The Start Listening Podcast

Wendy Heinicken-Goby is the owner of Château Saint-Pierre
De Mejans. She shares her experience building organically and bringing to life the soul of a thousand year old building in Provence, France. Hospitality, Artists in Residences, and Wine.

Five years ago she found a listing for a thousand-year-old building ten minutes from her house and went to look at it out of curiosity, with no intention of buying anything. It needed a great deal of love. She and her husband stepped into the chapel, looked at each other, and started asking questions instead of leaving.

The winemaker who had farmed the land for thirty-five years agreed to stay on. His biggest customer turned out to be an importer in Houston, where she is a third-generation native. She read that as the universe speaking about as plainly as it speaks, and they bought the place in 2021.

It opened a year later as a bed and breakfast, a wedding and events venue, and a working vineyard, and she has run it by feel since. Anything she adds has to please her first, and then it has to suit the building — which she treats as having a soul that predates her by over 1,000 years. New ideas are treated as experiments, and a decision afterward about whether it felt right. Nothing gets six editions planned in advance.

This conversation is that method in detail: what it has produced, what it cost her to learn, and the structure underneath that makes the looseness survivable.

Three things to take from it:

• Organic growth rests on structural discipline. The vineyard is an SCEA and the lodging and events business is an SAS, each with its own accounts and software, because French law treats farming and hospitality as different animals. Her first year, she bottled the entire harvest before knowing what she could sell. Every year since, the sales figures come first.
• She kept what already worked to cover what she didn't know. The winemaker is the son of the family who sold them the estate and has farmed that land for thirty-five years, including the vines he planted himself. His staying was a precondition of the sale. Her own training came after, and so did the industry friendships she can now call when something goes wrong — the thing she names as what she most wishes she'd had at the start.
• The history is the filter every decision runs through. Sound baths happen in the Romanesque chapel because they suit it. Concerts are chosen for what the music should be inside that building. Brunches are a local chef, local produce, outdoors under the trees — and the vegetable garden, the beehives, the olive oil and the lavender all come off the same land the monks farmed. What she wants next follows the same line: children learning outdoors how wine and honey and olive oil are actually made, and a medieval dinner in the chapel, built on records she has been gathering from historians and the National Archives.

If this is the conversation you've been needing to have, start here. thinkvoen.com

Where to find the Château:

Château Saint-Pierre de Mejans — saintpierredemejans.com/en

Where Wendy learned the trade:

Université du Vin — universite-du-vin.com

Les Éléonores de Provence — leseleonoresdeprovence.com

The community she's part of:

Creative Connections Luberon — instillimpact.co/community (Jossie Auerbach's bilingual gathering of women entrepreneurs and creatives, which has held events at the Château)

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This episode was produced by Cat Fincun and VOEN Consulting.

Andrew Hannon runs a whole-animal butchery, an Italian grocery, a pasta shop, a sandwich counter, a charcuterie program, and now a rotating wall of local artists' work — out of 675 square feet in the corner of Raleigh's Transfer Co. Food Hall, with no hood system, three induction burners, a toaster oven, and an electric pizza oven that turns out roughly 600 loaves of ciabatta a week. He opened five months before the world shut down. He got one month of relief on the note and paid it in full every month after that for seven years. This September it is finished.

That is what makes this conversation possible, and he says so directly: the money that went to the bank now goes back to the partners, and for the first time he has room to think about what comes next. The thinking is mostly about what to leave behind. He knows which parts of the business make money and which parts he keeps because he loves them, and those are not the same list. He also has good staff, a chef he trusts, and the strange new problem of standing in his own shop with nothing to do.

Three things to take from it:

• Expansion by subtraction.
• He chose the debt structure on purpose.
• The owner is in the way.

If this is the conversation you've been needing to have, start here. thinkvoen.com

Where to find Alimentari:

Alimentari at Left Bank — Transfer Co. Food Hall, 500 E Davie St, Suite 136, Raleigh, NC / alimentariatleftbank.com / @alimentari_at_left_bank

The partners behind it:

Left Bank Butchery — leftbankbutchery.com (Saxapahaw, NC; Ross's whole-animal butcher shop, sourcing hogs and cattle from two farms within seven minutes of the door)

Mothers & Sons Trattoria — Durham, NC (Josh DeCarolis, the chef partner on the Italian side)

Transfer Co. Food Hall — transfercofoodhall.com (the converted bus depot in downtown Raleigh where Alimentari sits)

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This episode was produced by Cat Fincun and VOEN Consulting.

Elisha Baskin opened an English-language bookstore with a café inside it in Lourmarin, a Luberon village of roughly a thousand people where Albert Camus is buried and where a 1980s memoir turned the place into a destination for foreigners. She was clear from the start that it had to be that village. Four kilometers down the road in either direction would not have worked.

Two months in, the shop is running, and the reason is legible in almost every decision she has made. She knows who walks through the door — the Anglophone families, the French neighbors, the Friday market crowd, the teenagers who found a title on BookTok — and she built the stock, the hours, the programming, and even the marketing around what she has observed about them. This conversation is a working example of what market fluency looks like at village scale, from someone doing it in her second language, in her fourth country, in a trade she trained for one month to enter.

Three things to take from it:

• The plan is the fixed object. The tactics are not.
• Programming only happens where the enthusiasm is real.
• The network came before the business.
  
  If this is the conversation you've been needing to have, start here. thinkvoen.com

  Where to find the latest on L'Étranger:

  Librairie L'Étranger — 14 Bd du Rayol, 84160 Lourmarin / @librairie_letranger

  instagram.com/librairie_letranger

  
  Elisha trained for a month before she opened. If you are considering the same, these are the schools that teach it. (Start Listening has no affiliation with these schools, we recommend your own research.)

  
  In France:

  Book Conseil — book-conseil.fr

  L'École de la Librairie — lecoledelalibrairie.fr

  
  In the United States:

  The Bookstore Training Group of Paz & Associates — openingabookstore.com

  Professional Booksellers School — professionalbooksellers.com
  

  The community Elisha credits:

  Creative Connections Luberon — instillimpact.co/community

  Jossie Auerbach founded and facilitates that community. Her consulting practice is a separate business:

  Instill — instillimpact.co

  Jossie Auerbach — @jswauer / linkedin.com/in/jossieauerbach

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  This episode was produced by Cat Fincun and VOEN Consulting.

Alicia Nagel asked if she could interview me on my own show. It took us the better part of a year to actually schedule it, and then she turned up with better questions than I ask my own guests.

Alicia is a brand-first marketing consultant who has worked with over 150 brands, and she spends her days on the part of this that I don't — uncovering what a brand actually is and then translating that into work that lands. We met in a networking group, ended up in a second one together, and discovered we both grew up in Cleveland. She now knows more about my week than most people do.

We got into the brands I tend to work with: the ones in orbit. Circling steadily, doing everything the playbook says, watching the same numbers come back quarter after quarter and unable to say why the thing that used to feel special stopped feeling that way. I told her about a team that spent an entire year without shipping anything, and what changed when we went one layer beneath management and found out why. They shipped 33 releases the following year.

Alicia asked what I gauge decisions against, which is how VOEN got explained properly on the record for the first time — venture, oscillate, emerge, nexus, and what each one asks. She also asked what I do with clients that is genuinely hard, and I told a story about pricing that I have written more about on Substack, because ninety seconds did not do it.

Somewhere in there we covered why I have no blueprint, whether processes are sexy, a basil plant as a metaphor for sunk cost, and which AI you should not invite to the party.

If something here landed, I'd like to hear about it. [email protected].

Find Alicia: alicianagel.com

The pricing story, with the part I left out, is on Substack.
https://substack.com/@thestartlisteningpodcast

This episode was produced by Cat Fincun and VOEN Consulting.

This episode is a week late. I was sick, twelve hours into a different time zone, and I spent that week hating myself over a deadline nobody set but me.

Then I had two conversations with founders. One opened with "sorry about my voice, I'm fighting a cold" and waved off my offer to reschedule — we don't get days off, do we. The other couldn't take his wife's advice to enjoy an afternoon in the city between meetings. Both of them left corporate specifically to control their own time. Both are running someone else's schedule and calling it discipline.

The rhetoric that keeps us beholden to the system — I should, I have to, it's just how it's done, high performers, hustle season — it costs once it compounds.

There are numbers. Disengagement runs $4,257 per salaried employee annually, and 89% of that comes from the people who show up. Gallup has employee belief that their employer cares about them at a record low, while wellness budgets keep growing.

There's also the other side of the ledger. Bain has tracked insurgent brands for a decade. In 2025, 113 of them held under 2% of consumer goods market share and captured 36% of all market growth. The overall market grew under 2%. They grew 55%.

Three moves at the end for anyone who wants to start hearing it in their own business.

And a question I'd like you to answer:

Do you have something going on in your business that looks right on paper but something about it just isn't sitting right? If you could take it down the insurgent path — how would you?

Let me know at [email protected] with your system vs insurgent story. I respond to everyone who reaches out. I’m looking forward to hearing from you.

Go check out the Start Listening Substack to see the story of one company who hit a crossroads and the results after three years of the divergent paths of the system protocols vs. insurgent behavior. You might be surprised to see what happens.

https://substack.com/@thestartlisteningpodcast

This episode was produced by Cat Fincun and VOEN Consulting

In the right restaurant, every plate arrives with its provenance — the farm, the fisherman, the name of the cheese. Fashion tells you none of that. Most brands can't tell you where their own fabric comes from.

Co-Founder Natalia Mazzaia can name every hand hers passes through, because she called each one. Fibers spun from seaweed, soy, and milk. A supply chain traced backward one phone call at a time. A brand built slow, on purpose, against everything the fashion calendar rewards.

This is a conversation about knowing your ingredients — and what it costs to build a company that can answer the question.

If this is the conversation you've been needing to have, start here. thinkvoen.com

Where to find the latest on TerraTela happenings:
TerraTela — terratela.com / insta: @shopterratela

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This episode was produced by Cat Fincun and VOEN Consulting.

In this conversation, Cat explores the systemic hierarchical structures that have shaped our economy and society over thousands of years. The discussion delves into the concentration of wealth, the myths surrounding funding and business structures, and the evolving landscape of marketing in the modern economy. Cat emphasizes the importance of founders making deliberate choices to preserve their values and independence in a world increasingly dominated by consolidation.

Takeaways
The systemic structures date back to the beginning of civilization.
Wealth concentration leads to a disappearance of meaning in products.
Independent businesses are absorbed into consolidated structures.
Cultural and financial measurements reveal the impact of consolidation.
The tipping point concept explains sudden shifts in systems.
Small changes accumulate until a critical threshold is reached.
Funding models often dictate the outcomes for founders.
Alternative business structures can preserve founder values.
Marketing strategies have evolved with the rise of the influencer economy.
Founders must consciously choose paths that align with their values.

Chapters

00:00 Introduction to Systemic Structures

04:17 Understanding Wealth Concentration

10:26 The Tipping Point of Change

18:42 Myths of Funding and Business Structure

39:17 Marketing in the Modern Economy

54:51 The Path Forward for Founders

Keywords
systemic structures, wealth concentration, funding myths, business structure, marketing strategies, founder economy, consolidation, social change, economic systems, cultural impact

Part Four is coming. 

If this is the conversation you've been needing to have, start here. thinkvoen.com

SUBSCRIBE TO OUR SUBSTACK MAILING LIST:

https://substack.com/@thestartlisteningpodcast

This episode was produced by Cat Fincun and VOEN Consulting.

Most companies treat accessibility like a compliance checkbox. A ramp here, an updated HR policy there. Disability Lead has spent years watching what happens when companies think they're done — and what they're missing is almost always the same thing: they never thought about who gets to lead.

Emily Blum and Clare Killy are the CEO and Director of Programs at Disability Lead, a Chicago-based nonprofit that develops and connects leaders with disabilities to civic and professional opportunities. The stat that stops the conversation: only 3% of C-suite leaders identify as having a disability. Not because the talent isn't there — because the pipeline was never designed to move them through. Disabled people are, by necessity, some of the most sophisticated problem solvers in any organization. They've spent their entire lives creating access and solutions in a world that wasn't built for them. That skill doesn't disappear when they walk into your company. It gets underused, or it walks out the door.

This conversation gets into what a genuinely welcoming organization actually looks like before a candidate ever applies, why the "we're pretty inclusive, I think we're good" response usually signals the opposite, and what it costs a company — in retention, in problem solving, in culture — to keep building leadership pipelines from the same pool.

If this is the conversation you've been needing to have, start here. thinkvoen.com

More from Disability Lead
disabilitylead.org

→ Virtual public events each take place a few times a year

Disability Power Series: featuring disabled thought leaders from across the country

Our Stories: a curated storytelling hour featuring stories of lived experience from our Members -- free, virtual, and anyone can register 

SUBSCRIBE TO OUR SUBSTACK MAILING LIST:

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This episode was produced by Cat Fincun and VOEN Consulting. It was edited by Angelina Gurrola.

This is Part Two of How the Hell Did We Get Here? And Can We Do Anything About It?

Most people who defend systems that are hurting them aren't stupid. They aren't weak. They aren't uniquely susceptible to propaganda. They're human — and the human brain was wired, across hundreds of thousands of years of evolution, to accept existing power structures because challenging them was genuinely dangerous. It still is.

This episode gets into the science. Social dominance orientation — the psychological tendency to accept hierarchy — has a measurable, heritable component. The average American scores a 2.98 out of 7. Most people aren't enthusiastic enforcers of the system. They're defaulters to it. And the conditions that shift that score aren't individual willpower. They're narrative. The stories absorbed about what work is, what success looks like, what you're worth.

The question isn't how to break through the psychological immune system that defends existing beliefs. It's how to create conditions where people feel safe enough to lower it.

Part Three is coming. 

If this is the conversation you've been needing to have, start here. thinkvoen.com

SUBSCRIBE TO OUR SUBSTACK MAILING LIST:

https://substack.com/@thestartlisteningpodcast

This episode was produced by Cat Fincun and VOEN Consulting. It was edited by Angelina Gurrola.

Everybody has a version of the path they were supposed to take. The degree, the company, the title, the ladder. Most people follow it long enough to realize it was never actually theirs — and then stay anyway.

This episode is Cat's account of what happens when you stop. Not the inspirational version of that story — the actual one. Three months of swinging between hyper-focus and couch rot. A network that needed rebuilding from scratch. The specific moment of realizing that saying yes to everything that came her way was just a more self-directed version of the same problem she'd left. Going slow when every instinct said move. Building a North Star big enough to navigate from when the day-to-day got loud.

The difference between a should and a what if isn't always obvious in the moment. Knowing which one is driving a decision is the skill nobody teaches you — and the one that determines whether what you're building is actually yours.

If this is the conversation you've been needing to have, start here.
thinkvoen.com

Bonus materials for this and other episodes on Substack.
substack.com/@thestartlisteningpodcast

TOPIC AND GUEST SUGGESTIONS:

startlisteningpodcast.com/#suggest-a-guest

This episode was produced by Cat Fincun and VOEN Consulting. It was edited by Angelina Gurrola.