Women were hit the hardest in the pandemic economically and women can reshape the recovery “to build back better,” says Cherita Ellens, president and CEO of Women Employed.
Ellen was one of six women leaders who set out to offer as many solutions as possible in one lunch hour zoom panel sponsored by the Chicago Foundation for Women in the recent, “Rising Above The Shecession: Concrete Steps To Ensure Women Emerge Stronger.”
Read MoreA lot of the Greek gods were already taken.
So Sabari Raja, co-founder and CEO of Nepris, an education technology company, settled on the Greek god Nepris as the name of her new company who is the “lord of sustenance.”
“We were looking for unique names to build a brand, so we turned to the Greek gods, and every Greek god was already an education company,” says Raja, whose platform connects 85,000 K-12 educators with experts for instruction to more than 550,000 students in this country.
Read MoreCourtney McKenzie Newell in 2011 named her first agency Crowned Marketing & Communications, where she is founder and CEO because she was a crowned beauty pageant winner as a student at Florida International University.
Winning Miss Palm Beach County, and later competing in Miss Florida as part of the Miss American pageant series, McKenzie Newell says, ““I took that money and started my business and paid homage to where ti came from.”
Read MoreGrowing up in rural eastern India, Rupa Dash would be the first girl in her family to get an education.
“The biggest dream girls would ever see and what she deserves is to find somebody or your parents find somebody who would own a truck and you would get married,” says Dash, co-founder and CEO of the World Woman Foundation, with the mission that “Equality for women is progress for all.”
That is an audacious success for someone who as a young girl explains, “I literally never get out of my home and played outside.”
Read MoreOctober is Women’s Small Business Month, so Take The Lead honors the 11.6 million women small business owners in this country who are earning $1.9 trillion in revenue and employing 9.1 million people. Every day 825 women launch small businesses in the United States.
Yes, the numbers tell a story of perseverance and success. One quarter, or 20 % of all companies with $1 million in revenue are women-owned, with 39 % pf all small businesses owned by women. The fastest growth areas are Florida, Georgia, Texas, Michigan and South Carolina.
Read More“Just start.”
That is author and renowned journalist Heather Cabot’s advice to entrepreneurs as well as her own motto.
With her latest book out this month, The New Chardonnay: The Unlikely Story of How Marijuana Went Mainstream, hitting a bestseller list on Amazon recently, Cabot is taking stock of her successes as well as looking for what she will tackle next.
Read MoreLori Greiner, the highly successful investor on ABC-TV’s “Shark Tank,” can offer tips and also learn lessons from Zeynep Ekemen, the creator of Silver Defender, a stretchable film that protects any and all surfaces from germs and viruses.
Ekemen, or Z, as everyone calls her, was at her early morning “Breakfast Club” with business friends in a local Fort Lee, New Jersey coffee shop in 2018, when one of her friends returned from the men’s room grossed out by what he saw.
Read More“Jump and learn how to fly.”
That is Sarah Saffari’s advice to anyone feeling trapped and stuck in a job or remote work. The founder of CEOwned, an online business consultancy, knows from personal experience how to succeed during a quarantine.
For the last five months, the Canada-based Saffari has been working to help online business owners scale and succeed in their businesses from Medellin, Colombia, where she was traveling when COVID-19 restrictions hit. Not able to emerge from quarantine and return home, she is succeeding in place.
Read MoreSeeing nurses and other frontline healthcare workers wearing trash bags to protect themselves during shifts at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic because of a shortage of PPE equipment made Amy Lu upset. It also made the engineer CEO and co-founder of Antlia Systems get to work on a solution for protection.
“It broke my heart,” says Lu, co-founder of Chicago-based Antlia Systems (named after the constellation). “So I used my connections to get more PPE and donate them. Then I was working hard to figure things out with engineering teams to find the best solutions to make safe places.”
Read More“As painful as it is now, the focus is now on meaning. This is a permanent innovative change.”
Jocelyn Kung, CEO of The Kung Group, says her executive coaching and organizational consulting firm’s recent survey of more than 400 startup founders revealed that the ongoing global pandemic has deleteriously affected the growth of companies, but also shifted priorities to a new era of sustainability,
Corresponding to the release of the Q2 Venture Report by Crunchbase this week, that shows the volume of less than $100 million m fundings is down 63% from the same time last year. The number of companies in the second quarter of 2020 is also down form 2,660 in 2019 to 1,254 companies this year.
Read MoreMillions of high school, college, graduate, law, dental and medical students missed out on the walks across the stages, the diploma hand off and the chance to hear an inspiring speaker sitting next to best friends and peers this year.
According to the National Center for Education Statistics, 56.6 million students attended elementary, middle and high school in the U.S. this year, with 19.9 million attending college. For the nearly 4 million who will receive a college degree this season, celebrations are private, on hold or in isolation.
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