What does it take to walk away from a successful corporate career and build a multi-million dollar movement in seven months with no map?

In this episode of Women I Want You to Know by Andrea L. Johnston™ Podcast, Andrea sits down with Mary Corcoran, Co-Founder and Executive Director of the Save America Movement, the cross-partisan organization she launched with Steve Schmidt to slow the rise of authoritarianism and renew American democracy. Mary calls herself a recovering corporate executive. She spent a career in communications and marketing, the kind most people spend decades building, and then left it behind after watching a gap open up that no one was filling. What she traded was comfort. What she gained was a first-time founder’s education, learned in real time and at full speed.

Mary and Andrea unpack the strategy underneath the movement, and it maps directly onto building any business. Mary breaks an overwhelming mission into its parts and reaches her audience through three things: the message, the medium and the messenger. She makes the case that trusted local voices outperform polished national campaigns every time, that a nurse, a member of the clergy or a veteran in someone’s own community will move people in a way that linear television never will. For any founder deciding where to put limited dollars, the lesson is to build around who your audience already believes, not around your budget.

This conversation goes well beyond politics. Mary talks about leaning on a career and a life’s worth of network to build something high stakes and high risk, why she had to shed the fear of being publicly wrong, and how she keeps an organization agile without letting it tip into chaos. She is candid about the all-encompassing reality of founder life and the discipline it takes for a woman to carve out time for her family inside it. Her closing ask is one any time-poor founder can act on: if you have five minutes and a phone, you have enough.

This episode is for the woman who is building something no one has built before,who is tired of sitting on the sidelines and is ready to act on a big mission without a roadmap.