The call came on a Tuesday. Tricia Taitt had spent years building her career in finance — the Wharton degree, the Wall Street hours, the steady climb toward a corner office that smelled like possibility. Then 2009 happened, and the economy didn't care about her trajectory.
She was laid off.
Most people in her position would have dusted off the resume immediately. Networked harder. Hustled back into another finance role before the gap on the CV got too wide to explain.
Tricia went to Broadway instead.
This wasn't a breakdown disguised as reinvention. She'd been dancing her whole life — trained, serious, the kind of dancer who shows up at auditions between spreadsheet deadlines. When the layoff hit, she had a choice: scramble back to a system that had just shown her how quickly it could let her go, or finally give herself permission to do the thing she'd been doing in the margins.
She chose the stage. She performed in Fela! on Broadway, touring with the production, living inside the rhythm and discipline that dance demands. It wasn't an escape from rigor — it was a different kind of rigor entirely.
But here's what Tricia noticed while she was dancing: small business owners kept finding her. Friends. Friends of friends. People who heard she had a finance background and wanted to pick her brain over coffee. They weren't looking for someone to file their taxes. They were looking for someone who could explain their own numbers to them — what cash flow actually meant, why their profitable business kept running out of money, how to read a balance sheet without feeling like a fraud.
These were smart people. Capable people. They'd built real things. But the financial side of their businesses operated like a foreign language they'd never been taught, and the fear that created was holding them back.
Tricia saw it clearly: the same clarity she'd once brought to Wall Street transactions could transform a bakery, a consulting firm, a nonprofit trying to scale. The skills weren't too big for small business. They were exactly the right size.
So she built FinCore.
Not an accounting firm. A financial-clarity practice. Tricia and her team work as fractional CFOs, stepping into small businesses and giving owners the fluency they never got — the ability to look at their numbers and actually understand what they're saying. To make decisions from knowledge instead of anxiety.
She still carries both worlds with her. The precision of Wharton. The presence that performing demands. The understanding that sometimes the most strategic thing you can do is trust the timing of your own leap.
When people ask how she went from Wall Street to Broadway to running her own firm, Tricia doesn't see three different chapters. She sees one continuous practice: showing up fully, learning the choreography, and teaching others to do the same.
The layoff didn't redirect her life. It revealed what she'd been rehearsing for all along.
