A revealing room in Linda Brown's career is the one without much corporate furniture. In 2022, she and Karen Simonenko opened a wine-and-cheese shop on Main Street in Meredith, New Hampshire. The building had been empty for two years. Out went old carpet and unnecessary walls. In came fresh paint, modern fixtures, a lake-inspired resin-and-wood counter and artwork made, appropriately enough, with wine. A sign by the entrance promised three plain things: wine, cheese, provisions. After decades spent working with finance, systems and plans, Brown had arrived at the moment when strategy must become a room someone wants to enter.
There is a pleasing mischief in that move. Corporate planning tends to live in documents about a future no customer can yet touch. Retail has no such patience. The door opens. A person steps in. The lighting, the welcome, the choice on the shelf and the ease of asking a foolish question all become part of the product. Brown and Simonenko wanted KARLINS to feel elevated without feeling forbidding. They had tasted the offerings themselves. The shop was designed for the connoisseur, certainly, but also for the person who could not tell a tannin from a turnip and would rather not be punished for it.
“Seeing our vision of opening a shop come to life and having an opportunity to share this with others is truly a dream come true.”Linda Brown, on opening KARLINS in 2022
Before the bottle came the balance sheet
Brown did not take the fashionable shortcut to entrepreneurship. Her public work history begins in 1994 at CIBC, where she was a senior financial analyst in operations and technology finance. The next 18 years form a compact education in how a large institution thinks. She moved into financial analysis for the personal and commercial bank, then finance for CIBC Insurance. By 2000 she was directing finance for electronic commerce, technology and operations. Two years later she was a senior director of business management in retail markets. In 2004 she became vice president for compensation and benefits, a role she held through 2012.
Read as titles, the sequence is tidy. Read as operating exposure, it is broad. Brown's work sat at the crossings: money and technology, finance and insurance, retail markets and management, organizational goals and the systems used to reward people. Each move widened the frame. An analyst learns to make the numbers speak. A director learns that the numbers have owners. A vice president learns that every clean chart conceals a collection of human incentives, and incentives are where elegant plans go to acquire mud on their shoes.
Education ran alongside that climb. Brown earned a Bachelor of Commerce at Ryerson University and later an MBA at Northwestern University's Kellogg School of Management, with the MBA years listed as 2001 to 2003. Kellogg would appear again through its Women's Director Development Program. The pairing is revealing: one credential for running the enterprise, another for understanding the room where the enterprise is governed. Brown's visible career has repeatedly occupied the space between those two jobs.
The planner joins the people business
By 2018, Brown was vice president of corporate planning at Remedy Partners, later associated with Signify Health. Corporate planning is a role whose success is often invisible. The work is to establish sequence, make resources answer priorities and notice where a company's ambitions exceed its machinery. Brown describes herself in public as a results-oriented leader drawn to organizational efficiency and effectiveness. It is not lyrical language. That is part of its charm. Some people collect mottos; operators collect fewer bottlenecks.
In July 2019, she became a founding member of Chief, the network built for senior women leaders. Chief now describes a community in which thousands of companies are represented and nearly half of members are in the C-suite. Brown's membership is not an employment title, and it should not be mistaken for one. It is a clue about the professional company she chose to keep: leaders comparing notes on influence, accountability, board service and the peculiar loneliness of decisions that cannot be delegated.
That sequence matters because it resists a common bit of career theater. Brown did not wake one morning, reject everything corporate and discover authenticity between two wheels of cheese. The skills traveled. Finance supplied discipline. Planning supplied sequence. Executive community supplied perspective. The shop supplied consequence. Each environment asked a different version of the same question: how do you arrange limited resources so that a promise becomes an experience?
Main Street is an unforgiving consultant
KARLINS formally opened in July 2022 with a ribbon cutting and four hours of free wine tasting. Brown and Simonenko had recently relocated to New Hampshire's Lakes Region with their families. Both came from corporate executive backgrounds. Their new venture was smaller in square footage than the institutions they knew, but not in the number of judgments it demanded. They selected boutique and harder-to-find wines. They planned tastings. They prepared a Women in Wine event focused on women winemakers. They tried to build expertise into the store without turning expertise into a velvet rope.
The physical brief
Remove carpet and walls. Add paint, fixtures and furniture. Give an empty building a reason to be visited again.
The human brief
Offer distinctive bottles while making both novices and connoisseurs feel comfortable enough to stay, ask and choose.
The name itself was a compact act of partnership: KARLINS joined Karen and Linda. That sort of detail can seem cute until one considers what it signals. A small venture has nowhere to hide its authors. The founders' taste is on the shelf, their judgment is in the room and their names are over the door. Brown had spent years working inside systems large enough to outlast any single executive. In Meredith, the system was personal. If a customer felt welcome, that was the operating model working. If she did not, no quarterly vocabulary could rescue it.
Brown's listed tenure with KARLINS ended in August 2024. The public record does not turn the transition into a parable, so neither should anyone else. What can be said is more concrete: for over three years, she carried the title of co-founder; in 2022, the doors opened; and the shop made a corporate planner confront business at close range. There is dignity in the small transaction. It asks for clarity. It rewards attention. It reports its verdict before the customer reaches the sidewalk.
A founder title with a long preface
In May 2024, Brown became founder of SKÅL, the role now displayed at the top of her professional profile. Public descriptions offer little detail about the venture itself, and the sensible response is to leave the blank space blank. The meaningful fact is the founder's preparation. Brown arrived after a 32-year public career spanning banking, business analysis, planning, leadership networks and specialty retail. Her route suggests that entrepreneurship is not reserved for the young, the restless or the recently funded. It can also be the cumulative act of someone who has watched organizations from several useful angles.
One of those angles is scale. At a bank, process matters because thousands of people must make related decisions without sharing a desk. Another is intimacy. At a shop, the person making the decision may be three feet away, holding a bottle and raising an eyebrow. Brown has worked in both conditions. Scale teaches repeatability; intimacy teaches attention. The interesting founder knows when to borrow from each and when one has begun impersonating the other.
Her public LinkedIn audience, about 8,000 followers, is another kind of room. Brown's visible posts and interactions range across business leadership, women's professional networks and sustainability. In 2021 she shared news of a program to put repurposed solar panels back into productive use, writing that she was “super excited” for the team. The phrase is casual, but the subject fits the larger pattern: take an existing asset, look again and arrange it for another useful life. Careers can work that way, too.
The analyst did not disappear when the merchant arrived. She simply acquired a front door.The continuing logic of Brown's career
It would be easy to package Brown's story as a grand escape from corporate life. Easy, and wrong in the interesting way. Her path is less about escape than translation. The discipline of financial analysis became an eye for viability. Business management became the patience to coordinate details. Corporate planning became a storefront assembled from an empty office. A peer network became a place to test the burdens and possibilities of senior leadership. The founder's title came last, but the founder's education had been under way for decades.
A bottle shop may seem a curious bridge between corporate planning and a new venture. In fact, the fit is apt. Wine asks for memory, context and judgment. So does a long career. The label matters, but not as much as what is inside. Brown's public record contains familiar labels - analyst, director, vice president, member, co-founder, founder. The more useful story is how she kept carrying the contents forward: a preference for effectiveness, an interest in how organizations fit together and an evident willingness to make the plan tangible.
The Main Street room is no longer her current title. SKÅL is. Still, one can imagine the lesson lingering: sooner or later, every strategy has to open its doors. Someone must walk in. Someone must understand what has been built. And all the handsome plans in the world must finally answer a democratic question in business - does this work for the person standing here?