Women's History Month - Celebrating Women Who Tell Our Stories - Margaret Gooley's Story

I know I’m going to get dragged for this, but a woman who has been a source of inspiration in my life is Bethenny Frankel. If you don’t know who that is, she’s a former member of the Real Housewives of New York cast. We all know that being a stay-at-home parent is one of the most challenging roles a woman can have. However, when Bethenny started on the show in the mid-2000s, she wasn’t what most would traditionally define as a housewife. She was the only single woman in the mix. She made her own money and didn’t have children at the time.  

At the beginning of the first season of the show, Bethenny was struggling to get her business, Bethenny Bakes, off the ground. I remember watching her hustle and struggle through the ability to make rent and make her dreams come true. I was in my early 20s and just starting my career back then, so having someone to at least loosely relate to was great for me. I loved her tenacity, her quick wit, her need for organization, and her unwavering ability to be authentically herself. As the seasons of the show progressed, she came up with a very simple idea for a new, bottled alcoholic beverage and started using the exposure and the connections the TV show gave her to push this idea forward and turn it into a successful business she was passionate about. I’ve always found entrepreneurs absolutely fascinating, so getting to watch the progression and cheer her on as she continued to cheer on and support other women through the process was pretty awesome. Now, she’s turned a very successful business venture into the ability to help people all over the world who are experiencing crisis (like the victims of the recent devastating earthquake in Turkey). I hope some day I’ll be able to give back on a bigger scale like this.

- Margaret Gooley, CFP®, CDFA®, Worley Erhart-Graves Financial Advisors