Page 242 - South Mississippi Living - September, 2022

FINAL SAY
LIZCORSO JOACHIM
President and Owner, Corso, Inc.
As we celebrate women in business this month, I look back on my years in business and the fulfillment it has brought me. From 1988 to 1992, I owned Liz Joachim’s Emporium. Since 1992, I have managed Corso’s, a family wholesale distribution and full-line vending company.
We’re now in our 99th year of business. I think that longevity is due to the service we provide and that we cater to our customers; they come first. Also, the attitude of our employees servicing them helps to make customers want to do business with us.
If I were giving advice to young women starting in the business world, it would be to make the customers they service feel like they are a part of the business and don’t want to do business with any other business.
I want other women to realize how much we have accomplished in our short lives and how much is available for us to be able to participate in history and most of all helping to make this Coast such a great place
to live. I have always called Clare Hornsby my mentor as she gave me such a ladder to climb. Hopefully, I will someday reach the top of the ladder, mainly to please her.
My father started in business riding a bike and selling Hershey candy bars. It has been very interesting running a business that is 99 years old as a female owner. But for some reason I have been accepted on all the wholesale boards and received many honors from the manufacturers.
This is a family business. My husband, Jack, who retired from Bell South Telephone Company, takes care of the trucks. Our oldest son, John, does the buying of products and helps to pull orders and load trucks when the managers are not available. Our second son, Todd, is the geek who does all the computer business and sets up the customers’ purchasing ability. Our daughter, Elisa, is in charge of the vending part of the business and also started micro markets in the casinos and some local hospitals. I can’t leave out mentioning our grandchildren, Jack IV, Anna Elisabeth, Sadie Rose, and Cooper Corso Joachim.
Community involvement has always been important to me. I was brought up in a family that felt if you give of yourself ten times to help make your community a better place to live, in the future you will get it
back not in monetary means but in feeling good about yourself. Some of my greatest loves are the Frank P. Cor- so/Liz Joachim endowment at the University of South- ern Mississippi for a student with financial need who
is a single parent and couldn’t afford to attend college. Recently I started a Liz Corso Joachim scholarship for a second year student at William Carey Coast College and a Liz Corso Joachim Scholarship for a second year stu- dent at Mississippi Gulf Coast Community College who is studying nursing. Also at MGCCC, I started a new scholarship for a culinary student in their second year.
242 | September 2022
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