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Show Notes

Beth and Debbie chat with Ann Gorr, a legal tech pioneer and founder of her own successful consultancy. Anne shares her journey from a school teacher to a trailblazing figure in the legal technology industry. With anecdotes about her beginnings, challenges as a working mom, and navigating a male-dominated environment, Anne’s story is a testament to resilience, resourcefulness, and the power of building alliances.

[13:08] Starting the business

[22:39] An owner’s agent

[27:16] Consensus building

  • Transcript

    Debbie Foster (00:03): 

    Welcome to the Powerful Leaders. No apologies podcast, a show about women who are ready to own their power and change the world. My name is Debbie Foster. 

      

    Beth Thompson (00:12): 

    And I’m Beth Thompson. Our guests are fierce and fabulous women who are making a difference in their personal and professional communities. Are you ready to be inspired? If so, stay tuned and also check out our website at affinityconsulting.com/powerful leaders. Here’s the show. Welcome to our latest episode of Powerful Leaders. No apologies. Debbie, here we are again. 

      

    Debbie Foster (00:40): 

    Here we are again. I just posted something on LinkedIn about the last few episodes that we’ve posted. I listened to them. I think you do too. After they come out. It’s the first time I’ve ever heard them and I just am so excited about the people who have been on our show and listening to it the first time when we’re recording is awesome. Then we listen to it again the second time and it’s even more impactful. So I’m really excited. We’re here again. 

      

    Beth Thompson (01:06): 

    Speaking of excitement, guess what? By the time this episode posts, we will have the link in the show notes to hats and water bottles and T-shirts and sweatshirts and any kind of merch you could possibly imagine. So I feel like we’re officially legit now. Can’t wait. Can’t wait to wear it. Can’t wait to see what to run into folks wearing, wearing some of the merch. I’m super excited about today’s episode in particular, Debbie, when you and I were brainstorming about doing this podcast, we both had this person on our list. She was on both of our lists of people that we wanted to interview because Ann Gorr, you’re a legend in the industry, 

      

    Debbie Foster (01:48): 

    A legend. 

      

    Beth Thompson (01:49): 

    You are a pioneer, certainly for legal and women tech, and we’re so excited to share your story today with our audience. So welcome to the podcast. 

      

    Ann Gorr (01:58): 

    Thank you. That’s quite an honor to be there. I was kind of shocked that my name was up there with some of the other people that I was standing in line with. I’m like, whoa, okay. Well, sometimes you don’t realize the impact you’ve had, right? So I’m happy. I’m happy to be invited and happy to be a part of your No apologies programming, and I’ll have to check out that merchandise. 

      

    Beth Thompson (02:17): 

    Yes, for sure. 

      

    Debbie Foster (02:18): 

    For sure. We’re so happy to have you. And we were just chatting before this that we didn’t see you at Legal Tech. Our normal hangout is in the executive lounge at the Hilton, and every time I walked in there I was like, is Ann here yet? And Ann wasn’t here, so you were missed even in the executive lounge at the New York Hilton. 

      

    Ann Gorr (02:37): 

    Right. Well, I think I had shared with you that when clients have emergencies, your world stops. And I’m a sole practitioner, so if I’m not there, there’s nobody there. I mean, I have my colleague, partner, vendor, people that work, but there’s something about when they can pick up the phone and speak to me. So unlike what I would normally do and be out and about and gaining all the information I can from Legal Week, I saw the inside of my hotel room and went out for a couple of cocktails here and there and really didn’t get to leverage anything of legal week. And I’m unfortunately going to have the same situation with, it’s just the way the scheduling fell and I don’t want to spend a week in Orlando in my hotel. 

      

    Debbie Foster (03:16): 

    We can totally understand that. But why don’t you tell us a little bit about yourself. Tell us your story. How’d you get started? What are you doing now? 

      

    Ann Gorr (03:23): 

    Well, my story goes back a long way. I’ve been in this industry for over 30 years. I was actually a school teacher for one whole year. I was a school teacher. I taught the first end of the year, first graders, which was one experience. And then I got assigned to eighth grade English, which was a whole other end of the experience, not fun. But I went into teaching because, and this kind of dovetails into your women’s leadership role. My mom died of breast cancer when I was six. I was the oldest. And my grandmothers who were born in the 1890s, 1900 came to raise us. And my dad was, he was by far my best mentor, but he was a nuclear metallurgical engineer. He was like rocket scientist except with submarines. That’s what he was. And he was very black and white and everything he did, he was super intelligent. 

      

    (04:15): 

    The loss of my mother rocked his world, and these lovely grandmothers came in and helped raise us. So when it came time for me to figure out what my next step in life was going to be, first of all, I went to a Catholic high school, still very misogynistic in his viewpoints. And when I was asking my parents like, well, what do you think I should be doing? I kind of like this. I kind of like that. They’re like, well, you could be a nurse, you could be a school teacher, you could be a secretary, you could be a nun. None of those really appealed to me. But the education one was the lesser of all evil. So I went to school to be a school teacher, did not challenge me, but be that as it may, it landed me a full-time job when I got out of college. 

      

    (04:55): 

    And I say that my dad was my mentor because he always would say, figure it out, Anne, figure it out. Talk it out, figure it out. And I would always be asking, but why? But why are we doing it? Why did they make that rule? Why did they make that rule for anybody that’s Catholic? Why did they make that rule where we had to eat meat, we couldn’t eat meat on Fridays. And I’d be like, now they’ve just changed the rule. What happened to all those people that, are they grandfathered in? Did they get out of purgatory? Are they going to hell? They ate last week, they changed the rule this week. What happened? And he would just be like, go to your room. Just go to your room. Everything I did in life would be, but why are we doing it that way? I think from very young, I think I was a consultant, I would always be trying to find some other avenue to accomplish and get over an obstacle that’s that’s where my dad fit into it. 

      

    (05:45): 

    He only saw black and white and I saw all kinds of color. There was gray. There are reasons why people did things. It doesn’t always have to be yes and no, but engineers are very much like our software engineers. There’s an on and off and there’s nothing in between. So that’s what I was raised with. I spent a lot of time being going, go to your room, man, like head to your room. I don’t want to have this discussion anymore. And my brother and sister didn’t have that kind of relationship with my dad because we’re not going to go be you. Right? So that’s where I did. And when I went to teach, I got a teaching job, a full-time position when full-time positions were not available, they just weren’t available. And I got it because of my ingenuity of making things change. If you know anything about education, change is not in their playbook. 

      

    (06:30): 

    And I would change things all the time and I would ask to do special things. Why are we reading? I was teaching in a very affluent school district. The kids had more spending money than my salary. And the parents were pushing down, our kids should be reading Beowulf. Our kids should be reading Shakespeare. I’m like, they’re in eighth grade. They would like to read the comics. Can we change the, so I got them to change the curriculum, which made all the tenured teachers mad at me. My kids were happy. They were reading protagonists that were teenagers and felt their kind of experiences. So here I am changing that. And an incident happened in that school district where I was a hall monitor, and this is what got me into where I’m at. I was the hall monitor for lunchtime. Some kids came out of the school, out of the lunchroom, went to their locker, and all these pills fell out of the locker. 

      

    (07:20): 

    There were seventh and eighth graders and I went, Hey guys. And I was 23, so I had just gotten out of college, what are you doing? Oh, my mother sends me to school with my vitamins and I can’t take them until after lunch. Well, those are the funniest looking vitamins I’ve ever seen. And they started panicking. I said, because I know what they are and they’re not vitamins. And when I went down to the principal’s office, the principal told them what had gone on and his question, oh my God, these kids have these drugs. His question to me was, why do you know what they are? And my response was like, oh crap. I’m the one that’s going to catch the fall on this. So I made the decision right then and there that I wasn’t staying in an industry that questioned its teachers instead of questioning what’s going on with the kids. 

      

    (08:03): 

    So I left in all my high school and college timeframes. I worked as a secretary for many of them in the office of the Attorney General’s office in Pittsburgh, downtown Pittsburgh. So I was typing and I was doing legal typing and I was in a legal environment. And when I didn’t know what I was going to do now, I had made up my mind whenever that incident happened that I’m not staying in teaching, I’m not going to survive. I’m beating my head against a wall and I’m 23, I’m not going to survive. So I picked up in this company that I was doing typing for and doing receptionist work for, said, well, we take you. And it was a financial management company. And I’m like, I don’t want to do that. I don’t want to be there. And they said, well, we have a colleague of ours that’s starting a business that’s in legal technology. 

      

    (08:47): 

    Would you like to go? And I think they’re looking for someone that can speak, someone that understands the legal office, someone that can type, someone that can present, someone that can do troubleshooting. I went, I’m on. So I picked up left Pittsburgh and moved not knowing a soul to New Jersey and worked for this legal technology company. And it was baptism by fire. I was in big, big firms. I was in AM 100 firms who were moving towards legal tech. And I was getting eaten alive. And I learned real quick and I learned really quickly what I was good at. I was really good at solving sticky wicket situations. I was good at corralling in the sales reps that were promising the world when it didn’t work. I was really good at business requirements, things I didn’t know I was good at. I became a great commodity in that legal tech company. 

      

    (09:33): 

    And that’s where I got my baptism by fire. And I stayed there and it was really a great experience for me. I got to do all kinds of things in that startup as anybody’s been in a startup, I got to wear all kinds of hats and I learned things really quickly and I didn’t know that I was, I have a saying that I say all the time, you really don’t know what you really don’t know. I did not know that I had key strengths in business requirements, empathy, process development, writing, speaking presentations in consensus building. And those were things that to this day still define me. So I was lucky that I had that opportunity and that baptism by fire worked out well for me. 

      

    Beth Thompson (10:11): 

    So speaking of not knowing that might’ve also helped you as a female because maybe you didn’t know that people might count you out or that they might discount you and you just barreled through. And so you were able to prove yourself because you didn’t even have the doubt. But did you ever have any obstacles as a female early on or even today? I mean, we all face challenges. 

      

    Ann Gorr (10:35): 

    I think we all have things as females that I think growing up with my dad was very helpful for me. He was very old school. He was raised during the depression. I mean, it was one mindset. The company that I worked for was horrifically the ratio to women to men. I think there were 700 employees, and I think there might’ve been 50 women. They were in the accounting department, they were the receptionist, they were the secretary. So having a strong woman, I sometimes had to battle that, but I never grew up with that man versus female, woman versus female. My dad never treated me that way at that company. I was so blessed. I had a sales manager who ended up being VP of sales who took me along on the ride. He recognized that I could make him look good all the time and I could control his people. 

      

    (11:21): 

    And he solved. He was really an ally for me. If somebody gave me a hard time, he talked to them, you don’t talk to Anne. And the best one was this one gentleman. It was another Dave. And he just gave me such a hard time. When I first started out, he was my first immediate boss and he didn’t like how I did things. He didn’t see a value in anything I did. And Dave Ireland asked me if I’d come work for him in the New Jersey office. And I said yes. And when it came time that I became the shining star that I could solve all these problems and everybody wanted me as their demo dolly person, Dave Ireland said, you’re not getting her. You treated her so badly when she was in Pittsburgh with you. I’m not giving her to you figure it out on your own. 

      

    (12:04): 

    That to me, validated that he knew that I’d gone through some struggles. Even today when I give presentations on empathy in the workplace or advice to women, I really have never been somebody that feels that a man has wronged me. I ab whore hearing that men are and are enemies because the majority of men, they just might not understand what they’re supposed to be doing or so many of them are allies. And who gets the recognition, the bad guy, not the good people, but the bad guy. So I don’t like when we dismiss the men in our environment or say that they’re our problem. They might have caused a problem, but you need to figure out how to surmount that problem. And it’s sometimes it means you have to leave. Sometimes it means you have to leave. If you’ve tried all your little tricks in your book and you’ve reached out to people and you can’t fix it, you’re not going to fix it. So come up with a different path that your water can flow down. 

      

    Beth Thompson (13:00): 

    Well, and speaking of leaving, when did you end up branching out on your own? Because obviously you have your own business now. 

      

    Ann Gorr (13:08): 

    So my daughter Erin was two. And I was traveling a crazy person, kind of probably Debbie Foster, all over God’s creation. I would be in a different airport if I was in the Marriott. I was in St. Louis, where was I? And I was putting in astronomical hours and it was getting too hard to be a working mom and traveling and having a family. It just was too different. So I went to this vp, I reported into marketing and sales to VP of marketing and sales and said, Linda, my manager and I both had children at the same time. We were wondering if we could job share. This was 30 years ago. Could we job share? And I’ll go three days a week and Linda will go too. And then next month we’ll reverse it and I’ll be two days a week that wasn’t heard of. 

      

    (13:55): 

    And again, it was all men. And they said, absolutely not. I came back, I had this whole, here’s how to solve all the negotiation pathways. And I just got shot down. And I came home and I remember my husband, I said to him, I’m quitting. I’m going to go out on my own. I’m quitting. He goes, you cannot do that. I’m like, I can. So for anybody that listens, tell me I can’t do something, that’s your kid to death because I’m going to make you said I can’t do that. Watch me just watch me. And that’s kind of what I did. And I saved enough money and he’s like, Anne, this is crazy. You can’t do this. You don’t even know that you’re going to succeed. You don’t even know. And I went, John, my first client’s going to be the company. They’re not going to know how to survive without me. 

      

    (14:38): 

    And he goes, you’re crazy. And I said, John, we have six months to live on. I’ve set aside six months and I’m going to have a job before that. Sure enough, they hired both me and Linda back as consultants because they couldn’t get the work done, and they hired four people besides us. So that was my way out. When I started out, I was doing all different kinds of projects. I was doing a lot of writing. I was doing a lot of presentations, doing a lot of training, which I’m really good at, but I don’t love doing. And I was doing an awful lot of that. And it was the great time because it’s when Microsoft was teaching and you needed to teach people how to move from word perfect into Word and doing all the tips and tricks and all of those things that we did to make, I don’t know if you were on just on the last podcast with Ari, but talking about efficiencies and automating and I was all about efficiencies and automating. 

      

    (15:27): 

    So I did a lot of that and side projects for law firms. And so I only stayed in law firms and I was only by myself when I got into the D m S environment. Maybe 10 years later I started getting involved in that kind of stuff. But I really was an island unto myself. I didn’t have a lot of partnerships with a lot of vendors and contractors. I had some were better than others and they would bring me along with them or they would recommend to their clients that I helped them in that arena. So I didn’t have that business association, a big network of people. I mean, I knew everybody in New Jersey. Lots of people were knowing who I was, but I didn’t have the alliances with big tech. So after my husband died in 2009, and it was a shock to all of us, I was fine the first year I had to, you just kept going on automatic pilot, get all these things done, and lots of empathy and sympathy from the legal community that helped me along. 

      

    (16:26): 

    But year two was very difficult. And I had a very hard time hunting and gathering and delivering, and I just needed to go someplace where I could be just a deliverer. And so I went into a systems integrator and it was the most misogynistic environment I’ve ever been in my life and and they hired me on to grow their legal vertical market. And I knew by week six, you got to get out of here. This is not going to work. You are not going to survive. And I give this advice to all women. For every bad situation that you’re in, there’s usually some saving grace that pulls you out the window. It might not go through the door, but it’ll get you out. And what was interesting is that I got out, but when I got out of there, what was the benefit? I had relationships with David Gould of HP and Dan’s and all the Dans and Nihon to Silva and all these people that knew me now and were like, come work for us. 

      

    (17:27): 

    And I’m like, I’m not working for anybody right now. I’m just going to go back to being me, but I’ll be happy to work with you on projects. And so that’s where I changed direction from being training strategy to straight strategic information governance. I went out and got my I G P I made sure that I’m keeping up on all the different sections there. And during that remaining, I was only there a year. So six weeks in, I knew I was leaving the remainder of that time. I spent time trying to find clients. And when I walked out the door, I had three corporate legal clients to do projects. But I wouldn’t have had that exposure if I hadn’t gone into this difficult environment. But I think it taught me a lot of lessons. It taught me how to be a little more patient. It taught me how to speak up for myself even more than I do. 

      

    (18:12): 

    If you can only imagine, I speak up all the time, but man, I used to say, you can’t say that to me. Have you talked to HR yet? Because you cannot talk to me like that. And they’d be like, well, I think I’m like, well, again, it’s against federal labor law. Would you like to go down to HR and find that out? So there were a lot of those kinds of just people standing on soapboxes that they really didn’t have the right to stand on. But it got me through a time in my life when I needed help. So it served a purpose, it gave me time. I do speak to those people. I mean, I’m hoping they don’t listen to this podcast, but the answer is, is that it served its purpose for the time in my life when I needed a place to put my head down and rest. 

      

    Beth Thompson (18:52): 

    One of the commonalities that I’ve seen in all of our interviews so far has been the importance of these relationships that we all start and build and how they really are the glue, the fabric that holds together our careers and helps catapult us because every single person has talked about relationships that they’ve built that have helped them along the way. And though for those that are paying attention, yes, RA Kaplan was mentioned and yet another episode of our podcast. 

      

    Debbie Foster (19:23): 

    So Anne, I’m curious, who’s inspiring you these days? Where do you go? Are you listening to any books, any podcasts? What keeps you going? 

      

    Ann Gorr (19:32): 

    I do listen to Ari’s podcast, sorry, Kaplan’s podcast. He has such interesting people and they’re usually on the pulse of where technology’s headed that I find. I don’t read as much tech knowledge as I should because I read it all day long. So I don’t feel like reading that in my downtime and during the day I don’t really have the downtime. So there are a couple of books. There was one self-help book that I liked that was kind of affirming, and I know it’s older, but it’s Chris Voss. He was the F B I agent that was called Never Split the Difference. And it talked about the art of negotiation. And what I found about that was it was validation for me, the way he approached, he said, everything in life is a negotiation and how you approach it and how you do that and how do you get people to agree or come along? 

      

    (20:19): 

    It was kind of validating for me that I read it and I went, oh, I do that already. Okay, good. Alright, check. Right? It’s that kind of stuff I read all day long. I barely, barely, barely watch television. I feel like a guilty sitting down that long. And again, I’m not apologizing for that, but I usually have way too much to do to be sitting down and watching stupid tv. But I do read a lot of historical fiction. I like James Patterson books. He had a book by a detective called Michael Bennett who The story is based out of New York City and I’m based in central New Jersey. I’m at the Jersey Shore, but a lot of my clients are in Manhattan. So it was interesting to read a book that has a lot of places I go to see that. So I found that, and there’s a really great book called The Opera Sisters and it’s historical fiction. 

      

    (21:06): 

    It’s about two sisters who helped the Jewish people get out of Poland by attending the opera and it was their whole, it’s a true story. So that was good. But I tend to watch different people. I like to be outside of where I’m at. I love to listen to Patrick d Dominico. I really do go to Ari’s Virtual Lunch. I think anybody that listens to that, you never know what piece of nugget you’re going to pick up. There’s people on there that goes back to that relationship building that you meet somebody and they go, Hey, I have a client that was looking for a new financial management system and he had a vendor that was a financial management product and matter management. I’m like, can you get me her name because I need to talk to a person higher up. And so it’s just getting those relationships and understanding how they help you grow and how they help your clients grow. 

      

    (22:00): 

    I would be lost without my network of people that help me partner vendors. The thing that I, and I’m probably getting ahead of myself, but the thing that sometimes is hard for the partner vendors to realize is I’m working for the client even though I have the relationship with the vendor and the vendor’s being pulled into the client, there are times I have to scold the vendor and they’ll be like, oh, but I thought we had a great relationship. We do have a great relationship, but you’re not doing well for my client right now, and I work for the client. I don’t work for you. And so we need to have a come to Jesus meeting at this point and figure out how we can fix this. And they’ll be, some of them get really offended and don’t talk to me after that. But that’s on them, not on me. 

      

    (22:39): 

    I really am an owner’s agent for my clients. I go in and help them. I represent the small to. I’m in that arena very rarely. I’m in a couple of AM two hundreds, but very rarely am I in the two hundreds or am one hundreds. I’m in the 25 to 150 attorneys tends to be my place that I play a lot. And they have a completely different ecosystem than the AM one hundreds and am two hundreds. And they don’t have the same resources. They don’t know that they shouldn’t just go buy the product because the law firm down the street bought that product. No, it doesn’t work that way. So let’s try to figure out how you’re going to move forward and how do we do that in a concise way that’s going to benefit you now and in the future and not be, as I say, building platforms on Lincoln Logs, Legos and Connects doesn’t work, right? You got to choose one. Choose one. So you can build a nice big castle, but you can’t build a castle. They don’t connect, right? 

      

    Debbie Foster (23:38): 

    I think one thing I would say about this idea of an owner’s agent, someone who can hold the responsible, we do some of that same work too. And I think that even though they might get angry, every vendor that we work with is better off because they have people like us who say, actually no, that isn’t going to work for this client. And the products that we recommend and support across the board, our better products because of people like you and us and other colleagues that we have in this very, very tiny small world that are challenging vendors to step up and provide better client service, create better products. It’s definitely making a difference in the industry. 

      

    Ann Gorr (24:23): 

    It really is. Particularly in the mid-market. I remember, I’m going to say it was over 10, less than 15, but I was at an iManage partner conference when I was invited, right when I changed my direction again. So as I tell people often, my career path was not a straight line. It was many zigs and many zags. And so here I am reinventing myself again in 2013, right? That’s when I reinvented again and I was going to be information governance. That’s where I was going to live. I went to an iManage conference and they were announcing their cloud and it was got you $20,000 just to put your name on the line. And I finally, they got through with all this big dog and pony show and how to go after the AM one hundreds with this and the AM two hundreds. And I raised my hand and nobody knew who. 

      

    (25:08): 

    I mean, that crowd didn’t know who I was, but I raised my hand. I said, okay, I’d like to know what you’re doing for the thousands and thousands of others that are in the ecosystem that you’re not even touching. My client cannot give you $20,000 to go to the cloud and I want them all to go to the cloud and you could see who is she? And I’ve done that. I had another member being at ELTA Con one year, I want to say maybe seven years ago. And my client was a big financial, corporate legal group, and they wanted to look at Lara’s, say docx tools. They wanted to look at that tools product. And I said, let me go in and find out if it’s going to fit the bill for you. So I went in and sat down and Matt James, who I am sure you’ve met at some point, who is just adorable, he was a baby engineer and he is now they’re VP of product evangelism. 

      

    (25:55): 

    I said, this is too expensive. My client doesn’t need all this stuff. This is too much. We don’t even have the people in place to do what you need to do. And he goes, well, what do you want to do? And I said, I’ll tell you what I want. And I went through the product line, I said, if you give me this and consider it a light version, my client will buy it. And that’s the first time that they did that. And they went back and they did a light and they would include me every time they’re making something else. I should have monetized that better than I did. But I was just happy that my clients were getting special attention to be Guinea pigs for this new product that they were downsizing, which I said, we don’t need the whole universe. We just need one planet. Can you just give us one planet? Because that’s all I need. And many, many, many clients either have called me after the fact to say, can I put you on our board to do a review of our product and change? And so that’s why I don’t put myself in as a partner. I’ll partner with people, but I need to be an unattached influencer. I can’t be aligned with different vendors. I can’t because once monetizing my involvement as a consultant, reneg, anything else that somebody might say, I’m an unbiased participant. So 

      

    Beth Thompson (27:02): 

    Well, you’ve had an amazing career so far and this 30 minutes has flown by. But as we wrap up, we always ask our guests this last question, which is, what is your leadership superpower? 

      

    Ann Gorr (27:16): 

    I struggled with this, but I would say consensus building. Consensus building is my leadership superpower because I’m able to take people that aren’t aligned with where we’re trying to head and get them on my trajectory. And I’m also able to bring partners and people together that may have thought they didn’t match. And it was the utmost honor that my corporate legal ops guy, before we knew there were legal ops, we were sitting on a plane traveling after we were rolling out something, and he always liked the window seat and I wanted the aisle seat. And so we would go on these trips together and there’d always be somebody in the middle between us. And the guy ended up being an IT director in the middle of us, one choppy flight back from I think Chicago. And he said, why do you hire Anne? And he goes, because she’s able to bring consensus among all the warring parties that I don’t have the patience for, and I just tell them all to get out of here and she’s able to get everybody to come and do what needs to be done. 

      

    (28:11): 

    So I think that’s rule with a rule, with an empathetic heart. Everybody’s on a different journey in this life. There’s something going on in their background that you may or may not know. There may be a reason why they’re being just too darn cranky or they’re afraid of whatever’s going on and you don’t know what’s going on behind the scenes. And if you can keep that in mind, I have two quotes that I like to say. One is something my Irish grandmother who raised me used to say, she’d say, Anne, even if you don’t have two nickels to rub together, it costs you nothing to be nice. So just be nice. And that was always said to us, just be nice. We knew what came from that. And there isn’t a need to be as a woman to pull on the big boy pants. I have different ways of resolving conflict and building consensus. But I’ll close on this quote, which is a Nelson Mandela quote, which says, by shining your light brightly, you give others their permission to do so as well. And I think as women, if we can shine brightly, they’ll follow our lead, right? They’ll follow us where we need to go because we’re doing it nicely, we’re doing it kindly, we’re doing it efficiently and we’re accomplishing our goal without stepping on top of people. And that’s kind of the way I build all of my relationships in life is just be nice. 

      

    Beth Thompson (29:26): 

    Great, great advice. Thank you, Ann, so much. We’ve enjoyed this conversation and learning a lot. I did not know you taught school early on, so learn something new today. But we appreciate having you on the show. 

      

    Ann Gorr (29:37): 

    Thank you so much. I really, really appreciate you including in your illustrious group of people. And keep up the good work ladies. No apologies for the things that we do in life. None. Thank 

      

    Debbie Foster (29:49): 

    You. Thank you so much, Ann. 

      

    Ann Gorr (29:51): 

    Thank you. Take care. Have a great rest of your day. 

      

    Beth Thompson (29:56): 

    And that’s a wrap. Thanks for listening to Powerful Leaders. No apologies. Be sure and subscribe to our show and help us spread the word by sharing our show with your network. 

      

    Debbie Foster (30:06): 

    And check out our show notes aaffinityconsulting.com slash powerful leaders for resources and ways to connect with us. See you next time.