Briana Franklin—How Can We Address The Student Debt Crisis And Financial Literacy Gap?

On the Brink with Andi Simon

Learn how to escape or even avoid crushing student debt

I am beyond thrilled to bring to you a remarkable young women, Bri Franklin, who co-founded the non-profit The Prosp(a)rity Project to help others avoid the massive amount of debt she incurred by attending an expensive college and being ignorant of the student loan consequences. She could have let the financial burden she experienced after graduation defeat her, but she decided to defeat it. Over many years she has worked tirelessly to pay off almost all of her debt. Now her mission is to help others in the same boat. Listen in, be inspired, and please share far and wide.

Watch and listen to our conversation here

Key takeaways from our conversation:

• Young people: think very carefully about who you want your future self to be, and make sure that the you of 10 or 20 years from now thanks you and is appreciative for the actions that you take today.
• Taking out loans have the potential to either upgrade your life or set you far behind the eight ball.
• Bri: If I could do it all over again, I absolutely would have heeded the advice of being very careful before just blindly signing any paperwork.
• College used to close the gap between socioeconomic groups, but now unfortunately, because of some bad acting, it has become the opposite and is now growing the wealth gap between socioeconomic classes and race communities.
• Predatory lending is subprime lending, taking advantage of a customer for the sake of financial gain. It’s basically taking advantage of customer and consumer ignorance, which tends to adversely impact people in black and brown communities.
• Bri’s hope is to educate young people and their parents through the educational system long before they make college loan decisions.

Want to connect with Bri? You can find her on LinkedIn, Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and her website The Prosp(a)rity Project.

More stories of courageous entrepreneurs making a real difference in people’s lives:

• Hamilton Perkins—An Inspiring Entrepreneurial Success Story
• Theresa Carrington—Transforming Impoverished Artisans Into Entrepreneurs
• Lynette Guastaferro—Transforming How Teachers Teach In Over 700 Urban Schools
• Ivy Gordon—Providing A Powerful Voice To The Sexually Abused

Additional resources for you

• My two award-winning books: Rethink: Smashing The Myths of Women in Business and On the Brink: A Fresh Lens to Take Your Business to New Heights
• Our new book, Women Mean Business: Over 500 Insights from Extraordinary Leaders to Spark Your Success, co-authored by Edie Fraser, Robyn Freedman Spizman and Andi Simon, PhD
• Our website: Simon Associates Management Consultants

Read the transcript of our podcast here

Andi Simon: Welcome to On the Brink With Andi Simon. Hi I’m Andi Simon. Remember, my job is to get you off the brink. And the way I like to do that is to help you listen to people, or see them if you’re watching the video, who can help you really understand the challenges in front of us in these fast changing times, and how you can see, feel and think about them with a fresh perspective. I like that fresh lens because unless you see somebody who’s addressing a problem, you really don’t understand the words, even if you read about it or maybe watched a video. There’s something very personal about some of the challenges that we’re facing that you might be as well. And so how do you address them?

So I met Bri Franklin, and Bri came to one of our book launch events for Women Mean Business: Over 500 Insights from Extraordinary Leaders to Spark Your Success. And I must tell you that the book tour has been extraordinary as well. I’m enjoying the people we meet there. So she and I spoke afterwards. Let me give you a bit of a biography of her bio, and then she’ll tell you much more about her own journey. And I think it’s an important one that you understand.

Bri Franklin is a businesswoman, philanthropist and student debt expert and thought leader with a passion for the socioeconomic and holistic empowerment of Black girls and women. And I think you’re going to think about this for all girls and women, but particularly women of color who are dealing with things in a particular fashion. Having taken on a financial burden that eventually ballooned to nearly $120,000 in student debt through her undergraduate studies at Dartmouth College, Bri developed an acute appreciation for the challenges many student debt holders experience, including their diminished ability to establish financial independence, take advantage of personal freedoms, or launch a business venture.

There was an article I was reading today about how the student debt for the generation who’s coming into the markets today is limiting their ability to buy a car. Today, a car is so expensive, it’s often as expensive as buying someplace to live. And 52% of the young people are living at home, not necessarily because they want to, because it’s impossible to find a place they can afford even if they share it. So our economy and our society is very challenging for young people because of the student debt and the inability to get past it.

In recognizing the extent to which other Black women in particular experience adversity at the hands of the $2 trillion student debt crisis and the lack of financial literacy, particularly not knowing what it means, not knowing what to do about it, Bri formed The Prosp(a)rity Project as a solution for eradicating the systemic barriers. Her work has been profiled in outlets such as Forbes, BuzzFeed, Authority Magazine, and Thrive Global, and she’s attracted support from audiences worldwide, generating nearly $400,000 in revenue.

But I think this is a more complicated and serious opportunity for you to understand what’s happening, how it’s impacting lots and lots and lots of young people, particularly Black women, and what we need to do to teach them how to be literate, but also how to use it wisely. Even businesswomen tell me that they don’t understand the finances and they don’t go after capital. So this is a big long term opportunity for us to educate them. Thank you for joining me today.

Bri Franklin: Oh my gosh. Well, your intro was incredibly flattering. Thank you so much for making space and the opportunity for me to be a guest today.

Andi Simon: You are a beautiful and brilliant woman. I’d like you to share with the audiences your own journey because as you shared it with me, I went, oh my gosh, we have to have you on our podcast so people can appreciate that, that nothing is a straight line from here to there. And your journey is not unique. There are many others just like you, but yours is the one we’re going to focus on. Who is Bri Franklin and what has been your journey so far? You’re a young person, but it’s been a complicated one.

Bri Franklin: It certainly has. I like to say that I had a very atypical post-graduation trajectory, and it was very much a jungle gym and not a straight line or ladder. So I came out of Dartmouth. I was the first in my family not to go to college but to go Ivy League. So I grew up in the Deep South, from Atlanta, Georgia, and always performed at the top of my class, student honor roll, principal’s list. You get the idea. And everyone just always told me, you’ve got to go to the Ivy League. You know, that’s where it’s at for you and that’s where you’re going to thrive and excel.

And so I really internalized that and thought, this is the only way to really honor my academic inclinations to the best of my ability. I started with one of the schools in my top choices and I ended up getting accepted, and it was between Dartmouth and Emory University. So, again, as an Atlanta native, it was a very close call because Emory was offering quite a bit of financial aid to the tune of all but $5,000 in grants, and that would have applied across all four years. So if I had chosen there, I would have walked away with no more than $20,000 in debt. That’s if I hadn’t done work-study or anything to offset my obligation versus the $100,000 that I came out of Dartmouth with.

And the deciding factor was, I was looking at the opportunity of going to an Ivy League and being in those circles, and the 18-year-old version of myself was also very much motivated by getting away from my parents and being able to break camp and go do my own thing. Not the best decision or reason for accruing so much debt, but that is how my story goes. So I came out of Dartmouth in 2017, as I mentioned, with $100,000 in debt principal, and then it quietly ballooned to about $116,000 within two years because of both interest and ignorance, on my part, and because of that ignorance, I also aimlessly wandered into other kinds of debt, and that included credit cards, and a car that was way outside my budget.

It impacted every level of my life, socioeconomically and mental health, and put me behind the eight ball in terms of achieving the typical milestones that young twenty-somethings often have made in the past, with little to no friction. So, and having dealt with that personally, I just became incredibly empathetic to others in that situation because it showed me that this was not the result of anything that I had done as far as breaking rules. In fact, I was trying to follow the rules, but unfortunately it worked against me because of what I now discovered is called predatory and subprime lending. So that’s exactly what my work focuses on resolving at a systemic level.

Andi Simon: When you went off, I’m curious, we all have kids and grandkids who are looking at college. And were you knowledgeable about student loans when you made the decision to go to Dartmouth without the grants as opposed to Emory with the grants? And was the reputation that much more powerful, did the colleges help you at all?

Bri Franklin: I get asked this a lot because people really were stuck trying to figure out why would I take the route that I did when Emory was literally making it so much more financially feasible? And that was because at 18, I call it the Know-It-All factor. A lot of teenagers are guilty. I think that’s almost the rule of thumb is that being adolescent and teenage, you just get in your own way sometimes and you think you know everything and that you’ve got all the answers. And that was really how I functioned, because no one had explicitly taught me what all was at stake.

You know, people just said things that were very nebulous, like, that’s a lot of debt. But I also would hear things like, oh, but you’re going to Dartmouth and you’re going to get hired immediately, and you’ll be able to write your own ticket. That was everyone’s favorite phrase: guidance counselors, teachers, relatives. A lot of people were just so convinced that by virtue of attending a school of that pedigree, that was automatically going to translate into an optimized advantage in the job market and increase my earning potential.

And so I just absorbed those promises and I didn’t really think to probe beneath the surface and take a step back and consider. Based on having majored in English literature, not having done a traditional internship, I didn’t know the first thing about networking. I didn’t know how to play those Ivy League cards. So I really came out almost with no measured advantage right away.

And, you know, for all intents and purposes, I think in those initial years, I could have been off to a stronger start coming out of Emory, but it was definitely a delayed gratification thing. And at these stages of my career, in my life, the Dartmouth Circle has come back full circle, and it’s now paid off in dividends in terms of the opportunities and the rooms that it puts me in. But I had to actively work for that, it was very much something I had to go out of my way to make up for lost time on, and it cost me quite a bit in the interim.

Andi Simon: What’s so interesting is that you’re a smart woman, and yet understanding the culture that you’re going into, there was no way to imagine it. You were imparting upon it your own sense of how it was going to benefit you. Even being an English major without having an internship, you were having a great time being you, and it wasn’t necessarily a good set up for the future, even if you didn’t have the debt. You’re missing something.

We talk in business about mentors or sponsors. Well, here’s an 18 year old who needed somebody who could guide you through your labyrinth and the jigsaw that you were going to be going through so you came out wiser, not poorer. So it’s interesting, as the listener is listening or viewing, how did you get yourself past the $116,000 in debt? Were you able to figure out a way out of it? Because I have a hunch that’s part of Prosp(a)rity Project‘s foundation.

Bri Franklin: So the short answer is, I’m still working through it. Unfortunately, I have not completely cleared it. However, I have made progress. I paid off about $40,000 of those various debts. So the total number, including the car, the credit cards, at the time was about $123,609. And I say, zero common sense. So I was able to shave off about $40,000, and I rolled up my sleeves and I threw pride completely out of the window.

And in 2019, I say that was my aha! I had a moment. I’d gotten so far behind on my loans, which for my private lenders alone were about $750 a month, irrespective of income. So because I came out and I was working temp jobs and contracts, I mean, I was making $15 an hour on a good day. And so I say my income was inconsistent at best, nonexistent at worst.

And the fact that my debt was constant regardless of what I was earning, that was, of course, very challenging to overcome. And just even at a practical level, having conversations with the lenders on the phone, the representatives, trying to appeal to them, get them to cut me a break, get them to give me some extra flexibility, it didn’t always go over well.

And so it all blew up in the summer of 2019, where my credit had taken a hit by about 150 points overnight because I fell more than two months late on my loans. And that also spilled over to my co-signers, my dad and step mom at the time; both of them had signed on to those initial private loans, and that had consequences for their credit. And it put us at odds interpersonally. And those relationships were always very valuable to me growing up over the years.

So it was just a cobweb of dysfunctionality and heartache, really. And so that was helpful, though, because it was able to just reroute me and caused me to take stock of my situation and just decide, as I said at the event, it may have started with these external factors. “This situation is terrible and I am irritated by it.” But even though it didn’t start with me, it ends with me. And so that’s why I rolled up my sleeves. I got two part-time jobs. I worked retail, which as an Ivy League graduate, takes a lot of humility to suck up the courage in your hometown, of all places, where you’re running into classmates and teachers and all kinds of people who are like, wow, that’s where Dartmouth landed you.

It was very much a pride component to it. But I was so motivated to get out of debt, I really didn’t care. I was like, if people are going to judge me for this, that’s their problem. I’m getting money by ethical means, and it’s building character, which it really did. So that was the foundation. I did what Dave Ramsey calls the debt snowball, and I started with the smallest balance listed out regardless of interest. And then I began chipping away. And because it does work as a psychological boost, when you can see the numbers go away, you feel like I can do this.

And it doesn’t feel like I’m draining the ocean with a teaspoon. This money does count for something. It is making a difference. It sets you up for progressive wins. And so I continued to keep those jobs through the end of that year, and I kept Orangetheory when I moved to the Bay area in 2020. I stayed and I enjoyed the increased pay difference because of the California minimum wage being twice of Georgia’s. But I was able to stay with family friends and not have to pay rent.

So I got all the upside and none of the financial downside, and I just aggressively knocked those loans down. And then once Covid hit, then it was starting from scratch all over again. And then once I started up The Prosp(a)rity Project, that summer was when I finally felt like my purpose was walking into place and I could see myself continuing down this route. And if all went well, being able to eventually climb out of debt along with the people that we helped.

Andi Simon: You know, I’m a visual person, and your story almost looks like a movie. Hopefully one day it’s real on the one hand, but I’m listening to you share with us the agony, the catalytic moment, the moment at which you realize that I can’t keep going like this. The impact you had on your family. None of this should be missed by the listener or the viewer because this is a very smart woman who found herself in a difficult situation that she’s working out of.

It’s not like she won the lottery but it is without a whole lot of help. It’s not as if everybody’s walking around on those, either the credit card or the car, but it is. And she’s also a representative of the generation that is finding themselves very much like herself in difficulty. You know, I’m a smart person. How did this happen? And once you got past that, how this happened, did it? Then how do I do something about it? Well, I can work hard. But now you’ve got Prosp(a)rity Project. Are you working on anything else? Or is this your business that you’re going to turn into a solution?

Bri Franklin: Yes! So Prosp(a)rity Project, this was my 24/7 life commitment for the last three and a half years. So we started up in the summer of 2020, and that took us all the way through this past December. And so we’re now at an exciting point of pivot where we’re using the last three and a half years of expertise, leadership, partnerships, just all of the gains and the wins that we’ve been able to accomplish collectively and through our work and turning that into an even more forward thinking solution.

So for context, Prosp(a)rity Project‘ is a 501 C3 nonprofit. The mission is leveling the socioeconomic playing field for communities most susceptible to and impacted by predatory lending. And in our first iteration of work, that was exclusively serving debt constrained, college educated Black women. We launched what’s called the 35*2 Free initiative, which draws its name from those two guiding statistics: $35 billion of student loan debt, as well as a 35% rate of financial literacy that Black women in the US hold collectively.

And so through that program, it’s a multi-pronged approach of not just helping that group pay down student loan debt, which we did up to $10,000 per person, but also training them on finance through what we call FinTech. So it’s six months of personalized financial guidance to give them a better roadmap for how to manage and steward their money and eventually build wealth, coupled with eight weeks of career development training, where they can put that into practice and then use that to go out for higher paying jobs and pivot into more lucrative industries, etc.

And so in doing those pilot runs, we did one virtual in 2022 with 12 women, we did a hybrid in the DC, Maryland, Virginia area last year with eight program members. We now have almost two dozen basically MVP’s, that we’ve been able to coach and get to know personally and turn that into the basis for an app that does the same thing, but to another degree by helping prevent it altogether with teenagers.

So we’re calling it Cadet Prosperity. And this is taking that IP and all of the user experiences and live journeys of these women, turning it into gamified avatars that can then coach and pay that information forward to middle and high schoolers who are sitting ducks, basically, for more predatory lending and usury. So it’s very exciting to bring it full circle and be able to help at critical scale.

Andi Simon: Let me see if I can take what you said and play it back so that I fully understand it. First of all, what’s predatory lending? You know, let’s clarify the words.

Bri Franklin: So predatory lending, as I’ve been explaining it in conversations and defining it through our work portfolio, is basically subprime lending or taking advantage of a customer for the sake of financial gain. So a lot of times that looks like very cryptic and underhanded paperwork or not being completely forthright in the terms, not going to great lengths to really make sure that the user understands what it is they’re signing up for.

So it’s basically taking advantage of customer and consumer ignorance. And that typically tends to adversely impact people in black and brown communities, whose parents or grandparents also were susceptible and didn’t know how to train them and break that cycle themselves. So it’s basically exploitation in the lending industry.

Andi Simon: Um, okay. Good. So understanding that, the other side of it is the ignorance of people to what that means and how to do it. And what you have had is now a dozen approximately folks who have gone through your program, which does two things, one of which is, begins to develop their career skills and the other helps them work off their debt, which if you combine the two, should get them a pathway to, I’ll say, prosperity at least, so that they can see the end of the tunnel and celebrate where they’re actually going to arrive. And if you don’t know where you’re going, it’s difficult to get there. And now we’ve turned the nonprofit into a for-profit application for gamification, for younger borrowers. Is that what I hear?

Bri Franklin: You summed it up beautifully.

Andi Simon: Well, I heard what you said, but I also know sometimes, as the listener is paying attention to it, they don’t quite necessarily put all the parts together. And I know that you’ve gotten on the one hand a training and development program nonprofit is that going to stay around, or are you going to move everything into a for-profit mode?

Bri Franklin: In all transparency, that’s a decision that we’re going to be huddling on in a couple of weeks just to weigh the pros and cons either way. I want it to be completely certain, whichever direction we move it in, so that it wasn’t a start-stop, because there’s still a lot of merit to keeping the nonprofit intact. But at the same time, in just taking stock of the current fundraising climate, I think, user listeners and audience members who are also in the philanthropic space, we can all collectively agree that 2023 was not a great year. And especially in our case, being a social justice-founded organization that was unapologetically Black, serving for so long, it was a moment in time and certainly not a forever movement.

And so we’ve seen a lot of appetites go back to pre-George Floyd pre-COVID business as usual. There’s a diminished sense of urgency around closing the gap for the black and brown community. So, my inclination is that we will at least just focus our efforts on the for-profit, even if we don’t legally retire the nonprofit, just perhaps having it on freeze for the time being until we can reintroduce these initiatives, perhaps through a foundation at some point down the line, once the for-profit is revenue-generating and off the ground.

Andi Simon: This is very important to hear, because your business challenge isn’t like other business challenges. The not-for-profit side needs funding through different sources than a for-profit side does. Right. And the application is now up and ready to go. And in schools themselves, if I remember you were telling me, not yet.

Bri Franklin: The FinTech app, we are in the very early stages, looking to raise pre-seed funding and just building out our initial team. And we do have a target go to market by next January when we would be ready to roll it out, ideally as a first version into schools. But, we definitely got our work cut out for us before then.

Andi Simon: I think you’ve opened up a very different opportunity where individuals, schools, training centers…my head’s already thinking about folks who I need to introduce you to, who you get into the high school training milieu and are really concerned about developing those young folks with the right skills and tools to do it. It’s very interesting and just curious, strategically, are you thinking of this being something bought by schools or by individuals or by parents? I mean, who’s the market?

Bri Franklin: So my co-founder and I, we just ironed this out over the last 48 hours. So we’re looking at B2B to see, the sell would potentially be to perhaps like a large banking institution, perhaps a tech developer itself like Apple and have it pre-installed on devices that are going to schools from the distribution standpoint and honoring the fact that a lot of school budgets tend to be very shoestring and don’t have a ton of money set aside for major app rollouts. It’s subsidized largely from school partnerships. We’re thinking that it would be one of those two routes as we see it right now.

Andi Simon: That’s exciting, because if you get the endorsement of a distribution channel like an Apple or something, or even the banks who could really see this as part of their community development initiatives, you get legitimacy and co-branding on it. And that takes it from a startup to something that could have great legs and go further. When you have tested it, have you tested it? I mean, I’m sort of trying to remember what we talked about, but have you tested it among youngsters and do they find it a wonderful game?

Bri Franklin: So the game itself is still being developed behind the scenes. However, we have been in touch with their would-be gamers’ parents, so we do have some focus groups that we’ve built out with mothers, fathers, of middle and high schoolers. And again, going back to drawing from my own experience, that know it all factor, we’re trying to get the best of both worlds, where we are that conduit for mom and dad, because we realize that a lot of this information is as simple as table talk, dinner table conversation. But there’s the lalala, I can’t hear you because you raised me sort of thing going on.

And so we’re trying to solve for that, but also not have it backfire to where it interferes with screentime parameters and household rules, parents keeping kids off of devices past certain hours or things like that. Certainly not letting it slide into an addictive user experience or anything. So we are trying to have those conversations now. So that informs the build out and saves us having to go back and rewrite or take out things once we’ve already done the heavy lifting.

Andi Simon: It’s so interesting because everything has its challenges. We have a society where the youngsters are quite not savvy on how to use applications like these. Can we use them to really educate them so that they can be wiser and make better decisions as they’re approaching their adulthood? At the same time, that it could interfere with their focus on other studies and other pieces.

Bri, this is so profound because the problem isn’t a little one. It’s a big one. I’m glad you’re sharing it with us because I’m not sure how I would learn more about it. It’s sort of like, where does this fit into the whole context of what’s going on out there? You can hear about, a president wanting to eliminate student debt and then people objecting to it, and it just breaks your heart. To some degree, it is a reflection of our society.

Bri Franklin: It is. And that’s where we also see the opportunities because it’s a knowledge gap on so many levels. And I’ve done personal crusading, you know, through going in and speaking to companies and trying to build the empathy because so many people put blinders on because they remember how it used to function when they were in college, which is how it was supposed to work. Higher education used to be a gap-closing convention. That was how people were achieving upward mobility in the 40s when the GI Bill was first introduced, that paved the way for the current student debt crisis. It looked nothing like it does now.

Student loans were capped at 1,000 USD per year, and it was directly tied to a boost and a measurable advantage in the job market post-graduation that you then use to repay the loans in full, get your mortgage, marry, start a family, and live your most prosperous life. And then, around in the 70s, people started to catch on just how lucrative it really was and how much demand there was. That’s when it privatized and opened the floodgates for the hell that we know today.

And, you know, the Student Loan Marketing Association became what we know as Sallie Mae. And then there was the lobbying in 2004 that prevented people from being able to discharge their loans through bankruptcy. So there’s just been so many factors that are greed and profit driven, as opposed to opportunity and people driven. And so that’s where we’re coming in to reset the clock and the board and just say, time out, things like this cannot go on.

My motto was that every bubble bursts, just like the housing bubble burst. And so many others. We’ve seen an economic collapse before. I don’t think this will be any different. And so that’s why we are positioning this as something that is not only innovative, but critically necessary. I’ve gone so far as to compare it to a vaccine against the virus of predatory lending, or the equivalent of equipping teenagers with a driver’s license so that they can legally operate a car.

We’re saying debt doesn’t have to be the enemy. It’s the ignorance that creates the problem and has potential to turn it from a tool to a trap. So we’re solving for a lot, and it’s educational at every turn, which is why we want parents to be on board with us and to not look at this as a tool to create controversy or to challenge their beliefs in a way that undermines their parenting, but rather to bring them up to speed and help them understand what’s at stake for their child.

Andi Simon: You are a very articulate young woman. Thank you. I loved listening to what you just said because you really understand the complexity of this. There’s no simple answer. And you have a passion and a purpose. You understand it and you want to stop it. And I am just honored that you are on our podcast today to share it. Thank you for joining us. It’s just so much fun. I think we’re about ready to wrap up.

A couple of things you want our listeners to remember or our viewers to hear you say: one, two or three things that are really important for youngsters to know and parents to be aware of, and the universities that won’t pay attention to right now.

Bri Franklin: Yes, because I do have advice for all three groups, but I’ll stick to those first two. So for young people, if you’re listening, if you hear this in Mom and Dad’s car ride or come into it on your own, I would say think so carefully about who you want your future self to be, and you want to make sure that the you of 10 or 20 years from now thanks you and is appreciative for the actions that you take today. Because things as serious as taking out loans have potential to really either upgrade your life or set you far behind the eight ball, and take it from someone who has spent all of her 20s trying to catch up and get back on track to achieve the things that used to be so typical for my age group.

If I could do it all over again, I absolutely would have heeded the advice of being very careful before just blindly signing any paperwork. For parents on the other side of that coin, I know that there’s a tendency to just say college or bust and to insist that our children, our nieces, our nephews are keeping the family legacy alive by going to our alma maters or just going to college. It’s become more of a tradition.

But we’ve got to remember the why again. College used to be unanimously gap closing, and now, unfortunately, because of some bad acting, it’s become the opposite and is growing the wealth gap between socioeconomic classes and race communities and everything. And so we want to just make sure we’re setting our kids up for success no matter what that educational means looks like.

Andi Simon: All right, now I’ll let you talk to those colleges. So the warning for them is…?

Bri Franklin: Do better. I think that there certainly is a place for academia, and I have great respect for what’s come out of colleges: vaccines, academic research, forward-thinking initiatives. And I remember the upsides of my own college experience, but it’s just unacceptable to keep driving tuition rates up with no correlation to how that’s going to better the student’s job experience post-graduation. So I would say that the short of it is that we have to remember that it’s about serving people and not gaining profit.

Andi Simon: Yes, I agree. What a wonderful podcast to share with our audiences today. I can’t tell you how much I’ve enjoyed meeting Bri Franklin, and I think you should take a look at the Prosp(a)rity Project and see how you, too, can be of help to her and to those who are trying. Now, they’re just the two of you, or is it a bigger organization than that?

Bri Franklin: So on the 24/7 main buildout it is myself and my co-founder, but we are basically migrating our existing task force from Prosperity Project over to Cadet Prosperity. We’ve begun to start getting feelers out there for advisors and potential board members. So we’re growing quickly. But in terms of the day to day diligence, it is myself and Kaylee for right now.

Andi Simon: You’re great. Great. Well, I’m honored to have you here today. It’s been a pleasure. Let me say goodbye to our audience. Thank you for coming. Remember our newest book, Women Mean Business: Over 500 Insights from Extraordinary Leaders to Spark Your Success has just become a really cool book. And I can only tell you that I’ve written three but this one touches my heart because as I open it, people in the audience say, ah. I actually had a client who yellow marked it all and when I met with her, she went, oh, you’ve changed my life. It’s available on Amazon, Barnes and Noble in your local booksellers.

I can only tell you that I met Bri through a book tour event at Eileen Rosenthal’s in Washington, DC, and every time I do one, I meet some others who say, oh, this is a great book. It’s the wisdom of 102 women, and they can’t wait to share with you what they’ve learned and how you can succeed as well. Thanks for joining me today.

Bri Franklin: Thank you again for having me. The conversation just went by in a flash, and I look forward to this being the first of many dialogues that we have.

Andi Simon: I’m looking forward to it as well. I’m going to stop and say goodbye to all of you who come. You remember you’ve taken us to the top 5% of global podcasts. I’m honored. Thank you so much. Keep sharing and sharing Bri’s so that her message can get out there to parents, kids and everyone else. Bye bye now.

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