26 THENEWYORKER, NOVEMBER 4, 2019
Suzy Batiz sees her trajectory as “a spiritual-evolution story.”
PROFILES
SWEET SMELL OF SUCCESS
A serial entrepreneur’s gospel of corporate mysticism.BY CARINA CHOCANO
ILLUSTRATION BY CARI VANDER YACHT
A
few days after Suzy Batiz learned
that she’d made Forbes’s 2019 list of
America’s richest self-made women, she
lay down on her kitchen floor and wept.
Batiz, whose net worth is estimated at
more than two hundred and forty mil-
lion dollars, grew up poor. She describes
her family as “Irish potato-famine peo-
ple” on her father’s side and “cotton pick-
ers from Arkansas” on her mother’s. For
most of her life, she was driven by an
intense desire to make money. “I really
believed that money was going to get
me out,” she said. Not just out of Ar-
kansas and generational poverty, but out
from under her oppressive religion, her
mother’s low expectations, her father’s
alcoholic volatility, her childhood sex-
ual abuse, her suffocating first marriage,
her tumultuous second marriage, and
her cash-strapped third marriage.
As an entrepreneur, Batiz has prodi-
gious drive but a spotty track record.
Here’s a non-exhaustive list of her gam-
bits: She’s sold exercise equipment;
started a clothing line; opened a cloth-
ing store, a beauty salon, and a tanning
salon; and sold cheap lingerie at a
markup to strippers, until a club owner
with three missing fingers demanded
a percentage of her profits. She’s sold
green-tea patches and at one point
wanted to create a caffeinated gum. (“You
know those Listerine strips? I tried tomake those with, like, Red Bull,” she
said.) There was a tanning-bed-repair
business and a hot-tub-repair business.
“One time, I sold a tractor-trailer load
of gearboxes. Another time, a couple
tractor-trailer loads of fabric,” she said.
“I needed money, so I would call man-
ufacturers and see what excess inven-
tory they had that I could turn. I was
just a hustler, you know?”
In 2001, she was in the final rounds
of fund-raising for a startup, a recruit-
ing firm that matched job seekers and
companies by culture—“The problem
was that it was twenty years ahead of
its time,” Batiz said—when the dot-com
bubble burst. Her investors backed out,
and within a year she’d lost her house
and her Range Rover.
She swore off business and stayed
home, painting and listening to the
heavy-metal band Disturbed. “They
were very energetically aligned with
where I was at the time,” she said. One
day, she went to see a hypnotist, who
told her that her life lacked purpose. He
gave her the book “Man’s Search for
Meaning,” by Viktor Frankl, which in-
spired Batiz to take what she calls a
“spiritual sabbatical.” She studied Bud-
dhism, Kabbalah, Hinduism, and meta-
physics. “I had an insatiable desire to
find something,” she said. “I was the ul-
timate seeker.” At a bookshop, she came
across “Loving What Is,” by the moti-
vational speaker and author Byron Katie,
who teaches a method of self-inquiry
called the Work. “Two weeks later, I’m
at her ten-day workshop,” Batiz said. “I
went in drinking a big thing of Yellow
Tail every night, and, when I came out,
I was sober for eight years. After that,
I was in a bliss state. I knew there was
a larger meaning here.” She developed
a self-help course called Inside Out:
How to Create the Life You Want by
Going Within. She started to meditate.
She got out of her head and into her
body. She listened to her gut. “Then,”
she recalled, “I was at a dinner party,
and my brother-in-law asked, ‘Can bath-
room odor be trapped?’ And lightning
went through my body.”
Batiz is the creator of Poo-Pourri, a
bathroom spray made from essential oils,
which has sold sixty million bottles since
it launched, in 2007. As its name sug-
gests, Poo-Pourri is designed to mask
the smell of excrement—or, more pre-