The Ladies Who Launch Dream

Our business and this book were developed out of our actual experience. We were (and still are) following our dreams, discovering our true passions, taking huge leaps, and most important, drawing on the energy of our friends, family, acquaintances, and anyone who was willing to give us any input in creating our company, Ladies Who Launch. Our point in sharing our own story is to help you begin to understand how a project, relationship, job, or situation can manifest itself in an inherently feminine way. We have discovered out of our own experience and that of women who have participated in our Incubators that women approach change, creativity, and business quite differently from men. This is not a bad thing! In fact, it worked for us—it can work for you, too.

We didn’t begin this journey with a specific result or even a very clear vision in mind, and we certainly didn’t have a business plan. What we both had was a very strong and almost overwhelming desire to create something that would make us excited to get out of bed each morning and add a little light and love into the world. Sure, we wanted to make money. We love making money! But we also wanted to make an impact on the world and spend our time doing something that was fulfilling in every way. What really drove us to break out of the corporate mold and launch was creating a lifestyle that gave us freedom and flexibility. We are both hard workers with strong work ethics, but we wanted to be successful on our terms, creating time for the things that are important to us, including our family, our friends, traveling, philanthropy, yoga, and the world around us. What we realized, after working for corporations and for start-ups, was that unless the business was a true reflection of our own dreams, no one else’s business would make us as happy as one that was our sole creation. We knew our path would be entrepreneurial and our mission would be to build on an idea that would allow us to stand on our own beautiful feet.

Coincidentally, we not only started our individual journeys toward making our dreams come true at the same time, but we both had similar ideas. Victoria set out to launch a magazine called Avanti, which means “movement” in Italian. Meanwhile, Beth created FLOinc, an organization whose mission was to move people forward and get them into the “flow” of their lives. We were both solo-preneurs (before we married our businesses together) and wanted to support and forge connections for other women going through the same process. After looking high and low, neither of us was able to find exactly what we were looking for in terms of an organization or resource that combined creativity, business, fun, and lifestyle. We discovered that we weren’t alone. We asked around and found that many women wanted to break out of the corporate mold, use their creativity, do something fulfilling every day, enjoy their femininity, have fun, and connect with other like-minded, motivated, and creative women. There seemed to be nowhere to turn. Networking as a concept and even as a word was never something either of us had found at all enticing or supportive. It involved images of conference rooms, hotel lobbies, business cards, and name tags, and felt boring, tedious, strained, and unnatural to us.

So we did what many women do; we saw a need and sought to address it.

Subsequently, our businesses were born. Victoria turned her magazine concept into www.ladieswholaunch.com, an online resource for women that features entrepreneurial success stories with a focus on lifestyle and creativity. Beth added a workshop called the Incubator to her menu of courses as a way to spend time with like-minded and motivated women and to help them crank up the volume on desires and dreams. Both concepts grew organically and quickly; the Ladies Who Launch subscriber base grew as women across the world signed up to receive their weekly dose of inspiration in the form of a Featured Lady who had herself successfully launched.

The Incubator, starting in New York City, became a word-of-mouth phenomenon as women flocked to the program. From marriage proposals to business partnerships and photography treks in Southeast Asia, life got rosier for the women in the Incubator, which evolved into that networking organization that we had dreamed of, combining entrepreneurship, creativity, and lifestyle. Together, we are able to provide the network and resources that women need to launch, both online and offline.

This process wasn’t easy. We learned, in hard but ultimately positive ways, as we went along. We both self-financed our dreams without any guarantee of success. And although we both went to business school, we found the approach we used for launching our dreams to be in almost direct conflict with what we had been taught. When we took the leap of independence, it was an exhilarating but terrifying experience. When you are in the middle of creating something brand-new, it can be almost paralyzing. We’ll be the first to admit that we’ve had everything from cold sweats to insomnia thinking about how to advance our brilliant ideas. Even when you know something works and it has proven itself to you in various outstanding ways, there is always a pinch of doubt. Will they use it? Will they like it? We truly believed that women would grow and thrive and become believers by coming to Ladies Who Launch and going through the Incubator process, but at the same time we wondered, will it work? Are there women out there who crave the resources and community we do, without the corporate networking model in place?

Luckily, not only did people come, they spread the word, told their friends, and most important, saw results. Every time a woman associated with Ladies Who Launch takes a tiny step toward her goal, gets a feature article published, makes her first 100K sale, makes a new friend, or gets engaged, it launches the rest of us higher and paves the way for others to follow. Five years later we have a thriving and growing business that changes lives every single day. We have had thousands of women all over the world take part in the Ladies Who Launch Incubator program and we are thrilled with the remarkable women that Ladies Who Launch attracts. Each, like you, is dynamic, creative, supportive, entrepreneurial, ambitious, and most important, kind and generous. They are ready to take major steps in their lives and understand that doing it together is a lot more fun than doing it alone.

What we realized through this experience is that when you’re enthusiastic about an idea and going for it with all your heart and passion, the universe, people, and circumstances line up behind you to make it possible. Family and friends contributed to our efforts, but also people we barely knew but who felt our enthusiasm have given us great ideas, connected us with their friends and associates, and spread the word that ultimately became the foundation for Ladies Who Launch. Had we tried to do this on our own it would have been so much more difficult; we might have spent many years getting up the courage to actually go for it. Our cowriter Amy Swift’s journey has run parallel to ours. Not only has she launched a business as a brilliant and talented writer and brand-identity guru, but she is also the Ladies Who launch Incubator leader in Los Angeles.

From the very beginning Amy has championed us, helped us write, created course names and descriptions, and developed our brand. In fact, early on, over lunch at the Cafeteria restaurant in New York City, Beth was explaining the workshop she dreamed of creating for all of her friends who had inspired her and who had helped her start her business. She imagined creating a forum so that they, too, could give birth to their dreams. Amy said, “Like an Incubator?” and so it began. Amy is not only a writer, she is a collaborator who has brought her unique vision and insight into our world, and whose vision so complements ours that we solicit her two cents whenever possible. We know that with her help, whatever we are doing will be that much better and bigger because together we create something even more wonderful than we could have on our own.

For more business tips and women success stories, visit the Ladies who Launch website.

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