Victoria Colligan of Ladies Who Launch

If you don’t like it, do something about it. Sure. Everyone’s heard that phrase. Yet, not everyone is willing to rise to the challenge. Victoria Colligan, the Founder of Ladies Who Launch, is not one of those people. A little more than four years ago, while working as a corporate attorney, she discovered that current business resources just weren’t addressing the needs of women on several important levels. Colligan left the cushy corporate life behind and made it her business to fill that void by developing an organization that could impact the lives of women across the country. Her efforts resulted in Ladies Who Launch; a nationwide organization of entrepreneurial women that has become a media darling, has 20,000 weekly email subscribers and conducts Incubators in 30 cities - including Vancouver, with plans to get groups started in Toronto and possibly London, England on the horizon.

In the midst of planning their upcoming Ladies Who Launch Live event at Convivium 33 on Thu 6/15, Colligan took time out of her busy schedule to discuss her inspiration for Ladies Who Launch; why women launch businesses differently than men; the Ladies Who Launch book on the horizon that will change the lives of women everywhere and why her trips to New York make her long to return to Cleveland.

Cool Cleveland: Tell Cool Cleveland readers a little about your background. Are you originally from Cleveland? Have you always lived here?

Victoria Colligan: I grew up in Cleveland. I was born here. I lived in New York for ten years and then I moved back to Cleveland. Actually it was my husband’s business that brought us back here. He was in private equity and he was investing in some businesses here.

CC: How did you come up with the concept for Ladies Who Launch?

VC: I worked for two start-up companies, mostly doing business development for them. Both of these companies were owned and operated and started by women. Basically it was at that point and time that I started conceiving the idea for Ladies Who Launch. I just started to see all these women around me starting businesses. Statistics underscore that. Almost half of all privately-owned businesses are women owned. Women are basically starting businesses at twice the speed of the natural average, basically at twice the rate of men.

I noticed that a lot of these women weren’t reading traditional business-oriented publications and they weren’t joining traditional women networking groups. I started Ladies Who Launch based on the fact that I wanted to package content differently and share their inspirational stories with other women - basically celebrating these women in a way that was feminine and was fun and had an element of lifestyle.

CC: Why was the lifestyle component so important?

VC: I noticed that a lot of these women were starting businesses for lifestyle reasons - meaning they wanted more flexibility in their lives. They wanted the ability to stay home with their children part-time. They used technology to their advantage – whether it was responding to emails in the middle of the night or whatever it was. They were starting businesses for lifestyle reasons and in different ways than men traditionally started businesses.

CC: What was your initial goal for Ladies Who Launch?

VC: Essentially my goal with Ladies Who Launch was to get their stories out there as inspirational tools for other women just to sort of say ‘Hey, we’re all on the same boat, we’re on the same path.’ What I noticed in starting to share these stories was that these women were also doing things really differently. They weren’t working 9 to 5. They weren’t necessarily writing business plans. They weren’t doing any of the things that you are supposed to do when you start a business according to the kind of traditional all-masculine model out there.

CC: How did Ladies Who Launch start out?

VC: It started as a weekly email and it evolved into a network as well - with an element of community. My business partner in New York had simultaneously started the incubator. The incubator was just a way to get women together and put them through a series of exercises to expand and clarify their vision and get them into action on their projects which could either be businesses or anything else.

CC: I noticed that on your website. Ladies Who Launch seems to go well beyond just the parameters of business. I found that really interesting. What is it that the Incubators do for the women who participate in them?

VC: For women, even with their businesses there is always an element of lifestyle in there for them. Women come to the incubator with all sorts of projects. Their project can be anything. It can be: I want to start a business; I want to grow my business; I want to write a book; I want to launch a new product; I want to start a book club; I want to meet more people – anything can be their project. The idea really being that entrepreneurship and creativity are kind of essential for women’s fulfillment and happiness. What we’ve found is that as long as women are being creative - as long as they are tapping into some sort of entrepreneurial energy – they’ll be happy.

What we do is we act as facilitators of that process for them. Whether it’s through our in-person incubator programs being conducted in 30 cities, through our weekly emails that get circulated to 20,000 women nationwide or through our events that we do across the country.

The Incubator is a very inspiring environment. Entrepreneurship and creativity – when we get these women in a room – it’s contagious. When one woman sees another woman there and trying to do it, she feels like she can do it, too. It’s that contagiousness that’s built our business and kind of made this viral impact. We haven’t done any advertising. It’s all been word-of-mouth, organic, sort of like Cool Cleveland.

CC: I’ve definitely experienced the impact that the positive support of other women, and hearing about the success of other women, can have on you. You’re not necessarily looking for someone to give you answers; but it’s truly empowering to have the support of other women and someone who will be your sounding board.

VC: Exactly. And that’s really what the incubator is about. It’s a support system. It is very positive; we don’t allow any negativity in the Incubators.

Cool Cleveland: Tell us more about your partner, Beth Schoenfeldt. You said she’d already started the Incubator. How did you come to the decision to combine your complementary efforts?

VC: Beth had started the in-person component of Ladies Who Launch. It was called the Incubator. I had started the online component (the newsletter). I really wanted to start something in different cities across the country but I didn’t quite know how to do it and I didn’t want it to be this typical networking thing. I wanted it to be something really original. The Incubator is really, really unique. The theory and the concept behind the Incubator is that you can often see things for other people when they can’t see things for themselves.

CC: (Laughing) That is so true.

VC: I know you’ve probably experienced it because you’re a business owner also. It moves you forward because when people believe in you - you doubt yourself less. That’s really what the Incubator is about. People believing in you to move you forward and it gives you that energy, that confidence, to actually make the steps and the decisions to move something forward and it really has worked. So many women that have come to the Incubator and they had no idea what was going on or how they were going to get from Point A to Point B and a year later they are at Point C – they’ve launched the store, or whatever. A lot of them attribute it to having joined the Incubator and put that kind of attention and energy on it.

CC: The list of women involved in Ladies Who Launch is amazing. There is such a diverse range of featured women – from women who have just launched their businesses to women whose names and businesses we all know and recognize. How have you achieved this type of success in just four years without any formal marketing efforts?

VC: It’s all still word of mouth; but we have a great PR firm. We get a lot of press. We’re about to be on CBS Early Show hopefully at the end of May. We’ve done TV interviews. We’ve been in like every single magazine. We’ve been in almost every local paper where we have an incubator. That’s helped tremendously. We’ve done a huge press outreach. That’s been mainly our marketing strategy. Then our incubator leaders across the country are almost like our sales arm because they are out there leading incubators and talking about Ladies Who Launch.

CC: What does Ladies Who Launch do for its members and what should someone expect if they decide to join?

VC: I guess I would answer that by first talking about what we are. More and more, what we are becoming is a PR, marketing and distribution channel for women and their products and services. We essentially try to give women the tools to distribute and market their products in any way that we can - whether it is through our events or through the Incubator. We have vendors at our events. We have service providers. We have speaker series. We also are building an EBay store so that we can actually facilitate the selling of merchandise from our website because we do get so much traffic.

We get requests everyday for stories about women starting certain types of businesses from different magazines. We’ve been able to reach out to our community to provide those stories so it becomes a PR channel for these women. We’ve almost become like the middle man when someone like Time Magazine calls and says that we are doing a story on this and we are looking for these women and we can always find those women within our community. We’ve become a huge source for women to get the word out their about their products and services and to network with each other.

CC: Who are your “typical” members, if there is a typical Ladies Who Launch member, and what should someone expect when they join?

VC: We are not about a demographic. We’re about a psychographic. We appeal to motivated women who want to tap into their creativity and their entrepreneurial energy to move something forward. It can be anything from a handbag company to an online marketing company. It can be about a hobby or a passion, but mostly people are starting businesses. Probably our mean age is like 30’s and 40’s but we have tons of 20-year-olds and 50-year-olds and 60-year-olds both in our incubators and running our incubators and in just our larger community. We are also very, very, very diverse. If you look at our Featured Ladies (on the LWL website) they are pretty diverse in terms of age, industry, ethnicities, backgrounds, level of success, education level, geographic location. The incubators thrive on diversity. Women who are young, women who are older, women with really evolved businesses to women who are just launching a brand new idea join the incubator. You get all this input from an array of backgrounds and it’s incredible the way you can move forward from that.

CC: That is definitely one of the things I found most appealing about Ladies Who Launch – the diversity of women involved. It was very motivating to see such a wide range of women achieving success.

VC: We really try to do that. It is definitely very deliberate.

CC: How do you select the incubator leaders?

VC: We only market the program through our online newsletter. We send out an email once in awhile about our leader training which is conducted here in Cleveland. Women come from all over the country to train with us two to three times per year. We look for women who are launchers. They have launched other businesses or they’ve launched something within another organization. We look for women who have their own inspirational stories to share. That’s one of the prerequisites. Leading the incubator is a business opportunity, though it’s never anybody’s primary business. It’s a license arrangement.

CC: So then if someone is in a city where there is no incubator they can apply to become an incubator leader in their city. What guidelines have you put in place to ensure continuity in the program?

VC: We train them to run our program. We have the content of the program that we’ve already built out. We put them through the incubator and teach them how to do it.

CC: How many people are typically participants in an incubator? I know it probably varies from city to city.

VC: We limit it to 12 women in the intensive and then the ongoing is when you kind of get into the larger group. We have about 60 in the Cleveland ongoing program right now. Our next intensive incubator starts Monday nights in August. Anyone who attends the June 15th Live event will get a discount if they decide to join the intensive incubator.

CC: How does someone join Ladies Who Launch and what is involved in their membership?

VC: Basically they can subscribe to the weekly email for free. If they want to join the incubator – in Cleveland it’s $250 for the intensive and then it’s $300 for the year for the ongoing program. Basically with that you get all kinds of other benefits. Coming to the event on June 15th is included in your ongoing membership. Being a vendor at our events across the country is included. You get discounted rates on events across the country. We have a lot of women who travel from event to event. They’ll go to the New York event, the Seattle event, from the ongoing incubator, because they want to network nationally with these women in person. You get free postings on Launch Pad, a $600 advertising credit in our weekly email and more when you join the Cleveland ongoing Incubator.

The ongoing program is really about facilitating a larger network, both in the local market and on the national level. If you are in the Cleveland ongoing incubator you can communicate with somebody, in Seattle, Portland, Vancouver, New York, through our online network. It’s like a social network, too.

CC: So incubator participants are really getting a lot for their investment. How long is the intensive incubator program?

VC: It’s four weeks and we meet for two hours a week. We really do call it an investment – the more you invest in something, the more you get out of whatever you are doing. The value is tremendous.

CC: What else does Ladies Who Launch have on the horizon?

VC: We have a Ladies Who Launch book coming out in January. We’re very excited. We just turned our manuscript in to our publisher in New York - St. Martin’s Press. It’s Ladies Who Launch: The Essential Guidebook to Launching Anything & Everything. It’s all about this feminine approach to launching that we’ve identified - how women launch differently and for different reasons from men, how that manifests and how women can embrace that to launch and to move forward. So we’ve taken our incubator program and all of our other methodology and we’ve incorporated it into this book.

CC: Tell us about your Ladies Who Launch Live event on June 15th. What should people expect if they attend the program?

VC: Our live event is going to be really great. Basically, we say it’s lifestyle networking with a twist. What we do at our events is different from any other women’s networking events. First of all we do them in lifestyle-oriented spaces. So we’re doing it at Convivium 33 in Chinatown. It’s this huge old church that this woman, of course, a Lady Who Launches, bought and renovated and turned into an art gallery. (She excuses herself, briefly to tell one of her partners that they should do a feature on Alenka Banco, the owner of Convivium 33, around the live event.) A woman named Alenka, she bought it. She is super-interesting and cool.

We have an editor from Country Living Magazine coming to speak about what the trends are now with women. We have Marianne Frantz from the Cleveland Wine School as one of our speakers. Connie Dieken, who used to be a newscaster here but started a media training company, onPoint Communications, she is also one of our speakers. Throughout the day we’ll be having spa demonstrations. We incorporate wellness, we incorporate fashion, we have vendors from all over the country, we have emerging designers. Everything that we do with the event is all about women launching and using their creativity.

CC: There are a variety of sponsors listed on your website and in relation to the Live event. How do your sponsorships evolve? Are you actively seeking out sponsorships or are they coming to you because of the things that they are hearing about Ladies Who Launch?

VC: Mostly we haven’t done much outreach when it comes to sponsors. Mostly they’ve sought us out. These companies want to connect with our demographic. American Greetings launched a new product line that is sort of hip and stylish (Bloom by AG) and they were interested in reaching our market. Commerce Bank, they are a very progressive bank. They do really interesting things that are beneficial for entrepreneurs – they stay open until 10PM in New York and they do same day access to deposits. There is a lot of education that our women would be excited about in relation to our sponsors.

CC: What types of partnerships are you looking for as you move forward?

VC: We are looking for partners who are looking to launch something within our group. We are also looking for our partners to be launchers in some way. We are looking to partner in a creative way. So if they’re launching a new product or rebranding something – like we’re working with Naturalizer Shoes. They are a very comfort-oriented shoe and they are now becoming more stylish so they are doing a whole new brand target.

CC: You’ve lived in various places – Madrid, Buenos Aires and New York City for ten years. It was your husband’s business that brought you back here, but what has prompted you to stay and how would you compare Cleveland to other cities?

VC: We did have a choice to not stay here, after moving back. So we made the choice to stay. First of all, I think it’s great to be near your family, if you can, when you are raising a family. We have two small girls. We love the lifestyle here so much. I love being able to kind of live out in the country and then be Downtown within half an hour. The cultural institutions are phenomenal. One big reason for me personally is I can’t wait to send my girls to Hathaway Brown School. I think it is one of the best girls’ schools in the country. I’ve become really involved in it, because I’m an alum, in terms of developing an entrepreneurship program there.

I’m based here and in New York, so I’m there every three weeks. I go there for meetings and press and I just love coming back here. I like being able to easily travel to anywhere from here. We do all our leader trainings here because it is so convenient with respect to the rest of the country. It’s less expensive. Plus when you get here, to stay here it’s not as distracting. I know this isn’t very original. People always say that they love the lifestyle here.

CC: It is true. Especially when you compare what you can get here for the money, particularly in relation to places like New York.

VC: It’s not so much just that. It’s such a great lifestyle. I like being able to get in my car and not be faced with horrid traffic. I can easily drive all over the city and get whatever I want, whatever I need easily and without a whole lot of hassle, without having to fight.

CC: I love New York. Great place to visit. But, I couldn’t even imagine trying to drive the streets of Manhattan.

VC: It’s totally stressful. Cleveland essentially provides me with the flexibility to do whatever I want to do, to be whatever I want to be. And now with the virtual environment you can be anywhere and do anything. I love AirTrain. I fly out of Akron all the time to New York. I love having my family here. I love the nurturing environment of that. Also, I have found the people here to be incredibly interesting. Through Ladies Who Launch I’ve met the most dynamic, interesting, diverse women.

CC: The Ladies Who Launch tagline and mantra is really very cool and interesting: “Entrepreneurship & Creativity as a Lifestyle.” You’ve talked about it a little. Could you explain exactly what it means to you, and in relation to Ladies Who Launch?

VC: When we say lifestyle, what we mean is two things. One is just being able to have the lifestyle you want. When you start your own business you essentially can design your own hours, design your own schedule. You can choose to work harder or not as hard. You can choose to spend more time with your children in the middle of the day, if you want; to stay up all night working odd hours, if you want. The great thing is technology has given us the tools for this. A generation ago we wouldn’t have been able to choose this lifestyle as readily but now you can have an online store and you can manage it from your home. It’s such a great time for women. You can email somebody from your Blackberry while you are sitting in a doctor’s office. It’s all great.

The other part of lifestyle is literally being passionate about what you do. So starting a business that you literally are so passionate about and emotionally involved in that it just gives you the momentum to make it great and to move it forward and to make it original. The other element, so I guess there are at least three, is the idea that women look at their lives holistically, meaning they don’t compartmentalize the way that men do. For women their friends and family might be their investors, might be the people they do yoga with, might be their trademark attorney. For women there’s not a lot of separation. That’s how women are. They have a lot of horizontal relationships with one another whereas men are more vertical. Women tend to not have titles as much. So, when we talk about lifestyle we are talking about all those things and entrepreneurship just lends itself to all of those things.

CC: The approach that men and women take to situations are definitely very different.

VC: The problem in the past is that it’s almost been looked at as a problem. If you are this way then you are not the other way. You doubt yourself. A lot of women get paralyzed. They get stuck. A lot of the women who come to the incubator are in this mode. They’re like, ‘My husband told me I had to write a business plan, I’m stuck.’ A lot of time, also, women come into the incubator with one project and they leave with a totally different project. The whole concept with the Incubator is to be open and to not be resistant. It works for a lot of women.

CC: Looking at what you’ve been able to accomplish over the past four year: Is your goal for the group the same as when you first started the group, or have they sort of evolved?

VC: The macro goal - the philosophy, the methodology, the core values - of Ladies Who Launch are totally the same as they were day one, which is to inspire women, to move them forward, to share their stories, to give them the tools to launch anything and everything. I’d say on a micro level it’s been a complete evolution and that’s been the exciting part about it. The Incubators are something I never expected. I didn’t know how that would happen and that’s been sort of an amazing ride. Doing an EBay store is something I never would have anticipated. One of the things I wanted to do, which I think we still will do, is an in-print publication.

CC: I love the online introductions of your staff where each woman tells her favorite woman success story. Do you have an example of one of your Incubator participants locally that you’d like to share?

VC: There are so many, but I can give you a really interesting one that just materialized. Jennifer Coleman is in our Incubator program, she started Jennifer Coleman Creative. She came to the Incubator with a lot of different ideas about what she wanted to do and she wasn’t sure what direction she was going to go in. She ended up getting funding from the Civic Innovation Lab for her idea of downloadable, digital walking tours of Cleveland. The woman who started ecokiss– a line of environmentally-friendly products sold within the Mustard Seed – is in the Incubator. We’ve also had women in the Incubator win part of the COSE Business Plan Contest. We have a woman that was in the Incubator who was just on QVC. She sold her entire stock in six minutes.

You can learn more about Ladies Who Launch, subscribe to their free weekly email, sign up for their Incubator program or register for the Ladies Who Launch Live event on Thu 6/15 at www.LadiesWhoLaunch.com.

Interview by Roxanne Ravenel RoxanneAtCoolCleveland.com. Photos provided by Victoria Colligan.

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