62: {Interview} Why Women Need a Seat at the Table with Angie Breedlove

Have you ever been in a room at work and looked around and no one looked like you? In today's episode, I sit down with corporate trailblazer Angie Breedlove. Angie, co-founder of Xcelerator Group and founder of Women of Warranty, shares her journey from corporate America to entrepreneurship. She discusses the importance of women in leadership roles and the challenges she faced in starting her own business. Angie also highlights the success of Women in Warranty and the need for more women in the warranty industry. She emphasizes the importance of finding passion in your work and balancing work and life.

Highlights Include: 

• Women play a crucial role in leadership positions and decision-making.
• Entrepreneurship comes with challenges, but it also provides opportunities for personal growth and learning.
• Nonprofits like Women in Warranty can make a significant impact by fostering diversity and inclusion in the warranty industry.
• Balancing work and life is a continuous process, and it's important to find passion in your work.

As Chief Revenue Officer, Angie leads the company’s sales, corporate development, marketing, pricing, and revenue management. She also oversees the company’s ongoing channel and client expansion efforts into emerging warranty products and technology.

In her previous roles as Vice President of Retail Strategy at Assurant, she led the strategic design, product development, and program optimization for nationwide retail companies including Lowe’s Home Improvement, Harbor Freight, American Freight, and Conn’s Home Plus. Angie was responsible for increasing expansion and development efforts into high-growth, emerging retail channels in both brick-and-mortar and e-commerce.

Prior to Assurant, Angie led the development and expansion of after-sales service from operational design to technology implementation at Lowe’s Home Improvement. By sourcing complete program management and administration of

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Transcript

Caroline (00:01.948)
Today I have Angie Breedlove with me. Angie is the co -founder and chief revenue officer at Accelerator Group. She is also the founder of a nonprofit called Women in Warranty. So welcome Angie.

Angie Breedlove (00:14.273)
Caroline, how are you?

Caroline (00:17.436)
Good. I'm so glad you could be here today. So you and I met before recording this podcast and you spent a large chunk of your career working in corporate America and leadership roles, specifically in the insurance and warranty space. And then a year and a half ago, you decided to start Accelerator Group with a couple other founders. So I'd love to hear your story.

Angie Breedlove (00:39.777)
Thank you for the people out here. It's my first podcast. So I'm a little nervous. You start seeing me break out in some red here. That's what it is. So I...

I love to talk about a little bit how I got into here to your point. Not a whole lot of people go, oh, I want to fix appliances and sell parts. I was raised by a single mom. So my grandmother babysat, she was the person, she was my playmate. And I didn't want to play school, I always wanted to play office.

was the coolest thing and my grandmother said okay but you can't be the secretary you've got to be the plant manager and I didn't know then you know what that was so I had a clipboard I love a clipboard and I'd go around to all my cousins and be like so where are you at with this and realized it made me perfect for leadership in corporate America.

But I started out when I was 19. We didn't have the affordability to go to college.

and started at Maytag. Hopefully everyone's heard of Maytag Appliances and you know just started at the bottom and you know got my job, did my learnings, had a baby, had another baby and I light bulb went off and I went into the human resources guy and said what's my career path and he said what do you want to do?

Angie Breedlove (02:17.985)
And I said, I don't know. And he said, well, I can't give you a career path if you don't know what you want to do. Caroline, I see that a lot with females. And it's a great thing that our children, my daughters, have a lot more opportunities. But it's almost like it's too much.

They don't know what to do. So my mentor, I went to him and he said, well, why don't you just do every job in warranty administration for like two, three years and go do another one. And I was like, oh, that sounds pretty smart. So that's what I did. And I was at Maytag for 20 years. And the first 13, 14 years of that,

Literally did every job in warranty administration. So I paid claims I coded claims I wrote parts catalogs. I ran call centers. I was in a call center and it really Got me to where I was very well around it and she can tell I can talk so they put me into sales and Became national accounts and at national accounts. I had our Sears account

And back in this day, Sears was 45 % market share. And I love to say Sears gave me my MBA in retail and appliances and services. It was amazing. I was drinking from a fire hose. No one looked like me either. There were no females. Everyone was male. Engineers, if there were females, they were in the call center. They were...

you know, doing planes or something. So I had to learn the job and the roles, but then also learn I sounded different. I used different words. I, you know, I just didn't fit how they were. And back then, you know, the majority of women and for leadership men worked from home, didn't work from home. They were home moms.

Angie Breedlove (04:33.985)
which is a huge job, right? Which made it even worse then. So I looked different to them. And about the end of my 20 years, I got this idea to pitch to Lowe's Home Improvement the change for them to bring in -house warranty administration, service contracts, and service. And I had...

Caroline (04:55.164)
Thank you.

Angie Breedlove (05:02.523)
no idea whatsoever that they were going to buy. My boss even said, well, you know, just if you want to dance with a bear, you better get ready to dance with a bear and go for it. And I think I was 38. Again, still single mom.

two daughters, I had to figure out how to get them taken care of when I traveled and we just didn't think of it any different. We didn't know any different. So, and I was going to college then at night school. So I started pitching to Lowe's and after a year, one year,

They came back and said, we love it. That's what we want to do. But we want to hire you to build it. We don't want to outsource it any longer. So I left Newton, Iowa, and 18 inches of snow, went back to the South, where I'm originally from, to North Carolina, and began just an amazing journey at Lowe's.

And I would say at Maytag and at Lowe's, I really benefited from some great mentors. If I hadn't had that, I'm not sure where I would be, but I'm also not sure how I would have viewed it, if that makes sense. So that little girl with the clipboard is still going around bossing. Thank you, Sheryl Sandberg. And looking at...

Caroline (06:25.73)
Thank you.

Angie Breedlove (06:34.473)
my career path more as a jungle gym than a career ladder. So at Lowe's, you know, here's a bunch of money, you know what you're doing, go launch a service organization. And I was just like, holy moly. You can't blink though. And I quickly learned if you're not pushing yourself to where your stomach is kind of sick, you're not pushing yourself.

So if your dreams are too small or they don't scare you, they are too small. And you kind of get on that adrenaline, right, of pressure and big projects, big deadlines, lots of money and lots of training and leadership of how to get teams of people to want to go over that mountain.

Caroline (07:17.308)
Thanks.

Angie Breedlove (07:34.081)
So we launched in 18 months the Warranty Administration for Lowe's and just probably one of the best career moves I ever made. But I just spent 20 years, if you remember, doing every single job in warranty. Lowe's didn't know it, so I was able to really go fast, really fast decision making. And...

I picked a team, I didn't have a lot of money for folks that were 20, 30 year veterans in service. So I was thinking about what I did and I said, call center. So I can teach you warranty. I can't teach aptitude or resilience or just pure persistence. So we went to the call center and started recruiting out of there and I loved athletes.

They tend to be very competitive and call center folks know where all the dead bodies are and they know where all the ugly babies are and how to fix it and they've had ideas and nobody's listened to them. So that's what we did. We built the team from very junior folks.

and you know this was we launched in 2010 and I personally have watched these people get promoted to manager to director to vice president and just awesome for that so then Lois asked me to launch installed sales for them and I said I can't launch it but I can build you a pool to launch it and

Caroline (09:18.876)
Thank you.

Angie Breedlove (09:22.913)
my whole view of leadership and what people are capable of had changed in that first five years at Lowe's. So once again, we built a hell of a team. We put our heads down. It was fast and furious. We were hiring 600 people a year. And I had...

a few years before that had asked again my mentor how do I get to be vice president what what am I lacking and what I was lacking was financial acumen and running a pnl so you know women we do a lot in the I call them the r roles human resources public relations community relations there's nothing wrong with that.

Caroline (10:09.34)
Thank you.

Angie Breedlove (10:11.393)
But you don't often get the opportunity to run a P &L and have that financial acumen.

And that's one of those things that kind of, you know, pushes you up to that next level. So that's what I did. Finance is not my strength. Accounting is worse than that. But I couldn't run a P &L. I couldn't create one. That makes sense. So got that added to my toolbox. And long story short, at Lowe's, they kind of made a change in strategy. They wanted to

outsource, they have leadership change.

So I took a role with a company called Assurrent, not Assurion, but Assurrent. And they wanted to rebuild retail at their company. And I set a goal of three years. I wanted to be there for three years and win my own Lowe's account to Assurrent. So those 77 employees that believed in me in 2010,

didn't lose their jobs. So we closed the deal at with Lowe's, yay, and all 77 of the employees came over full tenure doing the same job they've done at Lowe's. And so that started me on what do I do?

Angie Breedlove (11:42.497)
accelerator group was there.

Caroline (11:45.868)
So why is it so important? You brought up a really great point about how a lot of times, no matter what industry it is, pharma, manufacturing, insurance, legal, professional services, whatever, fill in the blank, there's not enough representation of women in leadership seats. Why do you think that's so important for women to be represented in leadership roles?

Angie Breedlove (12:13.377)
Great question. Remember I said no one looked like me and that's because I'd be sitting in an office meeting room, a boardroom, whatever you want to call it, and the only female in there. So if I hadn't been in there, it's all males. And when I speak, I like to talk about 78 % of appliances are purchased by females.

and 75 % of leaders or business owners in the industry of warranty administration or service contracts are men. So we've got 40, 50 year old men, they're also not very diverse, white men, making decisions about how a woman wants to have service.

and the disconnect is very loud. So the important part is the women have got to be there to be the voice in the room and foster that voice. And you got to be strong enough to be the unique voice in there. You know, men are called passionate, women are called emotional, you know. Men are ambitious, women are oppressive. But...

We don't start learning each other unless we're in that room.

Caroline (13:42.075)
that you brought that up to because even as I was raised as a little girl, it was you're bossy, you're outspoken, you know, fill in the blank of whatever bossy or ambitious words can be put in there and you just have to rewire that in your brain so that you feel worthy of a seat at the leadership table.

Angie Breedlove (13:53.409)
So, thank you.

Angie Breedlove (14:00.755)
You feel worthy and you also get rid of that imposter syndrome, you know that can get in there and the other the other thing is our vocabulary is even different so women a good example or females have a tendency to say I believe you know, I believe if we did this this would happen and Men say I think

So I think, I think we should do this. And it just is a stronger word, but it means exactly the same thing. And, you know, there's a lot of talk about mentoring women and how men need to step up to the plate and mentor more females to get them in the ring. I say no, I think men need to step up the plate to get mentored, mentored by females.

You know, who needs the mentoring? Think about the just the opposites of that. You know, we want to understand more, but we're going to mentor you to be more like us. It's such an oxymoron.

Caroline (15:14.876)
So after years of success and leadership roles in corporate America, you decided to go out with a couple other co -founders on your own a year and a half ago. What types of challenges have you encountered as an entrepreneur that you didn't expect?

Angie Breedlove (15:30.905)
Wow, um that I didn't expect and challenges so I expected them these things I just wasn't I've never done it. So it was and let me back up. So when you are a startup and an entrepreneur you do everything I mean everything so you're setting up your outlook. You're finding your insurance provider your

You're doing all the PowerPoints. And I mean, in corporate America, it's a big ship. Lowe's is a huge ship. And turning that ship doesn't happen fast. So everything's like the military. Everything's planned. Everything is given to you in a playbook. And you execute the playbook. So when you start your own company, the playbook's yours.

you figure out the playbook, you figure out your funding, you figure out, you know, what's your research, your marketplace, what are you going to sell and keeping that, you know, very crystal clear and, you know, every Monday we talk about are we going to make payroll next month. That was never something that I ever even thought.

Is it a challenge? Yes. But it's more of a man. I'm learning so much that I've never experienced before. You don't have an admin. You know in corporate America I had an admin. I had my own legal person assigned to me. I had my own finance person. You know it was a...

very well oiled, matrixed organization of machine. And when you go start your own, you know, it's you and my three founders, so my other three partners.

Caroline (17:32.732)
I think that's one of the scariest part as an entrepreneur is actually not only figuring it out, but being humble that you can be the founder, but you also are answering customer service emails and you are the founder and the speaker and the CEO and you have this big hat, but you're also doing the entries in QuickBooks, reconciling the accounts. I mean, it's not glamorous stuff.

Angie Breedlove (17:46.721)
Oh yeah.

Angie Breedlove (17:59.137)
No, it's not. And you know, we talk about when you go to my webpage, I built that webpage. I am not a tech person. So the learnings was amazing too. You get to do things that are so different. And now that I've started a company, I started, well, we'll talk about women of warranty, but I was like, oh, I can do that again. And I could do it again. And again, it kind of broke that.

barrier in my own life.

what I could do and what I couldn't do.

Caroline (18:35.932)
Yeah, and I think you wear a badge of honor in the proud department because I just went through a similar thing with my feminine founder website and I can't stop talking to my husband about it. He is like ready for me. He's like, okay, enough about it. It took me weeks to learn and I'm not a techie either. I'm not a marketing person. I'm not a website guru. I'm a have a background of an executive search recruiter. And so it was a huge task for me to figure out how to do it.

Angie Breedlove (19:03.105)
Oh yeah, and Squarespace is like, oh, we got templates. It's so easy. Yeah, right. We'll take that template and start changing the entire thing. Basically, the template's giving me my font, my colors, and that's about it. But yeah, good for you. And my husband got to hear it a lot, too. And he was a techie, you know?

Caroline (19:31.516)
So let's talk about Women in Warranty. You have had the organization for a over a year now. It's a nonprofit and you've built it and scaled it really fast. What would you say contributed to that success?

Angie Breedlove (19:47.681)
Well first of all it's women of warranting because we are wow you know and you know it could have been ladies of warranty but we'd have been low or babes of warranty and it would have been bow or chicks of warranty and then cow.

And I've had to say about Chick -A -Wow all the time. So we went with women of warranty. Yeah, so it did it it started from something I was always wanting to do always passionate about there were never any women affinity groups or warranty and man some girlfriends of mine in the industry were sitting around talking and I'm like WTF and they were like

Angie and I said no no no where are the females where are the females and we laughed and said you know we should we should do this what what prevents us from doing it and I had started working you know with women or accelerator group and building that and I realized

That was probably the first time I realized, you know what, I'm the boss of me. I can make the decision of my time and my resources and what's important. And I have a 35 year old daughter and a 29 year old daughter. And I wanted them to always have...

voice at the table. So Women of Warranty started from there and it went with leaders already in the warranty industry that were women started there and then Caroline I didn't talk to one single male leader and I'm talking because of 36 years in here right I know

Angie Breedlove (21:44.673)
Every leader at Whirlpool and GE and Frigidaire and Assurion and Lowe's, you know, not one male said, I don't know, that doesn't sound like a good idea, not one. So our first, our kickoff meeting, we had 75 people there and 11 were males. So quickly got a board together of females that were...

high up leaders and very well respected leaders actually, women that kind of bucked the system for many years. And their network came and then the network of that network came and then we were quickly up to 1 ,543 subscribers.

Then we started moving to make it a nonprofit. We don't charge members and we're very blessed to have corporate sponsorship from all those companies I just mentioned that that don't have they didn't have women's programs either. So that's the kind of.

Caroline (22:57.02)
That's it.

Angie Breedlove (22:58.393)
administration side but the other side Caroline we have a significant issue in the trade today if if it doesn't get better you may as well buy a refrigerator and if it breaks just go get another one because we're going to not have people that can fix them and less than 10 % of women are

the trade. So turning a wrench and that was something we also took on. So we've got two goals, two missions growing the trade but then fostering more females in decision -making roles within their companies.

Caroline (23:44.892)
So how do you balance a nonprofit, a business that you're running and life? I mean, you have kids, you have a husband, how do you do it all?

Angie Breedlove (23:56.865)
I think you and I talked about this. I don't believe in work -life balance. I just don't. There's gonna be times you've got life balance because you said, you know, works a little slow right now. I'm gonna go, you know, whatever, take, go on vacation, take time to learn how to make pottery, you know, whatever it is.

And then there's times where, you know, my thoughts going to be with my team until six, seven, eight o 'clock at night, doing emails on the weekends and you get work balance. But if someone has figured out how to make this work life balance, you know, I'll be happy to take tips and learn from that. But that's never been.

my experience. I remember when I was at Maytag and like I said Sears was my account. I would get up at five o 'clock in the morning, make breakfast. My 13 year old would get up and I'd head out on the road by 6 30 and she'd get up at 6 30, feed her little sister, get to the school bus and it was a three hour drive for me to Sears. So I'd be there before 10 o 'clock, have meetings through take them to

lunch, leave at 2, be home by 6, and my oldest daughter got her little sister off the bus, and I had made supper the night before, and you put it out, right? And people were like, how did you do it? How did you do it? When you don't have options, the past is pretty clear. There's not a lot of, oh, should I do this or not? You just put your head down.

And keep it down by the way or somebody will shoot it.

Caroline (25:49.404)
I'm here for that. You gotta do what you gotta do. I mean, there's plenty of Saturdays that I've spent editing this podcast or doing marketing material. And the reality is, and the truth is, I really love it. So it doesn't even feel like work when you work on a passion project or something that you're really excited about. I mean, I'd rather be doing this on Saturday morning all day lounging around and watching Netflix.

Angie Breedlove (26:09.377)
in the house. Yeah, so you know think of those differences that's a great point. I will cut that to say when I said you don't have options you do it if you hate what you're doing you're just gonna hate your life. So at least figure out something that you like about it that you're passionate about.

and that does make it better. Maybe you're passionate about the team and like I said I love sports people. I played sports growing up and the whole team piece gets my juices going.

Caroline (26:48.124)
So as we wrap up, how can our listeners find you?

Angie Breedlove (26:51.391)
Yay, Troutman, North Carolina. No, I'm kidding. Check us out, womenofwarranty .com. And you can go see everything, our advisors, subscribe to our newsletter. There's articles. We're getting ready to add podcasts because you inspired me, Miss Caroline. Thank you. But also hit me up on LinkedIn. We've really started growing the LinkedIn presence.

and Miss Emily's my assistant. She's amazing. She just had a baby so you know 10 hours a week is perfect for her.

and she'll get back with you and talk and I love love meeting people and talking to them so if you reach out to me chances are I'm going to give you my email my cell phone and say you know let's let's touch base let's figure out what it is you want to do I'm not fancy I think you can see my dog right there that I had already tried to get out of the room but but yeah we none of us go through this journey alone.

and having us together. You know, you also inspired me with another thing about a business coach and I hadn't done that. So I put that down to say, how do I get a business coach? Where am I going to get that from?

Caroline (28:21.116)
Thanks Angie.

Angie Breedlove (28:22.465)
Thank you. Are we done?