From chemical engineer to Fortune 500 director of engineering to co-founder and CEO of the Stein Center — Deena Stein's career defies the playbook. In this episode of Inspire to Lead, host Talia Meshiach sits down with her close friend Deena to unpack a story of ambition, risk, and reinvention.

Deena opens up about starting her career at Procter & Gamble at 22, leading a team of union workers twice her age who tried to break her, and how she learned that real leadership comes from earning trust, not authority. She shares how she and her husband Avi built parallel careers — hers climbing the corporate ladder at Abbott/AbbVie to director of a 300+ person organization, his training as a specialist dentist — before making the leap to build the Stein Center together from the ground up, including a bold, ground-up construction of their own state-of-the-art dental facility.

This is a candid conversation about redefining success on your own terms — at work, in marriage, and in life.

Timestamps:

1:00 Welcome to Inspired to Lead

9:50 Their mission was to break me: starting out at Procter & Gamble

14:34 Learning leadership and earning people's trust

16:23 Moving to Columbus, Ohio for her husband's specialty

20:30 Starting at Abbott/AbbVie in pharmaceutical manufacturing

28:30 Husband decides to buy his own dental practice

32:18 Building their own facility from the ground up

39:05 On being risk-averse (and taking the biggest risk of her life)

45:44 Working with your spouse without working together all day

62:06 Leaving corporate in 2019 right before COVID hit

63:40 What would you tell your younger self?

66:35 What is your purpose?

68:17 Closing thoughts: the power of friendship

This episode was made possible by our friends at Roth&Co. , innovators in accounting and business advisory.

If you enjoyed this episode, please rate and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts, and watch the full conversation on YouTube.

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