the MAX EFFECT - 8
Years ago, at a Fourth of July party, Chef Gale Gand was moving down a buffet line with her son when he stopped in front of a tray of empanadas.
“Mom, what’s inside of those?” he asked.
Gand didn’t know. “Take one,” she told him. “Let’s find out.”
A moment later, she heard another child ask her mother the same question. “I don’t know,” the mother replied. “Don’t touch it.”
Years later, Gand still remembers the contrast. To her, those two responses represented something much bigger than a decision at a buffet table. Faced with the unfamiliar, one instinct was to retreat. The other was to get curious.
Curiosity has served Gand well. It is there in the way she became a chef almost accidentally, after a line cook failed to show up for work. It is there in the time she told a chef she knew how to make croissants, then went home and taught herself overnight. It is there in a career full of surprises.
Gand has spent decades earning that kind of trust in a kitchen. A two-time James Beard Award winner, she was the founding pastry chef of Tru, the Chicago restaurant that helped put the city on the national fine-dining map, and has hosted her own Food Network series, written eight cookbooks, and judged everything from Top Chef to the Pebble Beach Food & Wine Festival.
In different forms, that same instinct runs through the lives of financial expert Kelly Ann Winget and FORM YPS owner Charlotte Colby, whose collective wisdom makes up the panel at Southlake Style’s 10th annual women’s luncheon later this month.
One works in pastry, one in investments, and one in fitness. Yet all three have built careers by questioning assumptions about what women should know, how they should behave, and what success is supposed to look like.
Together, their stories offer a broader interpretation of three familiar words: healthy, wealthy, and wise. “Health” is more than body size. “Wealth” is more than money. And being “wise” has less to do with having all the answers than knowing which questions are still worth asking.
Stay Curious
For all three women, the path forward rarely looked like the original plan.
Gand’s turn toward cooking was almost entirely accidental. She was studying silver- and goldsmithing at the Cleveland Institute of Art and waitressing after class. One day, a cook failed to show up for a shift. Her manager asked if she could cook. She couldn’t, but she was handed an apron anyway.
For the first few moments, Gand was terrified. Then something unexpected happened.
“I had this sense of calm come over me, just like I was at home,” she remembers.
It was unsettling, precisely because cooking was not the plan.
“I always kind of joke that I didn’t pick this; it picked me.”
Pastry baking came through a similar side door. A chef needed someone to temporarily cover the pastry station, and Gand agreed, expecting to return to the savory side of the kitchen six months later.
Instead, she found a form of cooking that suited qualities she had possessed long before she understood their value: patience, manual dexterity, an affection for repetition, and a fascination with making things. As a child, she spent hours untangling necklaces, making jewelry, and building tiny birds’ nests. In pastry, that same precision suddenly had a professional application.
Colby’s path was less accidental, but no less exploratory.
She is the founder and owner of FORM YPS, the Southlake fitness studio built around reformer Pilates, yoga, heated sculpt, and strength training. The concept has quickly earned a following and continues to expand, with a traditional strength room, cold plunges, infrared saunas, and a smoothie and protein bar — all part of Colby’s vision for a one-stop wellness destination rooted in the local community.
Getting there required a move that looked questionable on paper.
After graduating from Texas Tech with a degree in international business, Colby built a career at Sewell, moving through sales, service, and finance. Meanwhile, she had fallen in love with reformer Pilates.
Eventually, she left a six-figure corporate career and took a $12-an-hour retail job at Lululemon while earning her Pilates certification.
Colby didn’t see the move as stepping backward.
“I knew that was where I needed to be to be immersed in the community and learn about different modalities,” she says.
She taught. She watched how studios operated. She learned what instructors needed and what clients responded to. The paycheck was much smaller, but the education was more relevant to the life she could see taking shape.
Even then, she resisted rushing. After moving to Southlake, Colby initially assumed she would open a studio quickly. But when she saw established fitness concepts struggling locally, she paused.
“I need to take a step back and really figure out this community before I even think about opening a studio,” she remembers thinking.
Then COVID happened.
The pause gave Colby time to understand what made Southlake different. It ultimately required becoming part of the community.
“I always like to say, you have to live, eat, and breathe Dragons to survive out here,” she says.
What looks like a detour from the outside can sometimes be research in disguise. Gand wandered into a kitchen and recognized something in herself. Colby walked away from a bigger paycheck to get closer to a business she longed to embrace.
Build Confidence
For Kelly Ann Winget, confidence came less from wondering what might be possible than from trusting her instincts.
Winget is the founder of Alternative Wealth Partners, a Dallas–Fort Worth-based private equity firm, and has helped companies raise nearly $1 billion in capital. She is also the author of Pitch the Bitch: Grab your Financial Future by the Bags, a book examining the gender gap in investing. Its title takes direct aim at a notorious line from the 2000 film Boiler Room, in which stockbrokers are advised not to bother pitching to women.
Her instinct for opportunity showed up long before any of those titles did.
Winget grew up in a household where money was discussed openly — and consequences were real. Her parents owned businesses and invested, and they treated school almost like a job: strong performance could earn her money, but falling short could cost her.
“If you got a C, you paid money,” she says.
Basic responsibilities around the house were expected. If she wanted spending money, she found extra work or created it herself, such as selling lemonade and golf balls, and cleaning. At 15, Winget was already thinking less like a teenager earning spending money and more like an entrepreneur calculating opportunity, raking in nearly six figures part time selling car washes, alongside a string of other jobs.
“I was like, oh, I could rake the backyard and make $5, or I could go and work and make $50,” she says. “That was my trade-off.”
Years later, the stakes were even higher.
Winget was only 20 when a radiology company laid her off along with the rest of its support staff. A week later, they called her back. Because she had trained across multiple medical software platforms, she was the one person who understood how the various hospital systems connected.
By 21, Winget found herself managing 16 locations and 60 doctors from one office.
At an age when many of her peers were just beginning to navigate first jobs and first apartments, Winget was already thinking about something larger: how much control she wanted over her own financial security.
“That was [my first realization] that things aren’t actually always what they say they are,” she says.
A job could disappear even when she had done all the right things. So Winget began putting money to work with a specific goal in mind: enough flexibility to step away, change course, or choose what came next.
Still in her early 20s, that thinking followed her into her next job, at a demolition company doing roughly $10 million a year in revenue. She worked alongside a new business partner and shadowed a consultant as the company built systems for growth. Over the three years, annual revenue climbed nearly sevenfold.
Once again, she had learned the work by doing it.
So she went to the owner and asked for what she wanted: a new role, a higher salary, the kind of money and title that matched the work she'd already been doing.
He told her she couldn't just decide that.
"I feel like I can," she recalls telling him.
He said no again: she couldn't just call herself a business consultant and expect over six figures. She knew she could. So she left.
From there, she moved through oil and gas, marketing, capital raising, and family offices before founding Alternative Wealth Partners in 2020. By then, the young woman who had learned early not to rely on a job for security had built the thing she had been working toward all along: the ability to create her own opportunities — and walk away when one no longer fit. It’s a kind of self-trust many people don’t develop until their 40s, if not later.
Where Winget built confidence by moving across industries and proving she could adapt, Gand built hers by recognizing that skills could travel with her. She began in art, studying silver- and goldsmithing and making jewelry, then discovered that the same patience, precision, and handwork translated naturally to pastry.
Early in her culinary career, a chef asked whether she knew how to make croissants. She did not.
“Yes, chef,” she answered anyway.
That night, Gand went home and made seven different croissant doughs, staying up through the night teaching herself. By the time she returned to work, the answer she had given was true.
Redefining the Terms
Once capability is no longer the question, purpose comes into focus. It becomes less “Can I do this?” and more “Why am I doing it — and what do I want it to make possible?”
For Colby, that question became more complicated when entrepreneurship collided with motherhood.
Before opening FORM, she had been a stay-at-home mother, handling much of the daily life of her family. Building a growing business forced her to let go of the idea that she could continue doing everything for everyone at the same level.
Her husband helps. A nanny helps. Friends help. Her team helps.
“You can do it all, but something is going to suffer in some area,” she says.
Colby no longer thinks of work-life balance as a fixed equation. Some periods demand more from the business; others belong more fully to her family.
“There are seasons.”
Gand reached a similar conclusion years earlier, although her solution looked entirely different.
As her career expanded, her husband eventually became a stay-at-home father. Before that, Gand often brought her son into her professional world because restaurant hours, travel, and television production did not fit neatly around conventional ideas of work and family.
“I couldn’t see any other way to be a good mother,” she says.
So she stopped trying to keep the two lives separate.
Her children attended food events, handed out dishes, and stood beside her during demonstrations. Years later, when her son took a public speaking class, he could not understand why his classmates were so nervous about standing in front of a room. He had been doing versions of it most of his life.
For Gand, making her career fit motherhood did not mean shrinking one to accommodate the other. It meant creating a family structure that worked for the life they actually had.
Winget’s version of self-direction is most visible when she talks about money.
She does not argue that every woman should personally manage every investment account or master every financial product. An advisor can help. A spouse can take the lead. Experts can be useful.
But a woman should know where the money is. And Winget is blunt about why that involvement matters.
“Men have a habit of having heart attacks and dying at 60,” she says — and divorce can leave someone just as suddenly on her own.
Her point is not fear; it is preparedness. A death, divorce, or other major life change is a terrible time to discover that someone else understood your financial life better than you did.
“There needs to be some involvement,” Winget says. Enough to know what accounts exist, who manages them, how to access them, and whom to call.
For Winget, money is ultimately less about accumulation than optionality. Knowing what you have, and more importantly, what it can do, gives you more say over whatever comes next.
That freedom to define a life also means accepting that the definition may change.
Colby sees that clearly in fitness. When she was younger, she remembers the ideal female body being described in terms of smallness: skinny, lean, and delicate. She had always been muscular and athletic.
Now she watches her daughter growing up with the same build.
“My daughter is built just like me, and I hope that she never has those thoughts that go through her head,” Colby says.
Today, she is encouraged to see more women embracing strength instead.
“It’s so, so important to lift weights,” she says. “You don’t have to lift heavy.”
She talks openly about bodies changing with age, about perimenopause and menopause, and about the idea that what worked for a woman at 25 may not serve her at 45.
The same principle applies well beyond the gym. Careers change. Families change. Bodies change. Priorities change. What counts as success in one season may not fit the next.
The True Measures of Success
Perhaps that is where the three women overlap most: not in a single definition of success, but in the conviction that the definition belongs to them.
For Winget, success has always been closely tied to freedom. The teenager calculating whether an hour was better spent earning $5 or $50 eventually built a career around understanding what money can make possible. But even she does not talk about wealth simply as a larger number.
At the end of her interview, Winget was asked to finish a sentence:
A wise woman knows…
Her answer came quickly.
“A wise woman knows what her dollar can do.”
Gand’s answer to a different question lands surprisingly close.
Asked for the wisest piece of advice she had ever received, she did not name a famous chef, a restaurant lesson, or even Julia Child.
“Start an IRA with five bucks,” she says. “Just start it.”
For a woman whose career began because someone unexpectedly handed her an apron, there is something fitting about the advice. You do not have to know exactly where something will lead before you begin.
Colby widens the definition still further.
She has the business she once dreamed of owning, a family she clearly prizes, and a career built around strength and health. Asked what wealth means to her, she does not choose among them.
“I feel very wealthy in my health and my family and my business,” she says. “Money’s great and all, but if you have all the money in the world and nothing else, you’re not going to be happy.”