A powerful exploration of why women struggle to discuss money, negotiate salaries, and plan for retirement. Through personal experiences and research, this article reveals how silence costs women financially and offers four essential conversations to break the cycle.
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Influential Woman · Direct Sales
Meredith Tieszen
Chief Executive Officer, ECG
Las Vegas, NV 89131
1Article published
3Awards received
Her Story
About Meredith
Meredith Tieszen is a private executive advisor, author, and independent board advisor, and the Chief Executive Officer of ECG, an independent advisory practice. A global business executive with more than 26 years in direct sales, consumer products, beauty, and wellness, she specializes in business development, commercial transformation, business turnarounds, international expansion, and enterprise value creation, and has led private equity-backed, founder-led, and growth-stage businesses across multiple markets.
She started her first company at twenty-three and built it to 250,000 customers before selling it. At Rodan + Fields, she advanced from director to national senior director of sales for the U.S. market and helped grow revenue from $130 million to $1.6 billion. She later served as Global Chief Sales Officer at It Works! Global, overseeing 19 countries as the company’s only female executive, before becoming President of cabi Clothing. She has also held leadership positions at MONAT Global and Solvasa, where she advanced sales performance, developed leadership programs, and built scalable business infrastructure.
Her executive experience includes profit-and-loss responsibility for businesses generating $200 million to $350 million. As President of cabi Clothing, she partnered with executive leadership, the board of directors, and private equity stakeholders to strengthen commercial performance and operational efficiency; her accomplishments include more than $4 million in EBITDA improvement, over $2 million in cost savings, and frontline retention of 90.8%. As CEO of ECG, she advises founders, investors, boards, and executive teams on business development, strategy, profitability, organizational effectiveness, governance readiness, and scalable growth, and she is pursuing board director opportunities. She is authoring I’m Just, a book that encourages women to recognize their accomplishments and confidently communicate their value.
Tieszen’s leadership is grounded in her Christian faith, resilience, and a commitment to helping others succeed. She grew up in a trailer in Darby, Montana, and earned her GED after leaving school, and she attributes her success first to her faith and then to her husband, her parents, and the four close friends she calls her “four roof tearers.” She believes women should support one another rather than compete, celebrate each other’s achievements, and help one another recognize their worth. She previously co-chaired the Shannon West Homeless Youth Center through the Junior League of Las Vegas and has served on the board of the Direct Selling Association. Recognized by Women We Admire as one of the Top Women Leaders of Nevada in 2025 and 2026, she continues to champion faith-driven leadership, meaningful relationships, and sustainable business growth.
Her Interview
Ten minutes with Meredith
01What do you attribute your success to?
I attribute my success first and foremost to my faith, which serves as the foundation for everything I do. I am also grateful for the incredible people I have surrounded myself with, including my supportive husband, my parents, and my four “roof tearers,” the strong women who would lift me up, stand beside me, and help me tear the roof off any obstacle. I believe in the importance of women supporting one another rather than competing, celebrating each other’s accomplishments, and helping one another succeed. We should always be willing to lift each other up, offer encouragement, and straighten each other’s crowns along the way.
02What’s the best career advice you’ve ever received?
The best advice I ever got wasn't advice, exactly. It was a lesson I learned two days after September 11th, on one of six American Airlines flights in the entire country that day. At the gate, a stranger threw her arms around my neck and thanked me for being brave. I was stunned, because I'd spent years calling myself "just a flight attendant." But the people on that airplane weren't seeing a job title. They were seeing the person who was going to get them home. There is no such thing as an ordinary job. There are only ordinary attitudes toward jobs, and I decided that day I would never have one again.
I carried that into everything after I stopped flying. I took the region nobody wanted — thirteen states sitting in last place — and ran it like it was the most important assignment in the company, because for the people in those thirteen states, it was. Three years later it was number one. I ran a tea company out of an apartment and treated every order like it mattered, because to the person opening that box, it did. I didn't know their names and they didn't know mine, but somebody is always on the other side of your work.
That's why my version of that advice has become this: if you're too big to serve, you're too small to lead. Titles don't make you a leader. Serving people well — in the jobs nobody claps for, for the people you'll never meet — that's what builds it. And once you really know that, you never call it "just a Monday" again.
03What advice would you give to young women entering your industry?
You don’t have to have all the answers. I spent too many years pretending I did, and it kept me from the best thing a young leader can do: listen. When I became a global chief sales officer — over nineteen countries, in languages I didn’t speak — the first thing I did was find the person with the most experience and follow them, where the whole room could see me do it. Authority tells you who decides. It doesn’t tell you who knows. Then get in the habit of asking two questions in every room: “What am I missing?” and “What will this cost us if we don’t do it?” The first one keeps you humble. The second one is what makes leaders lean in.
04What are the biggest challenges or opportunities in your field right now?
The biggest opportunity and the biggest challenge in my field right now are the same thing: AI. It's moving faster than any of us can fully keep up with, and the easy move is to either panic or ignore it. I'm doing neither. I'm leaning in — using it, learning it, making sure I understand what it can actually do instead of what people are afraid it will do. Because the leaders who win the next five years won't be the ones who resisted it or the ones who handed everything over to it. They'll be the ones who know the difference between what a machine can do and what only a person can do.
And that's the part I'm protective of. AI can write the timeline. It can't sit across from someone who's just lost their job and know what they need to hear. It can give you a strategy. It can't read the room and tell you the strategy isn't what the room needs. Human connection — trust, judgment, the relationship you build over years — that's not a soft skill anymore. It's the advantage. So my advice to myself every day is the same: learn the technology faster than it can replace you, and hold onto the parts of the work that make you irreplaceable.
05What values are most important to you in your work and personal life?
Faith comes first, before anything else. For a long time I thought what I needed was confidence. But confidence turned out to be a shaky foundation — titles change, companies change, roles end. What doesn't change is whose I am.
After faith, it's character. My dad taught me that when I was thirteen, with a chair pulled up next to mine at the kitchen table. He asked one question: "How do you want to be seen?" Then he told me your reputation is yours to build, and it's worth protecting, because you build it over years and lose it in a moment.
Everyone looks good when they're winning. Character shows up in how you leave. The day a board let me go — forty-five minutes, that was it — I asked for thirty more so I could put together a timeline for whoever came next. How you leave matters as much as how you arrive.
And finally, relationships — built on purpose, with women who lift each other up instead of competing.
Her Content Hub
Articles by Meredith
I Paid Women Less — and They Let Me
Why Women Must Stop Keeping Money a Secret
I have paid women less than I was willing to pay them. More than once. And they let me.
I spent years on the hiring side of the table as a senior executive, and I could usually tell within minutes whether the woman across from me had ever talked about money with anyone. If she hadn't, she accepted the offer on the spot, or she negotiated her vacation days and left her salary untouched. I never set out to underpay anyone. But I didn't volunteer money she didn't ask for, and neither will anyone else.
Here is why that should keep you up at night. Only one in four women has a written retirement plan. The same Transamerica report found that women have saved a median of $56,000 for retirement, compared with $92,000 for men, and that 44 percent of women are afraid of outliving their money. They should be. You cannot plan for a number you've never said out loud.
I know the women in those statistics. I've led thousands of them. They can forecast a quarter in their heads while driving the carpool. They manage the household budget, the school calendar, an aging parent, and the company's P&L, often in the same week. And three out of four of them have never written down their own number.
I don't believe the problem is math. I believe the problem is that we don't talk about it.
The dinner table
A few weeks ago, I brought up money at dinner with a group of girlfriends. It's a conversation I enjoy, so it didn't occur to me that anyone would mind. The table went quiet almost immediately. Someone laughed, someone changed the subject, and within a minute we were talking about kids.
That table, it turns out, was a fair sample of the country. When Wells Fargo surveyed thousands of Americans about the subjects they find hardest to discuss, personal finance landed just behind sex and ahead of politics, religion, and personal health. Among women, half described money as private, and a third said they were afraid of being judged for talking about it.
So we talk about everything else. We'll tell a friend about a marriage in trouble, a frightening diagnosis, or a struggling child. We'll describe a surgery in detail before we'll say what we earn. The one subject that touches every part of our lives is the one we keep in a drawer.
What the drawer cost them
Back to the women across my desk.
What they wouldn't touch was salary. They wouldn't ask about the bonus structure, equity, or a signing bonus for joining mid-year. They rarely asked when the company's retirement match would begin, or what the real scope of the role was and whether the pay reflected it.
And almost none of them raised severance. I'll say that again, because at the vice president level and above, it matters more than any other line in the offer: negotiate your exit before you negotiate your vacation. Severance is the thing that protects you in the three, six, or twelve months after you and a company part ways, and the women I hired almost never asked for it.
In my experience, the men I hired seemed to arrive having already compared notes with someone. The women seemed to arrive alone. I can't prove that was true in every case, but I saw the pattern often enough to recognize it.
The research suggests I wasn't imagining it. A study of 4,600 employees across 800 workplaces found that women ask for raises as often as men do. Men received a raise 20 percent of the time; women, 15 percent. The problem, in other words, is not that women fail to ask. It's that we often ask without knowing what anyone else was paid and without a sentence ready for what comes after the request.
The women who talk about it
Over twenty-five years of leading women, I've noticed a consistent pattern: the women who talk about money tend to be the women who have it.
That isn't because talking makes anyone wealthy. It's because talking is how you learn what you don't know. It's how you discover that the woman beside you asked for more and received it. It's how you find out what the man in your role was paid. And it's how you hear a number spoken aloud enough times that it stops being frightening.
Fidelity found something similar. More than half of the women it surveyed said that talking about money with other women made them feel more confident, and the women who were part of those conversations were more likely to go on and make a plan. No one lectured them. Someone simply told them a number.
I learned this lesson slowly, and in my own home. I could stand in a room full of men who had been in business longer than I had been alive and recite a company's numbers without blinking: a hundred million dollars in a single state, six hundred million in a region, nineteen countries. None of it frightened me because none of it was mine. Then I would go home and find that I could not say my own number at my own kitchen table.
The sentence problem
What I eventually understood is that the price was never the problem. The sentence was.
Ask a woman what her team accomplished, and she can talk for ten minutes. Ask what she accomplished, and a qualifier appears almost immediately. "We hit the number, but I had a great team." "I built that, but it was years ago." I've said both about a company I built from my kitchen table.
This is usually described as a confidence problem. I don't think it is. The women I know have plenty of confidence. What they lack is the sentence, and you cannot negotiate a number you can't narrate.
The remedy is smaller than it sounds. Put a period where the "but" used to be. "We hit the number." Let it stand. If the team deserves credit, give them a sentence of their own. Then say what the last organization that paid you received for its money, state your number, and stop talking.
Four conversations
Becoming one of the one in four doesn't require a spreadsheet this week. It requires a conversation and, over time, four of them.
The first is with the person you share your life with. My husband and I sat down before we were married and decided how we would handle money and how often we would revisit it. We still do, every quarter: what are we building toward, what will it cost, and are we aligned? For anyone without a partner, the first conversation is with a financial planner, and many offer a free initial meeting. I should be clear that I am not one. I'm not an advisor, an accountant, or an attorney, and nothing here is financial advice. It is an invitation to the conversation.
The second is with a mentor or advisor, and it should be specifically about your work: what you were offered, what you asked for, and what you may have left on the table.
The third is with a woman a few steps ahead of you. Ask her for a number rather than for advice. What did she charge in her first year? What did she ask for when she moved up? In my experience, women will answer if the question is asked plainly. Almost no one asks.
The fourth is with a woman a few steps behind you, and that is the one you owe. Every time I have shared a real number with a younger leader, I've watched her shoulders drop. She wasn't broken. She simply had never heard anyone say it out loud.
Money is not rude
Talking about money is not rude. It is not presumptuous, and it is not a sign of ingratitude or a lack of faith. I believe we are called to steward what we've been given, and no one can steward what she refuses to look at.
Nobody underpaid the women across my desk more effectively than their own silence. A plan that exists only in your head is a wish. Put it on paper, with your name on it and a date when you'll look at it again. Then say one real number, out loud, to one real person this week.
Somewhere this week, a woman will sit across a desk from someone like me. She'll be offered a number. She'll be qualified, prepared, and quietly thrilled. And she'll say yes before the sentence is finished because nobody ever told her what the woman before her was paid.
Don't be her. Open the drawer.
Meredith Tieszen is a private executive advisor, author, and independent board advisor, and the former President of cabi, LLC, and former Global Chief Sales Officer of It Works! Global, where she led sales across nineteen countries. She built her first company from her kitchen table, took the lowest-performing region in a national company to number one, and now advises senior executives, speaks on leadership, and hosts the Rooted Leadership podcast. Her book, I'm Just, is available for pre-order in December 2026.
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