Expand Your Empire

Expand Your Empire is a finalist in six categories at the 2026 Stevie Awards for Women in Business, including Thought Leadership in Consumer Services, and winners are announced in November. If this show has changed how you think about the financial rules you inherited, a rating or review wherever you listen helps more women find it. Most accomplished women have been responsible with money for twen...

Expand Your Empire is a finalist in the 2026 Stevie Awards for Women in Business across six categories, including Mentor or Coach of the Year in Finance and Thought Leadership in Consumer Services. Ratings help get the show in front of new listeners and judges, so if this show has changed how you think about your capital, please leave a five-star rating wherever you listen: https://podcasts.apple....

In this episode, Amanda Taylor sits down with Cate Wilkes, Founder and CEO of 638 Capital, a former Fortune 50 executive and Big Four advisor. Families spend years and serious money building the structures that hold private wealth, the governance, the succession plans, the tax strategy and the capital allocation strategy, and they spend almost nothing preparing the human who eventually has to make...

In money rule number one, I talked about why you can't budget your way to wealth. Today I'm confronting the next rule most of us inherited: debt is bad. I used to believe it too. I climbed out of credit card debt early in my life, and once I was out, I wore "no car payment" like a trophy. Responsible people eliminate debt. Successful people don't need it. That was the story I told myself. I'll giv...

I have three coffee mugs on my shelf with three women I adore. Hannah Waddingham as Rebecca Welton, Catherine O'Hara as Moira Rose, and Dolly Parton. Catherine died in January. Dolly died a week ago. Losing two of those three women in the same year hit me harder than I expected. But when I started thinking about what I wanted to say about Dolly, I didn't want to talk about the thing that everybody...

I would never say I was really ever irresponsible with money. Once I got out of the college debt phase and became an adult, I could balance a checkbook, I paid my bills on time, nobody would have looked at my life and said there's a woman who doesn't have it together. But here is the other part of that conversation. There were financial things happening in my own house where I basically thought, h...

You're being asked to win two bets nobody can control the odds on. That's not a discipline problem, and no amount of budgeting harder is going to touch it. Here's the whole menu of what you can actually do, including the parts nobody earns a commission telling you about. Most retirement advice hands you one option and calls it a plan. Usually the one the person across the table gets paid on. This...

I remember the first time I heard the idea of buying an existing business instead of starting one from scratch. It came from Codie Sanchez, who's built her whole platform around exactly that, buying boring, unsexy businesses instead of starting new ones. What got me wasn't the idea itself. It was that I had never even considered it as an option. I understood numbers. I understood operations. I und...

This is episode 52. One full year of this show, and I'm marking it by getting specific about a sentence I've said probably a thousand times. When women control capital, the world changes. I still believe it. But I've started to think a lot of you hear that and translate it into something I never said: when I finally have enough money, then the world changes. So you keep earning. The number goes up...

You've spent decades getting good at things. Companies profited from that expertise. Hard seasons sharpened it. And most of it, you were never really paid for. At least not what it was worth. Paula Washington calls that experience strategic capital, and she thinks it's the most underused asset you own. She's the author of The Encore Playbook and the creator of the Golden Compass Methodology. In th...

She Built It For 22 Years. Made Herself Replaceable On Purpose. Then Sold It. Most conversations about selling a company stop at the wire transfer. The money hits, everyone claps, roll credits. Christine Slocumb built a healthcare marketing agency over 22 years, made herself replaceable on purpose, and then sold it to private equity. And then she wrote the book on everything the sale price doesn't...

This week on Expand Your Empire, Amanda sits down with Audrey Schoen, a licensed marriage and family therapist who specializes in financial therapy for high achievers, entrepreneurs, executives, and couples. Audrey is not speaking theoretically. She has lived the tipping point where your business pulls from your life rather than funding it, and she built her practice helping others find their way...

A founder gets a number. Revenue for the month. A client who didn’t renew. The bank balance before payroll. And instead of treating that number as information, she treats it as a verdict. This episode is about the decision-making problem hiding inside that confusion, and why it quietly costs founders years of decisions, not just one bad month. In this episode: Why a bad number gets treated as a ve...

I met Susan at a Coronado Chamber of Commerce event. She mentioned she'd bought an auto shop. When I found out why, I knew I had to have her on. After sponsoring two Ukrainian families and watching how hard it was for them to stabilize here in the US, Susan didn't want to stop at temporary support. She bought an existing auto repair shop in Point Loma and created a real pathway for them to have wo...

You Cannot Buy Your Way Out Of A Belief. I want to confess something. I have spent a significant amount of money over the course of building my businesses on coaching programs, courses, masterminds, community memberships, and certifications. A lot of things I paid for and didn't even do. Most of them were good. The content was solid. The frameworks made sense. This isn't about getting scammed. It'...

When is the last time you did nothing and let it be okay? Not rest you scheduled. Not a Sunday blocked off so you could recover enough to work again Monday. Actually stopped, left space open, and didn't fill it. If you're anything like me, the answer is that sounds like a trap. The entrepreneurship space is always telling us to add more. Post more. Build the funnel. Launch the offer. Grow the list...

This episode is not for the woman who doesn't know what she's doing wrong. It's for the woman who knows exactly what she's doing wrong, could probably teach a master class on it, and is doing it anyway. She's read the books. Done the programs. She can articulate her money blocks with impressive clinical precision. She knows she's underpricing. She knows she's avoiding her numbers. She even knows s...

Every time I bring up investing, someone says I'm not good at math and checks out. That was never the real reason. The real reason is that nobody explained it in a language that felt like it was built for them. That is what this entire show is for. This is the final episode of Paychecks to Portfolios. We are on the multiple layers of the earn, control, own, multiply framework. And this is where th...

If you stopped working tomorrow, not retired, just stopped, how long could you maintain your current life before things started to break? If the answer is a few months, that is not a criticism. That is just data. And it tells you something important. You have built income. What you have not built yet is a position. And those are two very different things. This episode is about ownership. What it a...

I was standing on a stage in Hilo, Hawaii, when a handful of women walked up after I got off stage. Not to tell me how great the presentation was. To say thank you, because I had said out loud what they had been holding privately. And if you are a grown, accomplished, financially capable woman and your response to someone naming your private thought is relief, that is not about me. That is about t...

For about three years of running this business, I tracked every dollar. Every launch, every retainer, every invoice. I could tell you within fifty bucks what I'd invoiced in any given month. I believed, based on that tracking, that I knew what I was building. I did not know what I was building. Because revenue and income are not the same number. And in practice, I was treating gross revenue like i...

You can look fine on paper and be falling apart underneath. That's not a mindset problem. That's biology, and most high-performing women have no idea it's happening until the branch falls off the tree. Dr. Traci Potterf has spent 20 years working with high performers who are exhausted, wired, and running on fumes, and calling it hustle. She's been there herself. Living in a toxic environment, igno...

The number most Americans say they need to retire comfortably is $1.46 million. The median retirement savings for women aged 45 to 54 is $115,000. That's a $1.3 million gap, and it hits self-employed women hardest, because the entire retirement system was built assuming someone else is handling it on your behalf. Nobody is. So let's talk about how you build it yourself. In this solo episode, Amand...

I had a whole other episode ready for you this week. Recorded. Done. Ready to go. Then something happened I couldn’t let slide without addressing first, so I scrapped it and recorded this at the last minute instead, which is honestly very on-brand for how this whole thing started. This one is more raw than usual. That’s exactly why it needs to come out this way. For a long time, I was three steps...

You can fix your systems. You can hire the right people. You can build the processes. But none of it works if the belief underneath has not changed. In this episode, I sit down with coach and clinical hypnotherapist Michele Molitor, who has spent more than two decades helping high-achieving women navigate the moment when success no longer feels like enough. Not because anything is wrong. Not becau...