4 Women Who Left Corporate Careers to Build Million-Dollar Empires: Their Secrets to Success

By the time Margot Carter left corporate life, she had achieved a level of success many executives only dream about. She had helped take companies public, put together big M&A deals, and landed a coveted board seat. Regina Merson was a bankruptcy attorney handling some of the country’s most high-profile cases. Erin Ortegon oversaw branding for a network of hospitals. Susan Sarich was an executive atop national hospitality companies.

By every measure, these four leaders had arrived. But for each of them, corporate success no longer felt like the finish line. They wanted something more—something that felt personal. And they were willing to risk everything to pursue it.

Breaking Away

A native of New York, Margot Carter worked as a business and finance attorney out of school before shifting to an in-house role and moving into the C-suite—at the ripe old age of 27. She moved to Dallas to be chief legal officer at FY Source Corp., then continued dealmaking at finance and tech companies over the next decade, including transactions that structured Charles Schwab and the sale of ed-tech company Princeton Review.

In 2010, Carter was named CLO of Dallas-based real estate SaaS company RealPage and helped take the company public. But after five years, she left Corporate America to focus on advising businesses and serving on boards. Before long, she was approached by two former colleagues who were looking for a co-founder for an enterprise that leveraged AI. In 2016, the trio launched Cien.ai, which focuses on software for sales productivity. “It’s the hardest job I’ve ever had,” Carter says of entrepreneurialism.

Regina Merson also began her career in law, specializing in real estate, before shifting to bankruptcy work for international firm Weil, Gotshal & Manges during the 2008 financial crisis. “It was at a time in the market when you were told, ‘This is what you’re doing or you don’t have a job,’” she explains. During her six years, she worked on high-profile cases involving General Motors, Lehman Brothers, American Airlines, Blockbuster, and the Texas Rangers.

But by the time she hit her early 30s, she felt stuck. Her therapist asked her, “If you could do anything, what would you do?” Merson had no idea. “All I did was work, go home, sleep for four hours, wake up, come back, and take naps under my desk,” she says.

Reflecting on the question, she realized that applying her makeup in the morning sparked joy. “It made me feel like I’d had a moment of creativity,” she explains. Her therapist encouraged her to dive into it, so she enrolled in a business class at SMU and connected with other makeup lovers. Merson saw that cosmetic companies weren’t effectively tapping into the Latina demographic.

It took her a few years to pursue entrepreneurship. The timing was helped along by forces outside her control. In 2011, she was one of 200 employees laid off by Weil. She took her severance and began building her independent makeup brand, Reina Rebelde. The name translates from Spanish to “rebel queen.”

It took about five years to get the company off the ground. The transition involved dealing with disappointment from family members and untangling the psychological dissonance she felt. “The biggest misconception is that becoming an entrepreneur is a linear path,” Merson says. “I had a very prestigious job. You don’t just walk away from that and say, ‘I’m done. I’m going to go play with lipsticks now.’”

The Turning Point

Erin Ortegon also struggled with psychological dissonance when she left her corporate job behind. Two days before resigning from Methodist Health System, where she was brand director for a portfolio of seven hospitals, she learned she was pregnant. “In addition to walking away from something that I had spent my entire career building, leaving that security net felt so much more intense knowing we were about to start a family,” she says.

She began her career in healthcare as a business development associate for San Antonio-based Innové. When it was bought by Dallas-based Tenet Health, she moved north, hustling on a small team that managed a portfolio of 60 hospitals. “Corporate healthcare is not for the faint of heart,” she says. Then, she moved to Children’s Health and helped it expand its Plano campus as program manager. Instead of being on a small team managing a big workload, the numbers flipped; she was on a team of 20 overseeing two hospitals—and she was bored. “I was too young to be that stagnant,” Ortegon says.

She advanced to Methodist, managing a $10 million budget. But two years in, she was bored again. Ortegon always dreamed of opening a coffee shop using beans from Austin-based Wild Gift, a roaster she discovered in college. Her husband asked, “Why not now?”

So she developed a plan for a weekends-only coffee truck that would give a portion of its proceeds to charity. She named it for her first dog, Cedric, and worked both jobs until she had the money to open her brick-and-mortar shop in Oak Cliff this past March. “It was the scariest thing I have done in 10 years since moving to Dallas,” she says.

For Susan Sarich, the transferability of skills developed during her time in the hospitality industry made it possible to launch a chain of bakeries across California, Texas, and Tennessee. “I could have never opened SusieCakes had I not had those 12 years of corporate experience,” she says.

While working at Clift Hotel in San Francisco, she began noticing a “dessert deficit.” Hotels and restaurants mostly offered complex confections. She felt there would always be demand for classic chocolate cake, the kind people make with their grandparents. It was an aha moment. Then she thought about the recipe tins filled with 3-by-5 cards from her two Midwestern grandmothers, Madeline and Mildred. “That was my second light-bulb moment,” she says.

Her third had long been percolating. At the beginning of her career, while climbing the ladder at Hyatt Hotels, leading special events for the House of Blues, and directing catering for a French fine-dining concept under Lettuce Entertain You Restaurants, she realized there were few women in hospitality over 30. “It really is an all-encompassing career path,” she says. She wanted to break the mold and create a business that would be more welcoming and accommodating. Sarich left corporate to focus on creating an enterprise that blended all three ingredients—believing that her concept had staying power.

“I wanted to be known for old-fashioned Americana desserts that bring people back to a simpler time in our lives,” she says. “I believe that cake is a hallmark of milestone moments, and people will continue to have those milestone moments.”

Rejection and Resilience

As every entrepreneur knows, things never go according to plan. For Margot Carter, timing was the biggest challenge. Her team came up with an idea for an AI-powered tool that would analyze CRM data and make recommendations to increase revenue by optimizing sales reps’ roles, performance, and soft skills. But in 2016, enterprise AI adoption was still in its infancy, and security concerns were common. “We were ahead of our time,” she says.

When even receptive businesses told them the CRM data was not clean enough to work with, Carter and her team changed course. “We standardized the data, enhanced it, and automatically analyzed it—something that would take global management consulting firms months or years to do,” Carter says. “We could do it in hours or days.”

Then they innovated further. Cien.ai was competing against global management consulting firms, but the team realized it would be better positioned if it partnered with its competitors. So, Cien.ai developed partnerships with every large CRM platform and the APIs necessary to work remotely. “It was a new way for consulting firms to start selling their services and also leveraging the cost savings, productivity, and efficiencies,” Carter says. Now the company even partners with private equity firms to reduce the need for data migrations and onboarding new tools during acquisitions.

There was a steep learning curve, moving from corporate employee to business owner. Carter had never done operational tasks like payroll, for example, and she wasn’t used to startup life. She says she and her team work toward a “made-it moment” each day, but there have been big wins: uncovering more than $2 billion in revenue opportunities for Cien.ai’s customers, working with some of the world’s largest PE firms, and rolling out a B2B version of Cien.ai last year. “For us to be able to service the largest Fortune 10 businesses—and successfully help them—is very rewarding,” she says.

Regina Merson lived off her severance package for six months, traveling to beauty conventions and learning about branding and manufacturing. “You buy makeup in such massive quantities, so when you press order, everything has to be thought through,” she says. Until Reina Rebelde gained traction, Merson helped sustain things through consulting work and personal loans from family members.

Early on, she had to navigate complex deals with retailers. The brand quickly attracted interest from Target, Costco, and Sephora. Merson couldn’t say yes to all of them. “When you’re a new brand, if retailers are interested in you, and many of them were, you have to pick your lane, without having visibility into what that relationship might look like,” she says.

She chose Target, but she could never guarantee stores would effectively display her products. There were also massive inventory loans to deal with and a low ROI on marketing spend. “We successfully got people to the stores, then nothing would be on the shelves,” Merson says.

She later tried to work with Walmart and had a similar experience, confirming the discount makeup market was not Reina Rebelde’s niche. She has since connected with Nordstrom.com, Macy’s, and JCPenney to more intentionally position the brand in department stores, which offer the added bonus of customer education opportunities.

Despite how things ultimately played out with Target, Merson says the moment Target contacted her was when she knew Reina Rebelde was going to make it. “Enough retailers were resonating with what we had launched,” she says. “And it had only been six months.”

Doubts and Determination

When Susan Sarich pitched her SusieCakes idea to investors in 2005, she was repeatedly told that Californians were healthy, they didn’t eat cake, and that people would not buy sweets from a bakery when they could get them at a grocery store. She tried to secure grants from the Small Business Administration but was told, “Baking is a hobby, not a business.” Determined, she worked two part-time jobs, and her father sold part of his retirement fund to come up with $100,000 needed for the first bakery.

She targeted Brentwood, a high-net-worth location in California. The site she wanted was prime real estate, but the landlord was hesitant to lease to an unproven concept. After a couple weeks of Sarich delivering baked goods to his family, his wife and daughter convinced him to take a chance on her.

With data documenting her success, Sarich was able to secure funding and open a second SusieCakes in Calabasas. She opened one location a year in Southern California before expanding north to the Bay Area. “After we had eight locations, and I had proven out two very distinctly different markets, we were approached by private equity,” Sarich says. It was 2015, and it was the moment she felt she had made it. SusieCakes entered Texas in 2016, Sarich relocated to Dallas full time, and business has since grown to 31 locations.

Erin Ortegon also ran into real estate struggles with her coffee business. Just turning the lights on was an ordeal. “It took us three or three-and-a-half months to get electricity,” she says. She had signed a lease on Jefferson and Polk—near where Cedric’s Coffee Truck had parked in the LULAC lot—before leaving Methodist. Multiple times a week, she drove to the city’s permitting office, begging for power. Finally, she connected with a helpful inspector.

She knew the venture was going to be a success about a year after launching as a weekend coffee truck, with equipment loans paid off and profits rolling in. “I remember looking at the [sales] numbers thinking, ‘Remember nine months ago when we were making a quarter of this, and we were excited about that?’” she says.

Although their journeys were very different, Ortegon and the other women entrepreneurs reaped the rewards of risk. The titles and steady paychecks were gone, but so were the ceilings that once defined what was possible.

Dreaming Even Bigger

The four women leaders are now pursuing new short- and long-term goals. “I want to keep growing the way we have, which is thoughtfully and with human capital behind it,” Susan Sarich says. She hopes to fold her newer locations into the fabric of their respective communities and aims to eventually help SusieCakes become a household name.

Regina Merson aims to lean further into her customer base and culture. “We have found a new demographic of women who love how the products perform on mature skin,” she says, “and love that it feels like something different.”

Cien.ai recently rolled out an agentic AI component, through which customers can ask questions and get answers about the product or their data. “Instead of having to hire a lot of people, we hire people to manage our agentic workforce,” Margot Carter says. Her goals for the company are threefold: grow revenue, partner with more global consulting firms, and fundraise.

Erin Ortegon, meanwhile, has caught the entrepreneurial bug and wants to launch more ventures outside of her coffee shop enterprise. “We have three other dogs, so we can have three other businesses,” she says with a laugh.