Episode 024
Meg Carlson
What would you do if your financial advisor told you that you were “set for life” at age 43? In this episode of Women’s Million Dollar Conversations, Alice Tang sits down with Meg Carlson, founder of Uproar Capital and a former global Vice President for Heinz. Meg shares the incredible story of discovering that 17 years of hard work and yearly stock grants had accumulated into a $7 million windfall.
Meg discusses the freedom that comes with financial security, allowing her to take a two-year sabbatical to connect with her children before launching her second act in M&A and startup leadership. Whether you are navigating the corporate ladder or building your own brand, Meg’s insights on “owning your power” and building your balance sheet are masterclasses in strategic wealth.
In this episode, you’ll learn:
-The mechanics of long-term compensation: How stock options can build hidden wealth.
-How to overcome “Imposter Syndrome” by taking back your power and owning your true self.
-Meg’s #1 financial rule: Why you must build your balance sheet, not just your income statement.
-The importance of aligning your talent with an organization that truly values what you bring.
"Every time you decide to pay yourself first, you are choosing to build value for your future vs. spending what you own."
[00:00:20] Alice Tang: Hi, Meg Carson, my new friend, I’m very excited. We are in different time zone.
I got to connect with Meg Carson, a mover and shaker in the food and beverages industry. Hello, Meg. Welcome.
[00:00:35] Meg Carlson: Thank you, Alice. I’m really excited to be here with you.
[00:00:39] Alice Tang: Me, will you tell us a little bit about
[00:00:40] Meg Carlson: yourself? Sure. Meg Carlson, I’ve been active in the food and beverage consumer products industry for almost 40 years.
I I love helping entrepreneurs. I. Who are trying to bring innovative, [00:01:00] disruptive brands and products to market. I founded my company Uproar Capital about four years ago with the intention of doing that, following a pretty long stint, both as an entrepreneur on my own behalf, and also a corporate executive for a large food company now called Kraft Heinz.
[00:01:20] Alice Tang: Very good. Wow, that’s a huge resume. And you mentioned 40 years. Gosh, we thank you are 45, so let’s keep it there.
[00:01:30] Meg Carlson: Yes. Thank you so much. Good makeup.
[00:01:34] Alice Tang: Awesome. First question for you on your road to your first million dollars, whether is your previous industries, where you are helping to shape or your current consultation on your road to that million dollar.
How long does it take and how does it make you feel when you hit your first million?
[00:01:54] Meg Carlson: So that, it’s such an interesting question because I didn’t set a goal, Hey, I’m gonna go [00:02:00] hit my first million dollars. I basically, after business school was fortunate to work for, Ore-Ida Foods, which was owned by Heinz.
And I I just loved the company so much and loved learning so much and kept getting new opportunities that I said yes to. And after about five years, I began to be eligible to earn stock options in Heinz stock as part of my long-term compensation and those were granted every year. And it really wasn’t until 19 98, 99 when I was negotiating my exit from the company to move on and do something else.
That I sat down with my financial advisor which was provided free as a service to executives with the company. And he said you’re set for life. I said, what do you mean? And he said you’ve got the current value of those stock options is 7 [00:03:00] million dollars. I and I about fell off my chair because, options isn’t real money until you exercise them. So it was they were just sitting over here waiting. And it was it was such a freeing feeling to say, boy, I’m 43 years old and I can choose whatever path I want to going forward. Just an incredible sense of freedom.
[00:03:26] Alice Tang: So I guess you have answered the next question, but I still need to ask the obvious. What’s your value of money?
[00:03:32] Meg Carlson: So for me, yes, the value of money is freedom to pursue my dreams, however they might manifest without feeling that sort of regular pressure of mortgages, even though we still had a mortgage, we chose to build a second house with some of that money. But really not pressure to get a job, any job, but really to be thoughtful about my next step.
[00:03:58] Alice Tang: Very good. So would you say [00:04:00] that you graduated, you got into the business, you were 21, I’m just guessing at 43 you were sitting at 7 million of option, not counting everything else.
[00:04:09] Meg Carlson: That’s right.
[00:04:09] Alice Tang: That’s brilliant.
[00:04:10] Meg Carlson: I was actually 28 when I started, cuz I went back to school and got an M B A and my husband and I got married before cuz he went to law school. So we really didn’t have a pot or a window before we were 28. We started from 28.
[00:04:27] Alice Tang: Okay, so let’s do the math here. I think it’s about 17 years to get to 7 million. Okay. 17 to seven. I think this is a good message here.
[00:04:36] Meg Carlson: Yes.
[00:04:36] Alice Tang: For our audience. Great. When you sat there, other than falling off the chair, when your advisor told you, how does it make you feel? Really, did you remember the emotion other than the freedom? Do you have joy? Do you have liberation? Do you feel blissful?
[00:04:57] Meg Carlson: I did. I felt it gave me permission to [00:05:00] take time to basically a long time off to take a time out which is what I did. So our children at the time were ages seven and 12. And so it was a perfect time to really actively connect with them. So I actually took full two years and just tried lots of different things on not working, mostly engaged with my family and and doing lots of volunteer work and all that kind of stuff until I felt like I was really ready, fully recharged, and really ready to do the next thing.
[00:05:37] Alice Tang: Fully ready and recharged. Next question. On your road to your 7 million, now we’re talking about it, there might be some bias you’re dealing with, whether is in internal, inside you or external. What bias, what or what is the biggest bias that you have faced in that journey?[00:06:00]
[00:06:00] Meg Carlson: In my corporate journey, most definitely, there were two things for me. One, was I was actually the first woman promoted to vice president position globally for all of Heinz 35,000 employees globally. And so I always said to folks I’m the only skirt in the room everything I do is gonna be carefully screened. And I just it took me a while to get comfortable with being myself. And not trying to be one of the guys. But I had to have confidence and trust and it had to be mutual.
The second feeling, I think my bias was more internal, which is this imposter syndrome of, I have these great mentors who feel like I can accomplish anything and most days I feel like that, but some days I feel like, what the heck am I doing? How did I get here? And, somebody’s gonna discover at one point that I’m, I work really hard and I’m a good learner, but I, I’m making it [00:07:00] up. Yes, both those feelings.
[00:07:03] Alice Tang: How’d you overcome your imposter syndrome?
[00:07:06] Meg Carlson: I actually spent a little time with a therapist and just talked about the hard mental place that I was and how I felt like I wasn’t owning my true self. And that therapist ultimately said, what I’m observing in you is that you have chosen for some reason to give up your power and you just need to take it back, take back your power, own it a hundred percent.
And and that was a real defining moment for me. And at the time I was 35 years old and I was in that first executive role. So it was it was a very meaningful time for me to own my power.
[00:07:46] Alice Tang: Take your power back and own your power. That’s how we counter. I remember Maya Angelo said something along the line, do your best given what you know, when you know better. Do better. So if we [00:08:00] assume everybody’s learning we are doing our best. There’s no such imposter.
[00:08:05] Meg Carlson: Exactly.
[00:08:06] Alice Tang: Great. What is your number one advice for a young woman or a woman like me watching this and said, I really want to be a Meg. What is your number one piece of advice for us?
[00:08:19] Meg Carlson: First of all, you’re not gonna be Meg. You’re gonna be yourself, and you’re gonna be the very best version of yourself. So know yourself well know what you excel at. What makes your heart sing and pursue opportunities that put you in a position to bring your very best self, every day. So that has to do with the values of an organization that you choose to be part of, the people you spend time with your friends, your family. Be thoughtful. We don’t always get to choose our family, but we get to choose how we spend time with our family. Be thoughtful so that you’re surrounded by love and people who support you and want you to be [00:09:00] successful. And if there are people in your life who are not supportive or jealous or talking behind your back, you don’t need to be part of those people. Don’t have them in your life because it will just make you feel badly.
Get to an organization where your values are fully aligned and be at the core of what is important to them. So for me I was going into marketing with a finance background. So I chose a company that was good at consumer products marketing where I could learn from the best and do what I loved.
So I was an engineer going to a consumer products marketing company. So join an organization that places a high value on what you are going to bring to them.
[00:09:47] Alice Tang: There is a lot of great nuggets. Know yourself, if I may recall. And then don’t worry about the naysayers, hang out with the supporters and if you are, joining a company, make [00:10:00] sure that your values is aligned with them and your expertise on your talent is well needed in that organization so you can thrive.
[00:10:08] Meg Carlson: Yes. Very well said.
[00:10:10] Alice Tang: Great. If you were to redo your life, not everybody want to, what is the one thing you would change in your career?
[00:10:19] Meg Carlson: I think I would’ve stuck to my guns and tried to find a faster way to get back into food and beverage. I took a diversion when I left the large company and I went to work for a little tech startup for a year. And I learned a lot from that, especially about venture capitalists and raising money and having a very small group of people, 12 people trying to change the world. But I wasn’t passionate about it.
And then from there I joined forces with the C F O from that company and we launched a mergers and acquisition firm because we both really weren’t ready to do nothing. And we fell into it and we had a very [00:11:00] successful run for about 10 years. But we also went through the incredible economic downturn of 2008, and we had no transactions for 18 months and had to survive that. Lots of people had to go through that. Anybody who was in the investing side or the transaction side with property or businesses it was really tough. And those are good lessons to learn. But it was a long haul to recover and get back on track. The food and beverage was always my passion and so I basically took about a 10 year time out not doing that, and only discovered as I chose, what am I gonna do next? That, that was really what I loved doing and where I belonged.
[00:11:47] Alice Tang: So was the 10 years helpful for the discovery of your real passion is food and beverages, or you were just thinking at the time when you rejoined or after two years of sabbatical[00:12:00] rejoined that you wanted to test yourself and see what else you could excel at.
[00:12:07] Meg Carlson: Yeah that’s pretty insightful of you. I think the mergers and acquisition path was a logical one because I had done that at Heinz for half my career. And so it was also a competency. And the beauty of what we were doing is we were working with entrepreneurs, small business owners to help them realize their million dollar dreams. And so there was a great deal of satisfaction in that. But it was more narrow and limited. And what it helped me learn is I really like very broad. I like a lot of diversity. I like versatility, I like all aspects of a business, and I like running a business.
[00:12:48] Alice Tang: Beautiful. Beautiful. We’re winding down to a few more questions. So there are moments in your 40 years that you might look in the mirror or just sit in [00:13:00] the bathtub and thank gosh, this is very difficult. Should I quit? And what kept you going?
[00:13:07] Meg Carlson: Probably when I most thought should I quit was when I was leading a startup food business. We created a product called Melt Organic. It was the first non-dairy plant-based substitute for butter. And the category was really hard and we had to raise a lot of money, and I ended up putting a lot of my own money into the company.
And there were times when I thought, what, is it really worth it? Is it really worth it? And I still own stock in the company, so hopefully it will ultimately have been worth it when there’s an exit event, a liquidity event. But what kept me going was I had friends and colleagues to invest in the business, and I knew they had invested in me. I knew that was the primary [00:14:00] reason they chose to come into the company. And so I really felt this obligation to not let them down and not walk away just because it got difficult. And I could, because I could.
But I felt that was not the appropriate response. That when life gets tough, you really have to dig deep and decide. Am I gonna figure out how to make this work? And my career had been built on overcoming obstacles figuring out creative ways to go over, around or under, or, build alliances. That had been my career and so why not utilize all of those skills and experiences to figure this one out as well?
And I do believe that the entrepreneurs who are most successful, they do have luck, but they have tenacity and they have resilience[00:15:00] and everybody counts on the fact that they do. That they’re the leader for the reason that they are going to continue to lead and and continue to move things forward.
[00:15:13] Alice Tang: Love what you said when you said when things get really difficult, it is time to dig in and almost, I didn’t hear the word, but be curious about what else that we haven’t tried. Cuz a lot of times we think in the box. So those at the moment to dig further. So thank you very much. Two more question.
[00:15:34] Meg Carlson: Sure.
[00:15:35] Alice Tang: What is a piece of very good advice or very bad advice that has impact your life the most?
[00:15:44] Meg Carlson: I would say the advice I received from my father-in-law very early in when we were just married, 24, 25 years old, and he was the millionaire next door. He demonstrated that in his lifestyle.[00:16:00] Paid cash for everything. Had no credit cards mean all of that. And a piece of advice that stuck with me from the very beginning was pay yourself first. Pay yourself first. So what that meant is figure out what your minimum requirements are to have the life you want. And then when you get a raise, put it away. When you have a bonus invested pay for your kids college.
I took a couple bonuses and pre-funded my son’s college with that money. So it wouldn’t be a burden going forward. Don’t use debt to buy assets that depreciate like cars and boats and all those things. Those are things you save for because you’re paying yourself first, because every time you choose to do that, instead of self-gratification you are choosing to build your balance sheet, [00:17:00] not your income statement.
So if you’re building your balance sheet, you’re building value for the future. If you’re growing only your income statement. Then you are spending what you earn. And you can choose to do that, but you can’t have it both ways.
[00:17:19] Alice Tang: That made me think of when we explain human capital in my world you have an advisor probably heard about that. So you’re starting at 21 or 28, and then you run until, let’s say 60. Period of time you work and save. And hopefully we save enough to have a comfortable life at the later part, our golden years. Put it this way. So we are converting human capital, doing this every day, every month, and every year into financial capital. So what Meg just is sharing with us is how do you utilize this financial capital? You can spend it on yourself, better necklace, [00:18:00] better clothes, better car, better boat, better whatever, or you invest in the future so that you have a chance to stop even early to help the beloved children in your situation to get to college without hanging on so much debt.
So thank you for sharing it. Last question. Yes. What are you grateful for?
[00:18:22] Meg Carlson: Right now I am most grateful for being surrounded by loving family and friends and being fortunate to have four grandchildren who live nearby, who are seven, five, and eight months old, eight month old twins. Feel so blessed to be able to share in their lives appropriately. Not all the time, but appropriately. And and to they just bring so much joy.
[00:18:57] Alice Tang: Beautiful. This close [00:19:00] beautifully. Our interview today. Meg we are very grateful for you. Thank you for sharing your experience, your knowledge and your wisdom. If people want to reach out to you, are you open?
[00:19:10] Meg Carlson: Sure, I’d be happy to. I love to mentor others, especially young women.
[00:19:15] Alice Tang: Great. Thank you so much.
[00:19:17] Meg Carlson: Great. Thank you, Alice. I’m grateful for you. I’m very excited about this journey you’re on and how you’re giving back to to others. So congratulations to you.
[00:19:28] Alice Tang: Thank you very much. Meg.
Meg Carlson is the founder and CEO of Uproar Capital which accelerates early stage food and beverage brands for clients, including Charlie’s Table, Domaine Sante, Snacktivist Foods, Sun Valley Mustard, and Zacca Foods. She currently serves on the Board of Directors for SOS Hydration, Inc. Carlson led Prosperity Organic Foods as a mission driven company guided by integrity, authenticity and purpose from October 2010 to April 2018. In 2002 she co-founded and led Carlson Hall, an M&A Advisory firm for 10 years. She has an extensive background in strategic business development and general management gained through 16 years in corporate leadership with Ore-Ida Foods, Inc., subsidiary of the H. J. Heinz Company (now KraftHeinz). During her tenure, she successfully created a new business unit and directed its expansion from $100 million to $240 million in sales revenues over five years building better-for-you brands like Bagel Bites with pay-as-you-grow strategies. Ms. Carlson graduated from the University of Idaho with a Bachelor of Arts in 1976 and an MBA from Washington State University in 1982. She is a seasoned M&A expert with the elite M&AMI certification. She currently serves on the Global Growth Portfolio. Previously she served the Entrepreneurs’ Organization as chapter Membership Chair, Finance Chair and Forum Chair, and as Global Mentorship Chair prior to joining the Global Membership Committee. She is active on the National Board of Advisors for the College of Business at WSU and on the Entrepreneurship College Advisory Board. She is married with one grown son and four grandchildren.