Syama Bunten:
Women don’t talk about money the way we should. Not honestly, not openly, and not with each other. But that’s changing. I’m Syama Bunten, founder of Wealth Catalyst. And Getting Rich Together is where the conversation lives. Every week, a different woman, a different path, and a conversation that will change how you think about your own financial power. This community is growing and you belong in it.

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I am here today with the incredible Corinne Goble. Corinne, you are a passionate advocate for women entrepreneurs and the power of small businesses to create lasting economic opportunity. It’s been so wonderful spending time with you and getting to know the incredible human that you are. But our listeners don’t know that as the CEO of the Association of Women’s Business Centers, you bring a deeply collaborative and mission driven approach to helping women build, grow, and lead thriving companies committed to expanding access to resources and relationships and supporting entrepreneurs, but to really not just create fabulous companies, but to pay it forward and create thriving communities. I think that’s what sets apart what you’re doing from other business organizations. You’re leading with a beautiful values driven approach to the way business can serve humanity and the ways we can create a better, thriving, more holistic financial ecosystem. Business is a big part of that. Welcome to Getting Rich Together, Corinne. I’m so happy to have you here.

Corinne Goble:
Thank you. The pleasure’s mine. I’m excited to be here.

Syama Bunten:
Wonderful. So before we jump into all the fabulousness of what you’re building and the events and the power and impact, I want to start with Corinne as a little girl. My love, take me back. Somewhere between nine, ten, twelve years old. Where were you on this beautiful planet of ours? What was life like around you? And what was money like?

Corinne Goble:
Well, I think I’d have to start a couple of years before age nine to really paint the right picture. I was born into a motorcycle club, a gang. My father was the vice president, the number two in power in this frankly organized crime club called a motorcycle club. This was back in the late seventies up in western Michigan. He and my mom had been dating, and my mom got pregnant. She was going to terminate the pregnancy, but she got drunk, told my dad about it, and he convinced her they should get married. They eloped, and I became the first baby of the club.

Money was the currency for their lifestyle. Money wasn’t wealth building. In the culture of that motorcycle club, you can almost think of them like hippies on motorcycles. They were very counterculture, not into institutions. My dad never wore deodorant his entire life. They were not of the mainstream world. So money was treated so differently, off the grid, cash only. We had no debt as a family. My dad bought our house for eight thousand dollars cash in a floodplain, and it literally flooded every year.

My parents ended up accidentally getting a legitimate business, no longer selling drugs, which became a trucking company. It’s funny how it came together, not worth getting into all the details, but ultimately my dad didn’t want to give up the motorcycle club ways. He still wanted to party late, still wanted to smoke weed all day, and he was addicted to soap operas.

Syama Bunten:
Which ones?

Corinne Goble:
All My Children, General Hospital. It’s hard for me to even remember these names, it’s been so long. He would turn the phones off. This is a trucking company where you have trucks calling in with questions about deliveries, customers wanting to schedule deliveries, but my dad would turn the phones and the radio off so he could watch, I think around noon it was One Life to Live or something. He would turn the phones off and it would drive my mom crazy, because that was turning off the business, angering customers, angering employees. So she ended up orchestrating a hostile takeover of the trucking company with my aunt, her sister, who owned two percent of the business.

Syama Bunten:
Wait, what? This is wild. How did that go down? How did they deal with that?

Corinne Goble:
My mom left my dad several times, but the last time she left him, I had two younger sisters. We went to my grandmother’s house, and then my mom called the lawyer and said, drop the paperwork, we’re going to buy him out. And they did. So money was, if I go back to when I was eight years old and my mom left my dad, money was really the ammunition against my dad. It hurt him that she would do this, but at the same time it was the ticket to her freedom. She got out of the motorcycle club, she was able to be independent, and she found purpose. She found this mechanism and vehicle to build her new life. I watched this happen.

My mom didn’t even graduate high school. She dropped out to work at a factory before meeting my dad, then joined the motorcycle life and was a free spirit. To see her embrace a professional, career style life was something else. I watched my mom transform from proud of her tattoos and cute little tank tops into career professional glam.

Syama Bunten:
How fast did that happen?

Corinne Goble:
Pretty fast. From the time I was eight, when she left my dad, to the time I was ten, there was a really fast transformation. The business, it was amazing how fast it grew once the phones weren’t turned off and someone was actually taking care of it. She already had customers, she already had a lot of the operations set up, and it was ready to expand. She was ready to do it, and she surrounded herself with the right people. She relied on her insurance agent, which was really important, since all the liability with the trucks and carrying other people’s valuables around town made great insurance necessary. She had great lawyers, divorce lawyers and business lawyers. She had the right bankers in her pocket too, because back then radio communication was how these trucks would share their location or delivery updates, and my mom had to install a hundred thousand dollar radio tower in the parking lot of the business. She had to get a loan to do that. So she needed the right people around her. I watched her evolve and become a really feminine business owner in a really male dominated industry.

Syama Bunten:
Did she bring you into it at all? Did she bring you in to see things? How did you start to experience that? You saw her transformation, but did she ever share anything with you, talk about the money of the company? Did things start to materially change for you guys?

Corinne Goble:
For us, the business was our family and our family was our business. There really wasn’t separation, for good or bad. If my mom was ever on time to pick me up from school, which usually she was running late, with the car phone and the bag in the car, trying to pick me up and do multiple things, if she picked me up at two thirty, we were going back to the office. We weren’t going home, because she was going to have to put in more hours and didn’t have time to go home first. My grandmother worked there all the way through my childhood, right up until my mom sold the business. My mom used family and friends to plug holes, because these were people she could trust.

Fast forwarding to when I was in grad school, by then she had a multi million dollar a year revenue business, and she experienced some really tough embezzlement situations with her top accounting person, a couple of them in a row actually. She called me to come back and be in charge of the books. She said, I just can’t trust anyone else. I wasn’t well versed in accounting, I didn’t understand debits and credits, so she put me in accounts payable first while I went back to school and started taking accounting classes.

Syama Bunten:
I mean, that is what an incredible kicking off point. Going back to your high school days, Corinne, how did you start to think about money for yourself? Was it, I need to get a part time job? Were you focused on your studies? How did you sort of think about your young teenager angst, and how did you make sense of wanting to buy things and exercise some independence as a teenager?

Corinne Goble:
I worked for the company every summer, some weekends, not every weekend, but you had to pitch in if needed. My mom would pay me, and that was good, but there was also this arrangement where we pitched in and did what we needed to do, and the business paid for the things our family needed. My mom always had the mindset that because she worried about money so much up until that point, she didn’t want us to worry about it.

For example, when it was time for me to choose what college to go to, I was being really judicious, figuring out where I should go, what it should cost, in state, out of state, private, public. I was the first in my family to go to college. My mom hadn’t graduated high school, she had at least gotten her GED by then, but I didn’t have anyone to tell me how any of this worked. I’m putting in applications, getting ready to make decisions, and I’m asking my mom where she thought I should go. She said, just go where you think you need to be. Find the degree and the college where you need to be. I said, well, I like this one program, they have a great study abroad program, but it’s the most expensive one. She said, don’t even worry about the money part. Just go where you need to go.

Syama Bunten:
So awesome to just be fearless.

Corinne Goble:
Except later the bills come due. What she was trying to say to me was, you’re investing in your future, so it’s going to be worth it in the end. But I was getting myself into debt with student loans. She was right, I did end up with a great education and it was no issue paying it all back eventually, but I’ve approached it very differently with my own kids. If we can get the degree we need and use scholarships and be smart about how we’re paying for it and maybe not take on the debt, that’s really the goal now. It was a different mindset for my mom.

Syama Bunten:
When you took on student loans, did anyone explain the terms to you, when you’d have to pay them back? Did anyone sit down and give you any education about what you were signing up for, or was it very much, I need to go to school, I need the money, let’s get it?

Corinne Goble:
Whether it was said or not, my assumption was that I was signing these student loans, but my mom would be paying them back later. Her business ended up experiencing some pretty big challenges with an economic downturn and changes to trucking regulation, the whole industry got reinvented. She was not in a position, even if she wanted to, to pay even the parent loans. I ended up assuming the parent loans too. I can assure you I didn’t know the terms of her loans, and I don’t think I really realized what it took to combine student loans and parent loans to make it all work. But I went to a very great college and it was expensive. Luckily it’s all paid off now.

Syama Bunten:
It all worked out. While you were in university, thinking about what to major in and how you were going to launch yourself, what did you think you wanted to be in the world? What possibilities were you entertaining?

Corinne Goble:
I was never limited in my thinking about what I could be or do, because I saw so much opportunity in the world. My mom could do anything, be anything. We traveled anywhere we wanted. My mom was a millionaire and ended up with a beautiful house on the lake, right on Lake Michigan’s waterfront. When you go from no resources to that level, it feels unlimited by comparison. I never felt limited. I felt really confident I could do anything I wanted. I was interested in diplomacy, international affairs, maybe being a spy.

Syama Bunten:
I could see you as a spy. No one can see you right now, but you’re very chic. I could see you in all black, like in a James Bond movie.

Corinne Goble:
If I should take that as a compliment, most spies have some sociopathic tendency.

Syama Bunten:
Okay, never mind.

Corinne Goble:
To be willing to push the envelope and not necessarily follow the rules. So maybe I could have been.

Syama Bunten:
Okay, continue.

Corinne Goble:
That was what I thought I wanted to do. I was excited about this world of international affairs and diplomacy. I don’t think I’d narrowed in exactly what that would be, whether it was to be an ambassador or working in that realm. But by the time I got to grad school on that track, the world changed radically on September eleventh. I had a reckoning, because I decided that realm, diplomacy, international affairs, I was in a degree program called security policy, and I realized that if you make a mistake in that world, people die. I almost overnight, after September eleventh, said, I don’t think that’s for me. I think the stakes are too high. I already stress out about being perfect, I don’t need to worry about that kind of consequence going to work every day. We were just too close to it, being in Washington DC in that program. I couldn’t see myself being able to sleep at night in that job.

It timed perfectly when my mom called and said, I need your help in the business. I said, that’s perfect, I can handle trucks and deliveries, that’s not so serious. So I was ready to take on that more business oriented career.

Syama Bunten:
What was it like to have your mom as boss?

Corinne Goble:
It was always a challenge. We had our own course to figure out. I was basically just coming out of teenage years and that rebellion, and now I’ve got my mom telling me what to do at work. That was not always fun. Yet we have similar personalities and the same targets, so we could figure it out. We might have some interesting tone talking to each other, being a little mother daughter nasty to each other, but there was always love there. It was the other employees who were the bigger challenge. They’d say things like, well, go ask your mom. They knew we had a special relationship or connection they could never have, and they were jealous of that, especially since she was the final decision maker.

Syama Bunten:
Totally. How long did you work for her?

Corinne Goble:
Not too long. When I got there, it was a financial mess. She’d had that embezzlement situation and she was really struggling to implement technology. Do you remember carbon copy paper, where the top copy was white, then yellow, then pink, then green, all these copies below? This was two thousand one, and when I went back to the trucking company, she was using those duplicate pads of paper for every delivery. The driver would leave to pick up a load with the full set. He’d get to the shipper, they’d sign, and he’d keep the top copy. Then he’d take it to the point of delivery, they’d sign, and he’d get the next copy. Then another copy would come back to the dispatch office confirming the load was complete, and they’d sign. Then that piece of paper would get sent back through the accounting process to bill the customer and pay the driver. It all depended on that green copy or whatever color we got by then.

It was a mess, relying on this piece of paper that had traveled thousands of miles in the hands of drivers who’d been drinking coffee and eating fast food and touching this paper. It was so messy. When I got there, our operations were that inefficient. We were filing paper, piles of things in folders, trying to find customer files. So inefficient.

One of the first things we did when I got there was implement a total operations technology system, front end and back end integrated. We started tracking loads by satellite and were able to bill a customer as soon as it delivered and start processing payment for the driver in real time. It made such an amazing difference in the business, that we went from losing massive amounts of money to being so profitable that she was able to exit.

Syama Bunten:
Wow, that’s amazing. Talk about at such a young age having exposure to what it’s like to be a female business owner from the inside out, then also seeing advancements in technology, entering a turnaround situation, being brought in as a trustworthy family member to help this turnaround, and then seeing the business grow in profitability and exit. That’s such an early formative time in your life to have had that kind of exposure. After that experience with your mom, where did you go next?

Corinne Goble:
Well, I know now that my exit from the company wasn’t very beneficial for me. She told me what she was going to do for me. She had already paid off some education for me that I needed to do the job there, which was directly related to my work. But she said, what I’m going to do for you is not contest your unemployment, and you can use that while you go find your next job. I thought, okay, that’s fine, we pay into those benefits, we might as well use them. That was three hundred dollars a week. It was two thousand two, and somehow I lived on that for a while. I had some money saved too, but I lived on that and ended up, I don’t even remember applying for this job, but I ended up working for an association of credit unions who hired me, gave me a company car, and sent me on the road to have lunch with all the credit union managers and make sure they felt good about their membership with the association.

It was the best job, especially for someone in their twenties, a company car, an expense account, lunch every day. All I had to do was write up contact reports and tell the boss who I met with and what was going on with them. It gave me insight into credit unions, and I started doing strategic planning for credit unions and board training. That really leveled up my skills in a different way and built the bridge to what I do today.

Syama Bunten:
It’s so funny as you’re talking about having the company car and traveling. In my twenties I thought travel was so glamorous, I’d think, wow, you want to enable me to travel and check things out. Now if someone handed me a company car and said go visit everyone, I’d say no thanks, we treat our time and energy differently now. But back then it’s like someone just handed you the keys to the world, go meet people, understand relationships, experience different territories. I’m curious how different people were, but also how painfully similar, as you started to understand the touch points and pain points of these managers. Give us the juice.

Corinne Goble:
I had moved to Alabama to look for work, which is when I got the job with the credit union association, so I was in the state of Alabama. I’d just gotten there, barely finding my way from my apartment to my job in Birmingham, and now I’ve got a company car and I’m going to travel the entire state. I was excited about exploring, and I learned a lot about rural, deep South culture that I’d never even realized, coming from western Michigan. I loved studying cultures, I’d traveled and studied abroad a lot, and this was another opportunity to learn more about our country and its people.

There are places in Alabama that haven’t changed since the nineteen fifties or sixties, and there’s still a lot of racial tension and civil issues that are very visible when you’re there, or at least when I was doing this work. This was something I needed to experience and had been sheltered from. I learned a lot, and it wasn’t always easy for me to learn. I came into it pretty ignorant, and I’d say I probably realized how much I still don’t know. There’s just so much history we aren’t necessarily always aware of day to day.

Syama Bunten:
Absolutely. When you’re traveling and learning and on the road so much, with the company car, were you also able to start saving more? Did that start to become more active, as your expenses got subsidized while traveling?

Corinne Goble:
I started to think about how credit unions work, that they operate on receiving deposits and using those deposits to make loans at greater interest than they’re paying on the deposits. I thought, this is a model that would work for me as a person, I should allow myself to hold more in deposits than I’m paying out. I was still working on paying off student loans, but I understood the money going out needed to be less than the money coming in. Since those times, I’ve always been moving my money to better paying accounts, having great diversification, and I started a 401k back then. I definitely saw how money makes money, just from watching how these nonprofit credit unions were doing it.

Syama Bunten:
It’s wild to me that in this world where everyone’s talking about impact and making a difference, even where you choose to bank can create a tremendous amount of impact with essentially zero risk. For every hundred thousand dollars you keep in a savings account, that allows the bank about a million dollars of loans. If you decide to bank at a community credit union and put that hundred thousand dollars in a savings account, and you’re really in alignment with the values of that community bank, you’ve enabled a million dollars of outflows to businesses and people and ideas you believe in. That’s being part of a regenerative economy. I think community banking is one of those things that doesn’t get talked about enough as a way to align your capital with your values without locking it up in a high risk investment. It’s a low risk way to get a good return, and it really changes the world in one of the most basic ways.

Corinne Goble:
You’re absolutely right. I also felt like I had visibility into this fairly invisible segment of the finance industry, because mainstream isn’t really aware of credit unions and those options, the often lower interest loans and in some cases better terms on deposits. I felt like this was a little bit of a secret power that not everybody knows about.

Syama Bunten:
So cool. Okay, talk to me about what happens next. Why did you decide to leave this fabulous job? Where did you decide to move directionally as you’re starting to really establish yourself? I almost feel like there are these moments in life where we’re building and building, and I don’t know, for me when I was younger I was like, is everything going to be okay, how do I know I’m doing this life thing right? And then things kind of start to lock in, and there’s usually a moment where you go, okay, I think I know kind of how to do this life thing, and I’m getting the infrastructure set. When was that for you?

Corinne Goble:
The association I was working for was really dynamic and it’s informed how I think about where I work today. It had a nonprofit side and a for profit division. I got recruited into the for profit company to help with their marketing. They had an in house marketing agency, and I’d developed a referral track record, sending credit union clients back to the marketing agency, and they said, you’re great at this, you should just come work in the agency. So I did. Not long after I was there, my boss, a senior VP with the company, ended up departing. It was a crazy story, he went to go manage some Disney talent, this was a side hustle for him, and it completely left the marketing agency without a leader. He even took the senior account executive with him.

Without any other choice, the president of the company let me stay in the agency and see if I could make a go of it. This was exciting to me, and honestly they had to do it, they didn’t have anyone else with any idea what we were doing. I knew how the agency was working, and I could keep our existing projects going, and I had a plan for recruiting new work. I had this idea that took off, where I pitched a statewide campaign featuring LeAnn Rimes, if you remember her.

Syama Bunten:
Of course.

Corinne Goble:
She was open to the idea, excited about it, and we did this statewide credit union campaign. It was like a six million dollar project. Since I was able to bring that work in, my boss said, yeah, I guess you can keep doing this agency work. Eventually, after about two years of that, I said, why am I doing this for them? I’m the only one here who knows how this works, if it weren’t for me this thing would have died a long time ago. Why don’t I open my own agency? I’d met someone in Auburn, Alabama, and I was driving a hundred miles back and forth to Birmingham, and I said, I’m tired of this drive, maybe I’ll just start my own business. So I left that agency and started my own. Within two years I was grossing six figures, really starting to hit my stride.

That was when I got approached by Kia Motors, who had just built their new factory in West Point, Georgia. It wasn’t even built yet when they came recruiting me. They wanted me to run a position that was internal and external communications for the factory, that would also represent government affairs in support with the Washington DC office, and would also run their community philanthropy budget.

Syama Bunten:
Wow, that’s so cool, because it feels like it’s coming full circle to that thought you had about doing policy. Sorry, go ahead, I’m excited to see how this goes.

Corinne Goble:
It took a year to get through their recruiting process. They were in no hurry, but they were still building the factory during that time. It takes a long time, especially in a stamping shop, where you’re making huge impact and you don’t want to rattle the property, because every vibration can degrade the quality of the whole manufacturing process. They build deep into the ground for a factory like that. It took a long time, but I got the job eventually and spent ten years there, and had a great opportunity to learn a whole new way of business, this Korean business built on the Toyota way. This system was a new method of first in, first out, where you only broadcast what parts you need to build the product right now, based on what you’re going to deliver into the market, based on what it needs right now. It’s different from the old American Ford, GM way of just making a ton of these and hoping the market can buy what you’re selling. They call it lean manufacturing.

I had a great time doing that, I learned a little Korean, but after ten years there was no way for me to grow. I reported essentially to the president of the factory, and without an engineering degree or a different gender, I wasn’t going to be the president of the factory, and that was the only position above me. I started to think about what else I might be able to do.

Syama Bunten:
Are you able to speak to, from a business and cultural standpoint, how different international organizations look at salary and compensation and negotiations and packages? How did you sort of negotiate and think about your professional career and what you were asking for in that ecosystem, and how did it differ from your other experiences and organizations?

Corinne Goble:
When I came into Kia Motors, I came in at what felt like a decent, but pretty low, salary level. I think I was hired in at a manager level. They were really great about promoting me, even though my position relative to the rest of the team never really changed, but my title kept getting elevated, even though I didn’t report to anybody else. We were a fairly flat organization, but they were really great about rewarding great performance. I had a great team and I think they’re all still there today. My pay grew. I had great benefits, they did discretionary incentive compensation, so you got bonuses every year. My pay grew faster there than anywhere I’d ever worked.

Syama Bunten:
That’s amazing. How did you start thinking about building or expanding your financial foundation at that time? Did you think about investing in the stock market, or a home, or putting more money in your 401k, or taking more vacation? How did you think about managing what more was coming in?

Corinne Goble:
I ended up having to be less selfish during that period, thinking less about my own wealth creation and more about what this meant for my family. Rather than building larger deposits and making bigger investments, I was thinking about what it meant for the family. What I mean is, when my daughter was born, my second, by that time my mom had lost her mom, and she was looking for her next thing. She was day trading. She loved it. There were days, maybe weeks, where she might not have come out of her robe, because she could be in front of the computer watching the markets.

Syama Bunten:
It’s like a super COVID ready experience, what do I do all day, I’m stuck at home, let me learn how to day trade.

Corinne Goble:
Yeah, I’d go visit her, maybe a year after my grandmother passed away, and walk into the house and wonder, when’s the last time you got out of that robe, do you get dressed anymore. She was getting shut in and hermiting in this day trading, talking about the market stuff, and she was busy, but I thought she was depressed, really retreated from people.

I had to make a choice at that point and say, I want what’s best for my daughter and what’s best for my mom, and I think that means bringing my mom back to Alabama with us. She sold my grandmother’s house, moved in with us, and gave up day trading, because she couldn’t take care of my daughter during the day and day trade. This took a major investment, I was paying for her car, her cell phone, her insurance, basically supporting her so she could support us. I joked that I basically had a wife, because my mom would do the grocery shopping, take care of dinner, and I’d come home and dinner would be on the table.

This limited what I could really do financially for myself, but it provided for our family in a way that’s priceless, being able to have my daughter grow up with my mom, who was never domestic until that period. It wasn’t until after my dad had his strokes and moved in with us too, which was wild, and then he passed away, that my mom finally decided to go back out on her own, after my daughter was in middle school by then. I had to take a pause from a lot of the financial goals because we had these family goals that were important then. Not that we spent our savings or took out of our investments, we just couldn’t make much progress beyond what was growing naturally over time.

Syama Bunten:
I was eleven years old the first time I learned that nice things weren’t for me. That belief ran quietly underneath my entire financial life for the next twenty years. That’s the reason I built the Money Story Reset, five reflections on the beliefs shaping your relationship with money. My own stories are in every single one, including the parts I don’t usually say out loud. I didn’t write this from the outside, I did every page myself first. It’s free. The link is in the show notes, or go straight to wealthcatalyst.com slash reset. That’s wealthcatalyst.com slash reset.

People make an assumption that money is like some hockey stick growth, that life is always going to be on a hockey stick growth, but really it’s more like a roller coaster than a straight line trajectory. It’s a blessing that you didn’t have to take any money out, but thank God it would have been there for you if you needed it. Having savings or these investment accounts, they’re there to save you, they’re there so you can use it.

Corinne Goble:
And the foundation that was built was there in a good way. I didn’t make a lot of contributions during those periods to my kids’ college savings accounts, but there was already money there. Especially in my son’s, and then my daughter’s been able to resume that. Thanks to that, even in those earlier years, I get to benefit from that today. Even though there was a period where I wasn’t making contributions, the money grew. Thank goodness.

Syama Bunten:
Exactly. So powerful. It’s like being in the right relationship, where you’re able to move together as a family, as one unit. I think that’s something that isn’t spoken about enough, choosing the right partner to go through life with, because as things evolve, it’s not always one straight line. There’s a reason relationships can be so traumatic at times, but also so incredible at times, because you get to really hold each other through the expanse of what life presents to you. That’s really powerful, Corinne.

Corinne Goble:
It’s a give back moment too. My mom was there for me in all those formative years, during childhood, so to be able to bring her back into our lives and pay that forward was the right thing to do. She’s now able to get back up on her feet. She owns her own home outright, and works for an employee owned company because she loves to do it, not because she has to. That investment paid off for her in a way that now she’s not dependent on me, and I get to focus back on my household.

Syama Bunten:
I love that. So bring us to where you sit today. You’re in an incredible role that’s facilitating community, women, business, the economy, how we think about what’s ahead. I truly believe the future of how we do business is in a way that’s in support of each other, uplifting women business owners, creating financial independence, and providing them with tools and resources to equip themselves for big leaps and creating independence. How did you decide, and what were some of the dominoes that fell that brought you to this moment, and how have you changed as a result?

Corinne Goble:
I thought it was a door closing, but it ended up being the best thing for me. When I was at Kia Motors and really wanted growth in my career and there didn’t seem to be an opportunity, I saw an open position at the government affairs office for the company in Washington DC, and I wanted that job so badly. I thought that’s where I needed to be, I was traveling to DC every month, and I felt like I know this job, I can do this job, and I want this job, and it would get me back into Washington. It seemed like from headquarters they were supportive of me getting into that job, but there was a box I had to check, where my boss at the factory had to sign off on me quitting to be eligible for that other position. You had to essentially quit one entity to start with the other. He said, I’m not going to sign off on that. I was shocked, I did not see that coming. He said, I just need you here.

Syama Bunten:
He sucks. I’m sorry that happened.

Corinne Goble:
We’re friends, we’re friends. It ended up being the best thing for me, because getting out of that company and realizing there was nothing else for me was the only way I would have ever learned about the Association of Women’s Business Centers. Credit goes back to my mom again. When my mom had her trucking company, she and some of her women owned business peers had all participated in an association that started up to support women called the Alliance of Women Entrepreneurs, AWE. This became my mom’s family, this community, her tribe. Several of these women became close friends, they’d go out dancing, to bars, hang out on weekends, do vacations together, and these were women who became strong role models in my life.

After that door closed at Kia, my mom was telling her friend Bonnie, a friend from AWE, that Corinne’s disappointed, she was trying to get this job and she’d really like to get back to DC. Bonnie said, well, I’m the chair of the Association of Women’s Business Centers, and I just got back from there, we’ve just interviewed some candidates and it’s not going well, I didn’t like the candidates, we can’t find the person we want. My mom said, well, I think Corinne would really like to apply for it. I think Bonnie might have been remembering me from when I was ten, and she said, sure, have her send in her resume.

So I did. I contacted the recruiting company, and when I got the job description, I knew it was me. It was women’s entrepreneurship, it had the government affairs piece, which I was well equipped to do, it had the finance piece, from the credit union space. I couldn’t imagine any other person who could check these boxes the way I could. This job was designed for me. I knew it going in.

Syama Bunten:
Yes. Was it that hell yes feeling, where everything in your body lights up and you’re like, my God, this is the thing?

Corinne Goble:
I just knew it was for me. I was also confused how I had never heard of a women’s business center, and yet I’d had my own business, and gotten support from an SBDC, a small business development center in Auburn. The woman there, Jackie DuPuy, was really great, but I’d never heard of a women’s business center, and I thought, how could that be. While I had that whole body, this is me experience, I also felt very convicted that they needed a champion who could get the word out that women needed to know about this resource. I felt more than I want this job, I felt that I wanted to advocate so women would know it was there, because I felt like it was necessary.

As it went down, I applied, and Bonnie recused herself because she was a family friend, and the hiring committee moved forward with me and brought me in. Then I figured out what it’s like to come in as the first W-2 employee into an organization I was really having to build. We had members, but other than that, it was building it from scratch. The members were on an Excel spreadsheet, invoices weren’t even coming out of QuickBooks. It was a real mess.

Syama Bunten:
Were you like, wait a second, this feels like working with mom twenty years ago? Did it all come rushing back?

Corinne Goble:
Yeah, I could probably pull some files, we probably still have pink, yellow, green copies of things back there. It was very reminiscent of that, there needed to be some operational stuff built. We needed to tell people who we were, and we didn’t have a lot of awareness, because the organization had gone without anyone at the helm other than the volunteers on the board for about a year, so relationships with some sponsors were suffering, relationships with members were distant. So the first thing I did was call every single member on the phone, introduce myself. I couldn’t have known how important and powerful that was to do first. I still have people say, I remember the day you started, or when you called me. Building the member relationships, then building on the sponsors and funders, it’s been a very fast eight years. It’s been a really great ride, we’ve been through multiple administrations and lots of challenges, but I’m excited about the future now.

Syama Bunten:
That’s powerful. During that time your children are growing up, life is advancing, your presence, your power, your influence in this way where all these parts of you come together, this Venn diagram. It feels like this has been perfect for you, Corinne, and now you get to really create it and champion the future of the organization. It can be challenging when you’re at the head of an organization to also think about your own compensation and growth, balancing the needs of the company with your own needs and how your life is changing. In these last eight years, as a family, what are some financial landmarks or flags, how have you started to think about what’s next, or what have you established in these last five, six years that maybe you didn’t have before?

Corinne Goble:
For one thing, my success at home is connected to the organization. Very early on, the board decided that essentially I can’t eat what I don’t kill, the organization has to be thriving for my compensation to be competitive and good. I have a salary and discretionary compensation, and the board approved bringing out a 401k some years ago. Being able to bring consistency, but also the incentive for additional compensation, that’s all been great. At the same time, I haven’t stopped managing my portfolio personally, and I see so much opportunity now. Being in this space, where I feel it’s necessary to know how small businesses can ensure their wealth, has opened up opportunities for me personally. I was an early adopter in Bitcoin and crypto, and I see tokenized treasury opportunities, opportunities to invest in companies as an angel investor. I see a window into the world that this position affords me just by virtue of the work I get to do. I wouldn’t see the things I see without doing this job. It’s not necessarily money coming out of the company, it’s just from the opportunity and perspective I get.

Syama Bunten:
I love that. How old are your children now?

Corinne Goble:
My son’s nineteen, and my daughter’s fourteen.

Syama Bunten:
That’s amazing. I’m sure they’re very proud of mom, and I get to see all the amazing things you’re up to. I’m curious, with both of them, but specifically your daughter, what conversations are opening up as a result of the opportunities you see in front of you, and the work you’re doing day to day. What’s that influence been like on your relationship, and on her aperture of what she sees as possible?

Corinne Goble:
Both of them, but especially my daughter, she’s not really in tune with what I do in my work. Someone will ask her a question and she’ll come back and say, mom, I was on the airplane talking to this business owner who wanted to know more about what you do, but mom, what do you do, I still don’t think I understand what you do. I think it’s because I’m working from home sometimes, taking phone calls in the car. She could easily know, she’s been exposed to what I do, but her life is so much more important, what she has going on, her goals, what she’s interested in, is far more important than what I’m doing. Even though I’ve dragged her to the Capitol, and she’s sat through congressional hearings where I’m testifying, which she finds extremely boring. Her life is about her, she’s the protagonist in her story. She trusts me for advice, and the conversations we’re having right now are a lot about her career options, what it could look like. She’s talked about how it could open up time in her schedule and be great money if she pursued being an orthodontist, or she’s talked about how she really enjoys cosmetology and could she just do hair, but can she really make a life doing that. She’s exploring different ideas about careers, and I think that’s appropriate for where she is right now.

Syama Bunten:
I think it’ll be so cool to see, twenty years from now, having her in this seat, going through an interview on a podcast, being like, wow, my mom, these are all the things she did, and I got to have my grandma around when I was little. It’s interesting, there’s all this subconscious and subliminal information, and epigenetic stuff getting transferred and picked up, that’s completely influencing her in ways that aren’t evident to any of us right now, and to her, and it’s going to unfold. It’s really incredible.

Corinne Goble:
Some dots are going to connect for her.

Syama Bunten:
Totally.

Corinne Goble:
And that’ll happen on her time.

Syama Bunten:
As it happens for all of us. It’s today, no one’s ahead, no one’s behind, we’re all tracking the story of our life. Corinne, as you think about the future and legacy, before we jump into that, you and I are going to have the privilege of seeing each other and connecting, and you have some of your big events coming up this September. I’d love for you to share what’s on deck, who it’s for, and how women can start to get involved and recognize this is for them.

Corinne Goble:
I’m really excited about September. We’re going to be in Denver, hosting our annual founder summit. We have a platform called Hope to Women. HopeToWomen.org was designed as the outreach mechanism so everyone could know about women’s business centers. I’m still so committed to that. We have to have something of value for that outreach to be impactful, for it to work. If they don’t know what a women’s business center is, just introducing them to one isn’t enough. We found we have to have something of value to really connect with the business owner first, and that’s how Hope to Women was born.

We do this event in person, we’ll be in Denver, and there couldn’t be a more beautiful setting to be in September than nestled with the Rocky Mountains around. We’ve put together a package of content that’s unlike any women’s conference. Most women’s conferences I attend, I find inspiration and make good connections through networking, no doubt, but what I don’t have is a real action plan when I leave. I might have some follow ups, a to do list, some inspiration, a good gut feeling about it. This is different. This one is about helping business owners find what’s stopping them from growing and being successful, and overcoming that in the room. It takes three days, it can’t be done in one day or one hour.

We have a facilitator, and several speakers throughout, all perfectly curated to break these business owners free from what’s holding them back. Coco Selman designed an entrepreneurial operating system that’s so powerful. She’s so fun to be with, it’s almost like being in the good part of therapy, it’s like a spa experience, and yet she can walk you through some of the toughest challenges of your business. We’re doing that with her entrepreneurial operating system for three days.

We have incredible people in the room. Coco is an eight figure exit, multi time founder. We have other serial entrepreneur women. We have the Champagne CEO there, we have Dr. Mary Swenson, who’s exited multiple times, taken businesses public, and now runs the World Trade Center in Delaware. We just have the right women in the room, and I’m excited about some of the business owners we’ve got there too. It’s going to be one of those unforgettable moments, not only for the connections, but for the breakthroughs that are coming for these businesses, and that’s what we’re there for.

Syama Bunten:
I love that, Corinne, that’s so amazing. I’m so excited we’re having a salon in Denver, that we’ll get a chance to hang out, and the women who get a chance to participate, what a treat. Coco is a dear friend and a brilliant woman, and I’m so confident in the hands of the women who are attending, she’s just the most incredible individual.

I’d love to turn to the ending of our conversation, though in many ways I feel like this is the beginning, because there’s so much more we could talk about. I do believe we’re living longer now than ever, so I’m going to put you at a ripe age of, I don’t know, a hundred and five years old, Corinne. If you were to look backward at a hundred and five, onto this body of work that is your life, which means you’ve got decades more to go, but it also means you’re afforded this rare opportunity of seeing the container, what are some of the words that come to mind as you think about legacy and this body of work?

Corinne Goble:
It’s such a tough question. First of all, I believe I’ll get to a hundred and five and my body will be in a good place, I’ve been really thinking about longevity in the physical form, but I haven’t thought much about what legacy looks like, other than every single day I’m really trying to do something that matters, for each of the business owners that are served by women’s business centers directly, and often initially through Hope to Women.

It may not be attached to me, this legacy, but what I want to have in the rear view mirror is a greater measure of women participating in the economy than we have today. I don’t mean it in a zero sum game, I don’t mean taking a bigger share of the pie. I mean, through the power of women and their businesses, we can grow the economy in a way that takes a lot of people like you and like me all working together. I don’t think that legacy will be attached to me if we did it right, and I’m okay with that, because I don’t think any one person can do it. I think it’s going to take all of us working together.

Syama Bunten:
Amen, honey. The ecosystem, how we’re building together, is so powerful. We’ve talked about money in a lot of different capacities, the 401ks, salary building, opportunities to invest. One of my favorite questions to ask as we close is, what has been one of your most fun ways of spending your money recently?

Corinne Goble:
I love to travel, when I get to go somewhere exciting I’ve never been. Those opportunities seem to be more and more rare, because I’ve just been more places. I’m going to Iceland soon and I’m really excited about that. Nothing is more exciting to me than booking a trip to a place that’s on my bucket list. So yeah, I’m excited about that.

Syama Bunten:
I love that so much, that’s so wonderful. My final question is, the women who listen to the show love to rally around the women who are on the show. What are you calling in, what do you need, what are you asking for right now, and how can we show up for you?

Corinne Goble:
First and foremost, I want us all to think about the women who need to overcome some barrier inside themselves. I firmly believe what’s holding our businesses back is nothing in the business, it’s something within us, and that’s what the Hope to Women Summit is about. My call to action is really rallying around, it might not be you who needs this summit, but you might know somebody who does. You might know somebody who’s talking about their business in a way where you know they aren’t seeing the right picture, or they can’t find their way around a challenge. That’s the person who needs a little nudge to be there.

Syama Bunten:
I love it, fabulous. Corinne, so lovely spending time with you. I know we just scratched the surface, and I know as our listeners get a chance to connect with you in person and experience your work, they’ll get to know all the other incredible things about you. I’m grateful today for your spirit of generosity and your ability to share so openly about your life journey, what makes you who you are, and the future you’re building. Thank you for being here today on Getting Rich Together.

Corinne Goble:
I love it. I love the mission, and it was great to be with you today.

Syama Bunten:
Thank you for listening. This is the conversation we come back to every single week. Real women, real wealth, and what becomes possible when we stop being silent about money. If today’s episode moved you, don’t let it stop here. Wealth Catalyst is where women go to take it further. Our Freedom Tour salons are gathering women in 32 cities this year, intimate evenings in homes and private spaces where women talk honestly about money, risk, and what they’re building.

And if you’re ready to go even bigger, join us at the Wealth Catalyst Summit, a full day event in New York City this May and San Francisco this October. Find your city and claim your seat at wealthcatalyst.com. We’ll see you there.