Build Your Own Boat

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 cookie
  • Why nonprofit skills transfer directly to for-profit entrepreneurship — from closing corporate contracts to building financial models, nothing she learned was wasted
  • How to test a product idea before you know how to make it — Liddy ran Meta ads before she had a recipe
  • The mindset shift from social impact to personal wealth building — and why it matters for women who have spent careers fundraising for others
  • How to say no to bad opportunities — even when cash flow is tight and the offer is sitting right in front of you
  • What corporate gifting looks like as a business model — and why it beats the consumer packaged goods margin game for a bootstrapped brand
Where to find Liddy Romero and Romero Cookies

What is Build Your Own Boat?

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/