Who is a woman who’s made an impact on your career? #IWD26

Madame C.J. Walker. Sarah Breedlove.

For nearly twenty years, one woman has quietly influenced the way I think about systems, entrepreneurship, and independence.

Madam C. J. Walker.

I first learned about her in cosmetology school in 2006. At the time we were studying the history of the beauty industry, and her name came up as one of the pioneers who transformed it.

But even then, what fascinated me about her story wasn’t just the products.

It was the system.

Walker was born Sarah Breedlove in 1867, the daughter of formerly enslaved parents. She grew up inside a social and economic structure that was not designed for women like her to succeed.

Instead of accepting that system, she studied others.

She studied hair and scalp health.
She studied marketing.
She studied sales.
She studied finance and distribution.

Then she combined those pieces and built something entirely new.

Today historians call it the Walker System.

Walker didn’t simply sell hair care products. She created an economic infrastructure that allowed thousands of women — especially Black women who were excluded from most business opportunities at the time — to become independent entrepreneurs.

She trained women as Walker Agents.

They learned how to care for hair and scalp health, how to sell products, how to manage money, and how to build businesses in their own communities.

They purchased Walker products and sold them directly to customers, creating one of the earliest nationwide distribution networks owned and operated by Black women in the United States.

But the most powerful part of what she built wasn’t the products.

It was the architecture.

Training systems.
Distribution networks.
Economic pathways designed from the ground up.

She built an operating system for independence.

Walker even organized national conventions of her sales agents. Women from across the country gathered to share strategy, support one another, and expand their businesses.

In many ways, these were some of the earliest large-scale gatherings of women entrepreneurs in America.

What she created was bigger than a company.

She created a structure that allowed other women to build themselves.

What Walker built also helped shape the early foundations of modern direct-sales entrepreneurship. Her network of trained sales agents was not a pyramid-style recruiting model. Women earned income primarily by selling products directly to customers in their communities.

But the structure she created — independent sellers, shared training, mentorship networks, and national conventions — influenced the development of later direct-sales companies and women-led business communities throughout the twentieth century.

In other words, Walker didn’t just build a company.

She created a blueprint.

More than a hundred years later, versions of that blueprint still appear whenever people organize networks of independent entrepreneurs, coaches, consultants, and creators who support one another while building their own businesses.

Recently I had a small reminder of that same idea.

I was sitting in my car on a rainy afternoon after dropping my son off with his father. We are in the middle of a difficult custody situation, and it was one of those moments where life feels heavy.

I was scrolling through TikTok, mostly listening to videos as they played.

A live stream came on from Danesha Mo’nek.

Danesha is a self-empowerment coach who rebuilt her life from a homeless shelter to a seven-figure business in just a few years. Her work focuses on mindset, identity, and helping people redesign the circumstances they thought were fixed.

Something about the message made me stop scrolling. And soon after, I joined her community.

The core idea was simple:

You do not have to accept the system you were handed.

You can build a different one.

That idea immediately reminded me of Walker.

More than a century separates them, but the pattern is familiar.

Women who refuse the script.
Women who build systems where none existed before.

My own career has followed a path that moves horizontally across systems rather than vertically inside a single discipline.

I’ve worked across enterprise technology, cybersecurity operations, communications, environmental infrastructure, and strategy.

The thread connecting all of those spaces is the same curiosity Walker embodied: understanding how systems behave and how they can be redesigned to work better.

Over the years I’ve found myself repeatedly building structures that allow other people to succeed.

Sometimes those systems are technical.

Sometimes they are operational.

Sometimes they are communities.

Today, through work like Spellbroken,life and Clear Path Water Consulting, I see the same pattern emerging again: networks of independent women building their own businesses, their own voices, and their own sovereignty.

Walker understood something more than a hundred years ago that still holds true today.

Systems are not fixed.

They can be redesigned.

And when someone builds a structure that empowers others to build their own lives, the impact moves far beyond one individual success story.

That is the real legacy of Madam C.J. Walker.

She didn’t just succeed.

She built the architecture that made success possible for others.