Build Your Own Boat

Janine Vanderburg
  • 5.0 (6)
  • Entrepreneurship

An entrepreneurship podcast for women in midlife and beyond. What if the most powerful thing you could do right now — for your finances, your freedom, and your future — was to stop waiting for someone else to hand you an opportunity and start building your own? Build Your Own Boat is the podcast for women in midlife and beyond who are done playing by rules that were never written with them in mind. Hosted by award-winning 3x entrepreneur Janine Vanderburg, each episode features real conversations with women in midlife and beyond who made the bold decision to bet on themselves — launching businesses and creative ventures, building wealth, and rewriting what entrepreneurship looks like in the second half of life. This isn't a podcast about hustle culture or overnight success stories. It's a roadmap — built from lived experience, hard-won wisdom, and the kind of honest conversation you rarely hear anywhere else. Guests include founders, consultants, creatives, coaches, media makers, and civic leaders who are proving every week that midlife isn't a ceiling. It's a launchpad. Whether you're just beginning to wonder if entrepreneurship is for you, actively building your business, or simply looking for proof that it's not too late — you'll find it here. Every episode, you'll discover: 1. How real women in midlife launched and grew successful ventures — and what they wish they'd known sooner 2. Practical strategies for building financial independence and freedom on your own terms 3. Honest conversations about the challenges of midlife entrepreneurship, and how to navigate them 4. Inspiration that's grounded in reality, not motivational posters The Encore Economy is booming — and women in midlife are driving it. Build Your Own Boat is where their stories live. Subscribe now and join a growing community of women who are building something that's entirely, unapologetically theirs. And do SUBSCRIBE to Build Your Own Boat on Substack as well, to read the full stories of our guests, and their best tips and resources. https://buildyourownboat.substack.com/

Episodes

  1. 4d ago

    From Fortune 500 to Founder: How Colleen Paulson Built Ageless Careers—and Why Women Over 50 Are the Most Underestimated Entrepreneurs in America

    What happens when a top-performing Fortune 500 engineer decides the system isn't worth fighting anymore—and builds something better on her own terms? In this episode of Build Your Own Boat, host Janine Vanderburg sits down with Colleen Paulson, founder of Ageless Careers and one of LinkedIn's most trusted voices on age discrimination in the workplace. Colleen holds an engineering degree and an MBA, built her career at Procter & Gamble and FedEx, and walked away from it all after being told she could come back to work full time—or not at all. No job share. No flexibility. No exceptions. That was 2006. Since then, she has built a thriving practice helping professionals over 50 fight age bias, rewrite their stories, and land roles that actually value what they bring. She has worked with more than a thousand executives, grown a LinkedIn following approaching 100,000, and rebuilt her entire business—twice—on her own terms. This conversation covers all of it: the corporate ultimatum that made her decision easy, the single cold email that launched her business, what age discrimination actually looks like up close, and what she would tell any woman sitting at a kitchen table wondering if she has what it takes to start something new. She does. Here's the proof. What You'll Learn in This Episode Why flexibility—not ambition—was the breaking point that pushed a Fortune 500 top performer out the doorHow one cold email to a Yahoo Finance columnist became the foundation of a 20-year businessWhat age bias really looks like when experienced professionals walk through the door of a hiring processWhy "staying in corporate" is no longer the safe choice—and what the data says about who is actually at riskThe LinkedIn strategy that rebuilt Colleen's business after COVID and now drives more than 80% of her clientsWhy women over 50 are uniquely positioned to build businesses—and what most of them are still getting wrongHow to find the "through line" in a nonlinear career and use it as your greatest competitive assetThe one thing Colleen wishes she had done 10 years earlier (and why it's not too late for you to do it now)Where to find Colleen Paulson 🌐 Website: agelesscareers.com 💼 LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/colleenpaulson

    36 min

  2. 4d ago

    How Do Women Over 50 Stop Starting Over? Donna Cravotta on Tried & New, Intentional Visibility, and Building From What You Already Have

    What if the thing holding accomplished women back isn't a lack of skills or experience — but the pressure to start from scratch every time they want something new? In this episode of Build Your Own Boat, host Janine Vanderburg talks with Donna Cravotta — founder of Cravotta Media Group, creator of the Intentional Visibility Project on Substack, and host of the Real 50 Over 50, a weekly livestream series now in its third year featuring nearly 200 women redefining leadership and visibility after 50. Donna's path includes 25 years in law firms, a first business launched at 42 as a virtual assistant (before that was a real category), and a deliberate pause at 58 to ask — for the first time — what she actually wanted. What emerged from that pause is her methodology: Tried & New, a framework that helps accomplished women stop starting over and start building from what they already have. This conversation covers all of it: the career pivot that started at a diner at nine o'clock at night, the hand cream client who generated $100,000 in sales in eight months with no budget, what 200 interviews with women over 50 actually revealed (hint: it wasn't "reinvention"), and the wisdom bomb every woman sitting on the edge of something new needs to hear. Where to find Donna Cravotta Substack — Intentional Visibility Project: @DonnaCravotta LinkedIn: Donna Cravotta Website: Cravotta Media Group

    42 min

  3. 4d ago

    From Amazon Alexa to AI Entrepreneur: Polly Allen on Burnout, Building a Business, and Creating Security on Your Own Terms

    What does it actually take for a woman to walk away from a high-level corporate job—one with status, a good salary, and a brand name on the resume—and build something entirely her own? In this episode of Build Your Own Boat, host Janine Vanderburg talks with Polly Allen, former Principal Project Manager on Amazon Alexa AI and founder of two ventures: AI Career Boost, a program helping professionals become AI-fluent leaders, and Escape Velocity AI Studio, which helps business owners and aspiring entrepreneurs build their first AI-powered revenue stream. Polly's story is a real account of burnout so severe she took six months of medical leave, the financial math she ran before quitting, the loneliness of launching a webinar with no proof points, and the accidental Calendly moment that generated 130 customer conversations in three weeks. Questions This Episode Answers How do you know when burnout has crossed a line you can't come back from?What financial runway do you actually need before leaving a corporate job?How do you sell something before you've finished building it?Why do women consistently underprice their services, and how do you break that habit?Can you build an AI-powered product or business without a technical background?What does "action comes before clarity" mean in practice—and how do you apply it when you're scared?How do women use their corporate experience as a competitive advantage when starting a new business?Is it too late to build something with AI if you haven't started yet?Key Insights from This Episode Corporate environments were not designed for women. Polly is direct about this: the systems that rewarded the people around her were built for people whose domestic lives were managed by someone else. Understanding this brings the clarity that opens the door to building differently.The risk of entrepreneurship is smaller than you've been told. Before Polly left Amazon, she calculated her runway, then asked herself a harder question: When's the last time I really tried to figure something out and failed for six months in a row? The answer reframed everything.Sell first, build second. The biggest mistake new entrepreneurs make is building a complete product before testing whether anyone wants it. Polly's first 16 clients came from a program that wasn't finished yet.Pricing is a mindset problem, not a math problem. Polly's 10x game: before setting a price, ask whether the offer is worth ten times what you're charging. If you can own that story and believe it, you're no longer underselling. Charge for outcomes, not hours.You will have to do it afraid. Before her first public webinar, Polly nearly cancelled. She didn't. Her word for that moment: you're going to have to do it afraid.AI has lowered the barrier to building a product dramatically. Tools like Lovable now allow non-technical founders to describe what they want in plain English and have a working product in an afternoon. The hard part is no longer building. It's knowing what to build and for whom.Where to find Polly Allen 🔗 LinkedIn: Polly M. Allen 💻 AI Career Boost: aicareerboost.com 🚀 Escape Velocity AI Studio: escapevelocityai.studio

    38 min

  4. 4d ago

    From Nonprofit CEO to Cookie Entrepreneur: How Liddy Romero Built a $250K Business in Midlife After Divorce

    What does it actually look like to walk away from a celebrated career — with nothing in your pocket — and build something new? Liddy Romero did exactly that. For sixteen years, Liddy ran Work-Life Partnership, a nationally recognized Colorado nonprofit social enterprise she founded that helped over 200,000 frontline workers navigate real crises — housing instability, domestic violence, childcare emergencies — in partnership with companies like Starbucks and The Gap. She raised millions of dollars, won national awards, and helped take the program from a single-county Colorado initiative to a model replicated across the country. Then, in 2024, she walked away. No severance. No profit sharing. Zero. What came next is a story about transferable skills, strategic risk, cultural pride, and what happens when a CEO-level brain gets pointed at a four-generation family recipe that had never left South Texas. Today Liddy runs Romero Cookies — a handmade, elevated Mexican heritage cookie business built around the pan de polvo (Mexican wedding cookie) her family made in their Rio Grande Valley bakery for forty years. In her first full year of business, she hit $250,000 in sales. What You'll Learn in This Episode How to fund a product business with no revenue — Liddy used her knowledge of community development financial institutions to land a $150,000 small business loan before she'd sold a single cookieWhy nonprofit skills transfer directly to for-profit entrepreneurship — from closing corporate contracts to building financial models, nothing she learned was wastedHow to test a product idea before you know how to make it — Liddy ran Meta ads before she had a recipeThe mindset shift from social impact to personal wealth building — and why it matters for women who have spent careers fundraising for othersHow to say no to bad opportunities — even when cash flow is tight and the offer is sitting right in front of youWhat corporate gifting looks like as a business model — and why it beats the consumer packaged goods margin game for a bootstrapped brandWhere to find Liddy Romero and Romero Cookies 🌐 Website: romerocookies.com📸 Instagram: @RomeroCookies💼 LinkedIn: Liddy Romero on LinkedIn🛍️ Shop: romerocookies.com (corporate gifting inquiries go directly to Liddy via the contact form)🏪 In-store: Coming soon to Tony's Market, Colorado

    38 min

  5. 4d ago

    From Corporate Layoff to Coaching Empire: How Kami Guildner Built a Business Around Helping Women Entrepreneurs Find Their Voice

    Kami Guildner spent nearly two decades building a career in oil and gas, rising to VP of Marketing and Branding before a 2008 layoff changed everything. What followed was 17 months of uncertainty, an epiphany in a barn with her horse, and the launch of a coaching practice she has now run for 17 years. Today, Kami works with high-achieving women entrepreneurs through her Movement Maker Mastermind, her annual Extraordinary Women Ignite conference, and her award-winning podcast Extraordinary Women Radio — all in service of a singular vision: to help 1 million women raise their voices, their visibility, and their revenue. In this episode, she shares what actually works when you're building a business from scratch after a corporate career, why focus is the most underrated business strategy, and what she's learned from nearly two decades of coaching women who are done waiting for permission. Where to Find Kami Guildner Website: kamiguildner.comPodcast: Extraordinary Women Radio (available on all major podcast platforms)Conference: Extraordinary Women IgniteLinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/kamiguildnerInstagram: @kamiguildnerFree monthly trainings: Sign up at kamiguildner.com

    35 min

  6. May 31

    Trailer

    Build Your Own Boat, an entrepreneurship podcast for women in midlife and beyond will drop on June 4. The podcast will feature stories, lessons learned, and actionable advice from women who have started new entrepreneurial ventures in midlife and beyond.

    2 min

Trailer

Ratings & Reviews

5
out of 5
6 Ratings

About

An entrepreneurship podcast for women in midlife and beyond. What if the most powerful thing you could do right now — for your finances, your freedom, and your future — was to stop waiting for someone else to hand you an opportunity and start building your own? Build Your Own Boat is the podcast for women in midlife and beyond who are done playing by rules that were never written with them in mind. Hosted by award-winning 3x entrepreneur Janine Vanderburg, each episode features real conversations with women in midlife and beyond who made the bold decision to bet on themselves — launching businesses and creative ventures, building wealth, and rewriting what entrepreneurship looks like in the second half of life. This isn't a podcast about hustle culture or overnight success stories. It's a roadmap — built from lived experience, hard-won wisdom, and the kind of honest conversation you rarely hear anywhere else. Guests include founders, consultants, creatives, coaches, media makers, and civic leaders who are proving every week that midlife isn't a ceiling. It's a launchpad. Whether you're just beginning to wonder if entrepreneurship is for you, actively building your business, or simply looking for proof that it's not too late — you'll find it here. Every episode, you'll discover: 1. How real women in midlife launched and grew successful ventures — and what they wish they'd known sooner 2. Practical strategies for building financial independence and freedom on your own terms 3. Honest conversations about the challenges of midlife entrepreneurship, and how to navigate them 4. Inspiration that's grounded in reality, not motivational posters The Encore Economy is booming — and women in midlife are driving it. Build Your Own Boat is where their stories live. Subscribe now and join a growing community of women who are building something that's entirely, unapologetically theirs. And do SUBSCRIBE to Build Your Own Boat on Substack as well, to read the full stories of our guests, and their best tips and resources. https://buildyourownboat.substack.com/

Information

  • Creator
    Janine Vanderburg
  • Years Active
    2K
  • Episodes
    6
  • Rating
    Clean
  • Copyright
    © Janine Vanderburg