Women To Watch Awards 2026 honors Stacey Divers-Turner

Before Stacey Divers-Turner ever coached a single client into franchise ownership, she spent 36 years doing what she has always done best: opening doors for other people. As a senior executive at some of America’s most respected insurance carriers, including Allstate, Nationwide, Farmers, and AAA, she managed multi-billion dollar portfolios and led large scale distribution sales organizations. But her most enduring contribution during those years was not measured in revenue. It was measured in the countless individuals she personally recruited, developed, and launched into thriving careers, people whose professional trajectories she permanently changed. Even inside corporate America, Stacey Divers-Turner was a coach, a connector, and a catalyst. She was simply not yet doing it on her own terms.

Despite reaching the highest levels of corporate leadership, Stacey found herself increasingly silenced as a Black female executive. Her voice was undervalued, her vision constrained, and her legacy was being built for someone else. In March 2024, she made a defining decision: she walked away from corporate America, bet on herself, and launched her own franchise coaching practice with The Entrepreneur Source. It was not just a career transition. It was a declaration. She has a particular passion for women who have spent years being the smartest person in the room and the least credited for it, women who are ready to finally stop building someone else’s dream and start owning their own. And she works with ambitious professionals across the full spectrum, men and women alike, corporate executives, career transitioners, and entrepreneurs in the making, who are ready to claim the freedom, income, and legacy they have earned. Today, Stacey gives her clients across North America access to over 280 franchise brands spanning 28 diverse sectors, ensuring every candidate finds not just a business, but the right business, one strategically aligned with their income goals, lifestyle vision, wealth-building strategy, and long-term equity through her proven ILWE framework: Income, Lifestyle, Wealth, and Equity. Her clients have gone on to open businesses across North America, each one a testament to what happens when the right person meets the right opportunity with the right guide by their side.

As a Black woman who built her career in predominantly white corporate spaces, Stacey understands intimately why Black wealth-building through business ownership is not just an opportunity. It is a necessity and a form of liberation. According to the International Franchise Association, Black franchise ownership has grown by 40% over the last decade, yet more than one in five Black adults still identify business ownership as essential to their personal definition of financial success (Pew Research Center, 2023). Black-owned franchises generate on average 2.2 times more revenue than Black-owned independent businesses (Franchise Business Review, 2025). Stacey Divers-Turner is not simply coaching within this movement. She is helping lead it. She also has a deep and abiding commitment to those who have served this country. Through SkillBridge partnerships, she helps transitioning veterans transform their discipline, leadership, and mission-driven mindset into successful business ownership. The numbers confirm what she already knows: veterans make up just 7% of the U.S. population yet account for 14% of all franchise owners nationwide, according to the IFA’s VetFran Program. Veterans are built for this, and Stacey is making sure more of them know it.

Few coaches bring what Stacey Divers-Turner brings to this work. She carries the perspective of a Black female executive, a military spouse, a woman of deep faith, and a widow who kept building even while grieving. She does not just understand her clients’ journeys. She has lived versions of all of them. A proud Christian, devoted mother, Board Member of NAWBO, and longtime member of Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority Inc., Stacey actively champions women in business and economic equity, using every platform, partnership, and coaching relationship to expand access to entrepreneurship for those who have been historically overlooked and underestimated. She is fueled every day by her daughter Sydney, a constant reminder that the generational wealth she is building today will outlast and outlive every obstacle she has overcome. Recently widowed, Stacey knows firsthand what it means to stand at the edge of the unknown with nothing but faith, courage, and an unshakeable belief that purpose does not pause for pain. That lived strength is precisely what makes her an extraordinary coach and an even more extraordinary woman. From coast to coast, Stacey Divers-Turner is not simply watching the landscape of entrepreneurship evolve. She is shaping it, one life-changing conversation at a time.