This Isn't About Women. It's About Money

Our meeting was shattered by a bomb drill in a building just blocks from Times Square where a real bomb had been left weeks before. I felt like I hit another dead end and I needed a call from my kids to tell me to “Suck it up!” Instead we decided to stop at the Plaza Hotel to see if we could grab a cup of tea. The dining room was packed so we went back outside to survey our options from the incomparable vantage point of the hotel’s front steps.

There was a family visiting from Israel waiting for a cab, and we fell into casual conversation. Originally from New York, he was a venture capitalist visiting on business

I told him I was putting together a Private Equity Summit designed to connect women with capital. He asked me when it was and how much money he should bring with him. He gave me his card and told me to follow up with the details, and he would make sure all his associates would attend as well. He told me to bring it to Israel, because there was a lot of money and a lot of deals being made with women. He offered me the same advice I had heard almost word-for-word before: “Don’t make this about women. Make this about money.”

Two Of My Biggest Character Flaws

I had just shown my proprietary blueprints for a ground-breaking digital media project it took me a year to build at immeasurable cost to potential competitors in meetings in New York. I didn’t want to wake up one day to see someone else calling MY BIG DREAM theirs, so I decided to hold my own PRIVATE EQUITY SUMMIT.

A lack of patience is probably one of my biggest character flaws. My passion can also sometimes make me come on too strong. At this point, I had an overabundance of both.

Kim Lavine with Terry Cross

In late January, in the midst of a blizzard, I tested the waters by hosting a kick-off at my H.O.M.E. office in Grand Haven, Michigan, a small venue in a small town, where dozens of women entrepreneurs from across the U.S. and Canada came to pitch real investors.

I hadn’t seen media frenzy that we attracted since the launch of MOMMY MILLIONAIRE, but I was in for another paradigm shift.

How Do I Fix That?

I put together pitch criteria for the event and an application process online. With almost no marketing behind it, I had dozens of women from around the U.S. and Canada in just days who wanted to pitch.

We gave everyone two minutes in an actual elevator. My brightest star of the evening was already doing a million in sales annually on her product at top retailers around the world—out of her garage. She was a lawyer, graduated Summa Cum Laude; even though I prepped her to dream big, the bottom of my stomach fell out when she asked for $45,000 in funding.

How did I fix that?

How To Shift a Paradigm

I was on the top of the Empire State Building, overwhelmed by the task at hand. I put my personal reputation on the line to enlist investors from around the world to bring hundreds of millions of dollars to this event, so there had better be fast-growth, high-profit women-owned businesses “money-ready” pitching.

The problem wasn’t the investors, the problem was with the women: they didn’t know how to ask for the money, they didn’t know how to drive a deal, they didn’t think investors were interested in their business models, they didn’t know how to frame a Value Proposition—and they didn’t think they could.  

how to shift a paradigm

• Break down conventional wisdom that investors are only interested in high-tech ventures.
• Take networking opportunities out of Silicon Valley, boardrooms and "old boys clubs.”
• Teach women how to package and drive a deal.
• Elevate women’s business funding from a charitable subsistence model to one of exponential financial return.
• Vet and qualify women to be money-ready investments, then empower them to be leaders in the boardroom.
• But the most difficult and most important paradigm shift is teaching women to think they can. I

The Smartest Investors Know This

Google CEO Eric Schmidt said that “Innovation never comes from the establishment. It comes from a graduate student, a crazy person, or a person with vision." I was about to meet some of those people at TED @MotorCity.

I was coming off a high generated by the spectacular media success of my modest Summit just weeks before. I arrived slightly late and had to wait to be seated during an intermission between speakers

I bumped into one of the organizers of this TED event and asked him what he thought would happen if you plugged TED into a $100 million of investor capital. He eagerly answered that he wanted to know more. I had the same response from event speaker Lisa Gansky, who as a rare woman in the tech field had raised millions years ago before selling her company to Kodak.

The smartest and most successful investors are the ones who can discern a needle of opportunity in a haystack of mundane moments that make up any normal business day—then act on it with haste. I was beginning to realize that some people just could not see the opportunity, unless they were a “crazy person, or a person with vision.”

10 Women Seeking $10 Million

But THE NEXT BIG DREAM was about to get exponentially bigger. And so were the challenges, when we put together meetings in New York with some of the world’s biggest banks.

We stayed at the Waldorf Astoria and the OCCUPY movement was in full swing. There were protesters in the street with bullhorns and banners and a news team was filming them as we entered the building. Security was tight and we were escorted up to offices high above the street where we looked down on the protestors. They were so loud, their voices carried over our meeting and our hosts apologized for the intrusion. What they said next stunned me: a percentage of billions in public funds they managed was earmarked for investment in women and minority-owned businesses, and there was more money than there were businesses. But there was more to follow.

At another meeting I was speechless when he said he would come, but only if I could put together 10 women asking for a minimum of $10 million each. This was really smart money and I couldn’t disappoint him, but I asked myself how I could possibly vet and qualify the 10 women worth $10 million each when I couldn’t even find one.

A Tinderbox Full of Money Ready to Explode

Free market capitalism was the only solution and some people were giving it a bad name. Somewhere in- between Wall Street and Occupy New York was the truth—and that truth was Angel Investors, who were pumping over $20 billion a year into early or first-round financing for emerging companies, with that amount growing by over 20% a year.

I could understand the anger of the Occupy protesters, but I could not understand what they wanted. This was America, land of the free and home of the brave, and from where I was standing, it looked like a tinderbox full of money ready to explode.

Even in the midst of these historic times, America is an embarrassment of riches, a melting pot of freedom and democracy and money that makes this the greatest country on the face of the earth to start a business. This new reality wasn’t easy, but it was the cure, and entrepreneurs—not protesters— were the heroes, taking on personal risk today to create the wealth and employment opportunities for millions tomorrow.

A new class of Super Angels were being born, using feet on the street to snap up deals, and one of the smartest guys in the room confided in me off the record that he thought Wall Street would become irrelevant in our lifetimes.

The Money Train is Leaving the Station

Who knows how long this train of investor money is going to be around before it leaves the station? We are living in historic times, which we’ll look back on as being as influential in transforming America’s future as the Industrial Revolution—but this time it will be the Women’s Revolution. This isn’t just happening in the U.S., it’s happening in every country in the world. According to statistics from the World Bank, women are leading a global economic revolution—and the only piece that is missing is the capital. Missing this window of opportunity could cost a generation of women their opportunity to start billion dollar companies, and millions of men the investment and employment opportunities they create. Crowd-funding was the newest phenomenon, but it was a temporary solution to a Big Problem: Raising capital was the most important job any entrepreneur had and nobody was teaching anyone how to do it—until now. The forecasted growth of women-owned companies from 48% to 55% over the next 4 years is a powerful phenomenon that will rewrite the American cultural landscape, changing work and family life in revolutionary ways.

Who did I think I was?

·  It was the holidays, a time for family and friends and love and laughter. I started putting all the pieces together and reflecting on the journey. We had climbed a mountain, but everywhere I looked were new peaks to scale. I’ve never made anything happen by following rules, and not following rules has proven to be an effective strategy. I've never worked harder, traveled further, dug deeper, dreamt bigger, risked more for so many--on a dream. It would have been so much easier to just give up, or give in. Who did I think I was to show up at these places and ask these people to join me in my dream and dare them to tell me 'no?’ Maybe I wasn’t the best person for the job, but I was the only person willing to do it. I looked at my 15 year old son from across a dinner table; he told me after watching what I had been through he would never do it. He said I was his hero because I followed my dreams. I had sacrificed so much financially to get here, but at that moment I felt like the luckiest person in the world. Money is just the machinery that makes ideas work. The person and their dream is the commodity worth millions. This is the story of that dream and history being made