Episode 051
Su Embree
Are you following the “American story” of waiting until age 65 to retire, or are you building the choice to retire on your own terms? Join Alice Tang as she speaks with Su Embree, an immigrant founder who turned her “halftime” into a launchpad for massive success. Su reveals the difference between the 20 years it took to save her first million and the single day it took to make her next. Learn why she believes money is a “divine energy” and how she overcame the skepticism of being a 25-year-old Asian woman in a field dominated by older men.
In this episode, you’ll learn:
“You’re the average of the five people you spend the most time with. Surround yourself with smart, amazing, thoughtful people.”
0:36 Alice Tang: Welcome to Women’s Million Dollar Conversations with Alice Tang, where we share stories from successful business women who have saved, earned, or sold over a Million Dollars and discuss how they built their success and insights to help you achieve your goals. Now, let’s join the conversation.
0:54 Alice Tang: Good morning. I’m Alice Tang in Portland, Oregon, the host of Women’s Million Dollar Conversation. Today, I am connecting back with someone I admire, but I didn’t have a chance to get to know her more um through a common friend, Ryan Buchanan. Uh sitting in front of me is the wonderful Su Embry.
1:05 Alice Tang: Su, would you introduce yourself to our audience?
1:08 Su Embry: Hi, Alice. Good morning. I’m Su Embry. I’m the founder of Sauté, which is a marinade and sauce business that I’m launching this year in 2025. It’s a sauce for um Asian inspired meals that you make at home. And my goal is that it’ll have national distribution um in a couple of years. I’m also a former owner and CEO of DHM Research, which is a public policy research firm that’s based in Portland and uh we had offices in DC and in Seattle.
1:50 Alice Tang: Wow. Wow. Wow. So, we are getting ready to learn about your journey of money.Play Intro
1:55 Alice Tang: The first question we ask our guests who have saved, earned or sold a million is how long does it take for you to get to that million? And in the journey of getting there, is there any biases that you have faced? And if so, how do you overcome that?
2:10 Su Embry: That’s a pretty big question. If you look at me, there’s already bias. There’s female, there’s an Asian woman. Many people don’t know I’m also an immigrant to this country. So, if I look at and think about bias, there’s just so much already. And I got into the business of public policy and doing research that impact communities by helping our elected officials and executives in large companies and large foundations to influence how tax dollars are spent, which is kind of a a behind the scenes business to begin with. But I was 25 when I got into that business. and the the person that did the kind of work that I did, they were in their late 50s and their 60s and white men. Uh so there’s already age bias going in and one of the things that I did was I just became a really strong observer and a good listener. I just took everything in. I knew that I wanted to learn so much and I didn’t allow that gender, age, ethnicity bias to get in the way. And that helped me a lot in my career to just say, “Okay, I’m in this environment where I’m not going to be the smartest person in the room. I’m not going to know very much. I need to just take my ego to the side and be humble and really learn.” I’ve been surrounded by bias since I was little all the way through my career, but I did not allow that to deter me from my pursuit of success.Play Bias
4:58 Alice Tang: How long does it take for you to get to the million?
5:01 Su Embry: I don’t know if you may have this maybe in common, but as an immigrant child, you’re taught to just save everything. It’s almost like you got to hoard it and put it away like a little squirrel. But no one really teaches you that that’s not the best way to grow money. You grow money by investing in it, by having assets, and building building a business, building a portfolio, building uh real estate. And it took me 20 years to save my first million. I got a $5,000 check to put toward my IRA, my first big job after college. And 5,000 was the most I’ve ever made in one time. So when I saw that check, I thought, “Oh, I should just put that away in my bank account.” But I was told, “No, it’s it’s your 401k money. It’s your, you know, set money, IRA.” and I created a Schwab account. The first time I’ve ever done anything like that and I bought um my first stock which was Cisco um the software company and that was in 1997 and I just kept saving and it took me 20 years to make my first million. Then as a business owner, once I realized, okay, that’s going to take me forever if I want to just start to build assets for myself, personal assets, um, I then grew my company and in two years paid myself a million dollars. So what took me 20 years to save with then an intentional plan, it took me two years to make my next million. And then after that, it took me a day to make my next million. So, I’ve just been learning and getting a little bit better uh with each strategy.
7:17 Alice Tang: This is an amazing story and journey of the million, million, and million and many more. Um I’m curious what changed from the first million to the second million is that at that time you realize that uh the way to build wealth because we are all running out of time we all have mortality right how many 20 years we have.
7:27 Alice Tang: So can you drove in a little bit of the mindset from the first to the second and from the second to the third?
7:33 Su Embry: Uh not everyone on maybe the people that you talk to even really have the opportunity to even just have a business. So I I had a business that was growing that I was investing back into and the mindset shift was that I realized wow I could grow the company to then pay myself more and and it literally Alice that shift happened overnight. I realized I do want to get to a position where I can retire and choose to retire. And I I didn’t want age to just creep up and that that determine my retirement. And I think that’s so much of the American people’s story that they’re fed is you reach age 65 or 68 or whatever the age is and then oh now you retire. That is not true. It just doesn’t happen like that for so many people. And I think we’re fed this untruth. And I said, I’m not going to depend on social security as my way of life like my mom is. You know, my mom has that benefit. And I said, I want to have the choice to retire at the age that I want and I’m going to build it. So my age was 52 and I was 40 at the time when I decided to to do that. And I went and talked to a financial advisor and he told me, “You need to put away if you want to get to this number um $180,000 a year.” And at the time, I don’t think I was paying myself that much. So, I needed and I left kind of upset. I was like, “How do people even do that?” But what it did was it put a little bug in my uh my mind and said,”I have this tool in my business that I can grow it.” And I just went full on. I wanted to get into other offices. I wanted to hire more employees. I grew the company and within two years I was able to then get to that million dollar intentionally. The first 20 kind of what took me 20 years to actually save it kind of happened because out of habit just doing the the thing that you’re supposed to do. And then the second was a mindset shift which is a conversation with my financial advisor that was kind of upsetting to me but then I realized you know what I can get there. let me just try. And I decided, let me see if I can grow my business to make more revenue and more profit so then I can get paid more. And it and it worked. I think the the next kind of level wasn’t really a mindset shift. It was more that with the growth of a company, I also had an opportunity to think about an exit to sell the business, which took me many years in concept to develop, but ultimately I sold it and and in one day made over a million.
13:03 Alice Tang: Wow. Thank you for sharing that story. What I’ve learned from you Su here is there is the traditional save and accumulate and grow at a certain rate. You know whether you’re using a 401k or whatever platform or even after tax investment. I think the conversation with your advisor has been a pivot point because you were so upset you need to make something different. You’re going to do it anyway. what else can I do other than the traditional saving way which is the Asian way right we do this mom told us to do this so it’s really grow the business and expand the business thank you so much so you can share your story in front of us for our audience now there are many decision you need to make while you were running the business I’m sure that there are times when you say you know what this is too difficult should I just forget it and get a real job and of course you did not.Play First million
13:35 Alice Tang: So help us know a little bit about that journey and what kept you going.
13:40 Su Embry: Oh, I thought about it so many times and if entrepreneurs don’t think about it every week it it’s just a it’s a process. It’s hard to make payroll. It’s hard to work with partners sometimes. It’s just difficult difficult employees and clients. So, I think there are two things that really helped me. One, I had two really amazing partners that grew the company with me. I may have been the one that wanted to push growth a little bit more ultimately because I knew we had the potential as a business to do that and I had my goal. I had my financial goal of getting to uh make the choice to retire at age 52. So I was motivated and it and the second is to have a plan. I had a plan. I had a goal. And if any of us that have businesses, if we don’t have a vision and a plan and a strategy to get there, we don’t go very far. We’re at the whim of what’s happening in the economy or a bad decision. So the plan is really what helped me to stay the focus and even though initially my plan was a personal one that I wanted to build wealth and it’s interesting this conversation you’re having cuz you’re actually kind of talking about my life without me sharing it at all as a story. It’s just what I was doing for myself. But the plan went from me making a certain amount of money to then me having an exit plan. So I built an exit strategy for the business for myself out of the business. And that plan helped me so much to stay the course when things got tough when our revenue dropped 50% because of the the financial uh recession in 2008 910. We lost half of our revenue. The exit strategy for me really helped me to just say there’s so much value in this business. We’re going to bring the company back. And we made tough choices along the way. I didn’t pay myself for some time. We kept all of the employees salaries the same. I worked with our vendors to cut some of their costs. So, I made some choices, but it was sticking to the plan that helped me to know what my priorities were. And then when the pandemic hit, my exit was scheduled for March 15 of 2020. I had hired a banker. I had hired a consultant to go and help me market the company. within my industry and there was no way we could do that when Oregon shut down a couple days prior. So my entire plan that took me up to that point eight years to implement and to stay focused on went out the door and I had to refocus back on the company bringing my employees back. I lost 80% of client work in one week. So most of my former company’s budget would come from marketing dollars and that’s oftentimes the first to go in times of uncertainty. I’m not the only one. There’s so many people that lost everything in very short time. But again, I had been through a recession before and I knew we could make this work and we ultimately did. But it was this exit strategy that kept me believing in the business and belie believing in the value and for me personally just in my gut to have this drive that I just have to try. I have to try and make this exit work. So we did we eventually got the business back. We got my all of my employees back stabilized for the long term and sold in June of 2021. And I sold the company for all cash which was my requirement is I didn’t want to talk to anyone who wanted me to stay in the business because I had been in it for 25 years. I had built a leadership team to run and operate the business and to manage every aspect of the P&L and I didn’t need to run it anymore. and we found an amazing buyer and a partner that agreed with me and saw the value in the business and did an allcash deal and most of the employees are still there uh four years later. I actually beat my own timeline. So I wasn’t 52 to be able to retire. I was 48.
17:40 Alice Tang: Very good. Very good. Very good. What I have heard is that you know having a plan of getting there and having an exit strategy as a business owner and believing in that exist strategy even in the most challenging time help you keep going until you go to the point where you find a wonderful buyer and then it’s great to exchange cash and have the new buyer to honor the business. Um the amazing part is most of the employee are still there because in general it’s not happening the little that I know about acquisition.
17:54 Su Embry: No. And I’ve been surrounded by really smart people. I admired my two business partners so much and I had bought one of my business partners uh out and so by the time I sold there were two of us. And I honestly I just not only admire them, but I really love them. And we worked really well together, the three of us. And I felt the same way of my employees. Without them, I wouldn’t be able to grow the company. So I was really ultimately in a people business and the value and the contributions that they add to the business is what helped me to ultimately exit. So I have a lot of gratitude toward the people that I’m surrounded by. Even today I feel really good about the choices I make in who I surround myself with and how I spend my time with them.
17:54 Alice Tang: Beautiful. There are some audience here who’s looking at you and said you there is a lot of secret sauce there.
Play What kept you going
18:01 Alice Tang: If there is one advice among all the advices you would like to give them, what would that be?
18:09 Su Embry: Oh, well, you just mentioned sauce and I’m starting a sauce company, so it makes me think about sauce. But away from that, you know, if I could share two things, maybe one is related to your conversations that you’re having with women. It’s never too late to save or to invest or to grow to a million. I think sometimes it could seem kind of far-fetching or too far out there and it’s never too late. I was able to do it in multiple ways and I understand the different position that I’ve been in having a business that gave me that option but it took me 20 years to save it and and I was able to do that. The other is going back to just surrounding yourself with smart people. I think I’ve heard something like you’re the average of the five people that you spend the most time with or that that you’re influenced by the most. I have always just looking back in my time chosen people well and it’s something I remind my two daughters about too is choose your friends really well um because they will influence you and you will be an average whether you want to or not of the friends that you spend the most time with. So surround yourself with really smart, amazing, thoughtful people.
19:15 Alice Tang: Great. Never too late. And surround yourself with great, thoughtful, amazing people who support you and believe in you. Thank you, Su.
19:32 Alice Tang: Is there a book that you’re recently reading or a quote that you live by?
19:37 Su Embry: I know that’s a very common question for people, but let me stick with the belief uh track. You just have to believe in yourself. Cuz when things go wrong, which they will, whether it’s in the business or in a career or in a relationship, you always just have to believe in yourself. You have to believe that you can get through it, that you can learn it, that you can figure it out. And even when people tell you that, you know, an Asian uh 25-year-old woman in public policy, I really just had to believe that I can learn this business and um do well in it. So yeah, believe in yourself.
19:51 Alice Tang: I have associated with Oh, and you have believe next to you. That’s right. I associate to that because I immigrated later. So I still have an accent here. 31 year uh old I was here and my first job is cold calling with an accent. 200 calls a day to get to some people who would like to see me for insurance or financial advice. So I totally And you made it. I made it. And even better, I had the team and they’re super well just like you. I believe in them.Play One piece of advice
20:10 Alice Tang: Last question. What are you grateful for, Su?
20:14 Su Embry: Today, I’m grateful for so many things. I’m grateful I live in Bend, Oregon full-time. I’m grateful for how beautiful of a place Bend is and the state of Oregon. Grateful that I have healthy kids. They’re 22 and 23. Oh my goodness, she 23 and 26. that they still want to hang out with their parents as adult children. But here’s one thing. I’m grateful that I now have learned how to grow. Like my money doubled in three years. And I know that’s from what’s been going on in the market. It’s been crazy. But I see my privilege now. I didn’t come into this country with privilege. I came into this country with nothing really. But now I sit in a position of privilege and I am I’m grateful that I can look at that and start to instill some lessons in my nieces and nephews. My girls are the oldest in in my family, but I’ve got um six, seven, seven other nieces and nephews and I am starting a retirement account for them as high school graduation gift. And it opens up a conversation about what is a retirement account, how do you open a bank account, what’s a financial advisor, all the conversations that took me 20 years basically to figure out. They get to learn it when they’re 17 and 18 and start to build their own wealth. So I feel really grateful that I’m in a position to be able to do that.
22:06 Alice Tang: And we feel so grateful for immigrants like yourself who is willing to share the story and also to empower the next generation to do better, shorten their running distance to get to that understanding and thus the million. Thank you so much Su. I so appreciate you. Thank you.
Play Grateful
Su Embree is the founder of Saute, a sauce and marinade business for Asian inspired meals at home. She is the former CEO and owner of DHM Research, a well-respected public policy research firm in Portland and Seattle. She sold and exited the business in 2021 to her dream buyer. She is also a cofounder of The Script which supports college students and young professionals from underserved communities on a pathway of leadership and to build assets for generational wealth.
Su serves as a trustee and board member of multiple organizations including the Oregon Community Foundation, the Children’s Institute, IWF Oregon, and she is an advisor to several emerging entrepreneurs. She served as the past President of the Entrepreneur’s Organization – a peer group of over 160 founders in Portland, and she’s a former trustee of OMSI – one of the most innovative science museums in the country.
Su is an investor and owner of several James Beard nominated restaurants in Portland. She has called Oregon home for 30 years with her husband and two daughters.