and are the receptionist. So they’re like, are you a flossy’s child? So they know a lot and I’m very transparent. We talk to them about how much money we make today. We talk to them about taxes and strategy and investing. We try to get them to understand the value of how spoiled they are.

My daughter wanted something this weekend. She’s like, it was only $80. And I was like, okay, go do the math and tell me how many hours you need to work at minimum wage to say it’s only $80. And then if you do something around my house for that six hours, is it worth six hours of your time?

And then she was like, no. So we try, you know, there’s still kids and teenagers, but they have own investment accounts. They do chores every week.

My youngest two are 14 and 16. They get 20 bucks a week, 10 in their savings and 10 in their spend. Spend is for anything you want. Savings, you can only use it on big things or holidays. So we’re teaching them the value and saving of having money, autonomy of being able to swipe their own debit cards, of seeing their own 529 and investment accounts that they can’t touch grow as we put money in it every week. We teach them and my daughter loves to log into her account and like slide the like what could be bar. If we keep asking and she goes, look what it could be when I’m 45 and she gets excited. And I think if you don’t show your kids the possibility for 20 bucks a month, or a hundred bucks a month, how far do you have to work to get that $80 hoodie? I always have to ground them. This wasn’t always our lives, right? Where I could just be like, here’s money for your lacrosse, she was at a lacrosse tournament this weekend. They don’t see it, right?

So they were very good. The boys are a little harder than the girls, but we talk about money. It’s so hard because I’m so nervous that they will take it all for granted. You know, one of the things that I’m often reminded of is that everyone born on this planet can’t escape their own trauma.

Theirs may not be the same as yours, but they’re gonna have their own and high schools are real paid in the butt. And being a young person in this world right now, I imagine it’s really difficult. Oh yeah, having teenagers is rough. I’ll take diapers over, toddlers over teenagers.

Anything. Oh my God, it’s so funny. In terms of, you know, now today, your work is so powerful. You know, the work that you’re doing as the CEO of Stella Foundation and the women that you are serving. I mean, Flossie, you’ve spent your whole life in service. You know, education is such a core part of who you are. You know, being an adjunct professor, teaching students, constantly being in the world and being a voice and an advocate for the things you believe in. Takes a lot of energy.

I don’t imagine you’re pounding red bowls, but you know, it takes a lot of energy and vision to be able to do that. And with your current work at Stella, what I think is so profound has been the way in which you’ve really catalyzed capital, but also women who are building incredible businesses and the organizations and the angels and the capital allocators who can really support them in doing that. And it feels to me like this great sort of, and you’re so young, so I have to say culmination, but like, you know, this great sort of narrative body of the work that you’ve been doing across so many different sectors really coming together to move the needle in a substantial way. Tell me more about how you’ve been called to this particular work. And also what are the visions and dreams? Because I have no doubt that what you’re building not only has already happened, but now that you’ve hit these KPIs, it’s like, okay, shit, what else is on the like flossing milestone list? Well, right now it’s a lot of napping.

Let’s go to my milestone list. I’m gonna take some downtime, but on the trajectory of what we do, I like to put those that we serve in three buckets and it’s all under the women’s flag. I think that’s important because women see the women’s flag and they come in the door, but they’re all in different phases and stages of life. And I think because of my background and my entrepreneurial journey onto my investing journey, I think that we do our community as a disservice by having these zero to one founders, just getting started or ideating or all the way up to, I just need to make my first 100K. And we put these women in a bucket, freelancers, solopreneurs, brick and mortars, Etsy shop owners, and we say, okay, you go get served by SBDC’s Women’s Business Center’s score. And then we have these one to two women that might have some business background or exposure, but they’re building scalable venture-backable businesses.

They’re trying to get to seven figures and beyond. And those are served by the startup community, right? Startup grinds, the Y-combinators, the tech stars, they don’t talk to each other. And I think that we do our communities, especially our women who are so far behind a disservice because they get into these rooms and they’ve never been taught the mechanics of capital. They’ve never been taught all the things I had to learn, right?

But they’re too nervous to stop when they’re in mixed-gendered rooms and say, I actually don’t know that. I don’t know how investing works. I just had an idea and I was put in this room and told to go get investment capital. And then the third bucket is investment. We need to ignite more women investing, which is your whole work, right?

If we don’t first give women the permission and the option to understand what investing is from, you know, my first 10 companies I got equity in, I worked for equity. I exchanged services. I didn’t have capital to invest, but I said, I’m really smart. And I can come on your board and I’ll exchange the service package for 2%, 4%, 6%, 10% sometimes of these companies because I knew if my hands were in their business, they were more likely to be successful. And then I went on up the ladder, you know, equity crowdfunding, angel checks, but nobody taught me that.

Nobody said, hey, here’s all the ways you can build your wealth. And I think that if we don’t get these three communities talking to each other, just because someone’s an Etsy shop owner doesn’t mean they can’t be an investor. It doesn’t mean that they can’t go on to raise venture capital and scale.

Just because you’re building a venture-backable business doesn’t mean you can’t learn from that zero to one who has to think revenue first every day. And I think that I just waved the women’s flag and go, hey, come over here if you’re doing these things. Let’s show you under the hood through education, community, programming, and fun to say, no matter which of these buckets you fall in, you might fall in one, you might eventually fall in all three like me. But if we don’t show them what’s behind those curtains and stop and say, has anybody ever showed you that?

Come over here, walk in this room, let me show you. And I can tell you I got started at Stellar Foundation because Dr. Sylvia Ma, our founder, was my very first mentor in Healthy Mama. And I was actually hired to cater a demo day for Stellar. So I brought all the food over a decade ago and catered it and was so excited because I was part of the cool kids’ room and I saw all these investors and I was like, what is this?

And I wanna learn. And they went and they closed the doors to do the pitches. And I was like, what’s in there?

What are those women doing? And I use that as an example of somebody opening the door for me and saying this is what they’re doing in here. But to me at the time, I thought I was gonna have this massive food company. And then somebody showed me another road and I took it. And now I’m showing other people what’s behind those doors.

And I think that if we don’t operate in a way that tears those walls down and our organizations don’t communicate, we’re doing everyone a disservice. I love you Flossie. You’re just so great. Okay, so you started to allude to this investing journey that you went on. And obviously, there are all these different entry points and to have had exposure 10 years ago to a pitch room event is even something where most women are like, at that time there’s pitch rooms, like there are places where people wanna hear what I’m doing and you know, there’s women with money, where are they?

I mean, that’s a really big deal 10 years ago. As you were thinking and starting to flex your muscle, you know, I think investing is really a muscle to be flexed. You start in some categories, you try new things, you get comfortable with risk, you try other things. Where did you get your information from? How did you start to educate yourself on the different ways that you could invest? And how did you sort of build that confidence to take incremental risk?

Where did that come from? So I think the confidence is like, I told you I don’t have any fear. I was like, sure, I’ll figure that out. I’m a fail first, fail forward kind of person. But once I learned about this whole investment world, I knew that there was all these different things I needed to do. There’s the personal work that is financial foundations personally, setting my children up, you know, doing all the things I needed to do for my own family and my legacy before I could go gamble any of that. Even though I’m fearless, I knew I had to fix my house first, right?

Learn about tax strategy and keeping as much of my money as I could possibly keep, right? Like getting good, smart people that want me. And I learned through reading, I’m a nerd. So I would spend my nights reading blogs and watching YouTube’s and following podcasts of women in the investment world who are talking tips and tricks. And I would read why Combinator has this startup library that is massive with blogs and blogs and blogs on what’s the difference between pre-seed and seed and seed and series A.

And what are the check sizes and due diligence? And, you know, I started to learn all these things, LPs and GPs. And what I knew is I was gonna start to gamble on some of these founders that I was supporting with education and resources and curriculum. And I said, you know, the first thing I can do is gamble my time because that’s low cost. So that was where like I’ll exchange services, I’ll be on your board for equity.

And then I slowly worked my way up to writing checks, you know, $500, $5,000. And it’s still scary because more than likely those founders are not gonna make it or make an exit. And you’re really gambling on something big one day. So my goal is to keep gambling a little bit at a time, but to always make sure that I don’t take from my house. That is my safe space and that’s where I’ll put my money in a smart strategic investment strategy with my financial planner.

And I’ll continue to pull little chunks out on like my Lado tickets, right? Is what I think of startup investors. And, you know, I will get there one day, it’s hard for me because I work with these startups every single day.

And I think so many of them are brilliant. That for me, the analytical and emotional part starts to blur a little bit because they’re like my babies and I’ve supported them and I believe in them and I want them to succeed. And that’s totally different than writing a $50,000 or $100,000 check and saying, I really think you’re the people that are gonna take this to an exit. And I work pre-seed, which is scary stage. So most of the founders I’m working with, you know, are in pre-seed and seed stages.

So I think on my personal journey, I just continue to read and learn and listen from women who’ve done it and use built these incredible rooms at the Wells Catalyst event in San Francisco. I was just like soaking in all love. And I was like, oh, there’s more. And then in New York City, it was like, you can also invest in Broadway and you can invest in art. And I was like, ooh, your pathway is unlocked.

What does that mean? So I think you just have to continue to surround yourself with women who are doing it and ask them how they did it and ask them for advice and resources and support. You can’t be afraid to talk about it. Like I only have this much money, what do I do with it? You have to get really, really good at being open, like you are like open about money.

Like how do I do this? But I’m just going to keep writing bigger checks. And then hopefully one day it’ll pay off in a very big way that I can be a foundation or something. That’s my dream. I would love to be the check writer. Like here you go. You get a check, you get a check, you get a check, you get a check. Well, one day I’ll get there.

I love that so much. I know we’re running out on time. There are two questions that I’d love to ask you, Flossie. The first is obviously money is, you know, it can be very serious. We’ve talked about what it’s like to not have any, what it’s like to be scrappy, what it’s like to start to invest it.

And all of those things are pretty serious. But money is also, I think, super fun, enables us to do great things. There’s so many fabulous things you can do with your money. What has been one of your most recent, fabulous things that you have done with your money? We just booked a trip to Paris.

We’re tired and we’re taking some downtime for the holidays. And, you know, we were talking to the kids about going on a vacation and we chose Paris. And I didn’t have to think about it. I didn’t have to plan for a year or budget.

I just went online and booked the trip. And that is the type of like fun and freedom that comes with money that you can’t explain, right? And I’m so excited to go eat and drink my way through Paris for a week at Christmas time. I love it so much. And then my final question is, you know, all the women, and there are some men, but mostly women who listen to this podcast, we love to rally around the women who are on the show.

So what is it that you are calling in right now, Flossie? How can we support you? So currently, Stella Foundation is down nearly 30% in funding and donations this year due to the hard political and economic climate that we’re in. And we did actually almost eight times the output on our programming side. So in true women’s fashion, we did way more, with way less, but we’re calling on people to step up and support. We have some big donation campaigns coming up in November and December, end of year, make it part of your tax strategy, use your death, pay it forward, but this foundation can only survive and we can only do the work that we do with direct support from those that want to see these women thrive. So my call to action is to donate. Donate to Stella, donate to the program, or if you’re looking for great investment options, write a check. These women all need capital, just as bad as we do. Write a check, come to an event or one of our angels programs or our investment events and write a check.

So always, you know, Nalo has to do with money, give, invest, donate. I love it. Flossie Hall, you are a beacon of light in a turbulent world. You light the torch for all of us to be inspired for a life of service and vision and unlimited possibilities. I am so grateful to have had you here today on Getting Rich Together. Thank you for being here. Thank you for having me. Thanks for tuning in to this episode of Getting Rich Together. My hope is that you leave every episode feeling more inspired, more powerful and more connected. Until next time, remember, you have everything it takes to create wealth on your terms.