Saturday, November 29, 2025
Saturday, November 22, 2025
Celebrating Women Entrepreneurs: That's You!
When women thrive, families, communities, and nations flourish. Say YES and be part of a powerful movement creating a world where every woman becomes a force for equality and unstoppable impact!
Go here to visit and join the Women's Entrepreneurship Day Organization (WEDO), which was founded in 2013 by Wendy Diamond, an entrepreneur and humanitarian, with the aim of celebrating, supporting, and empowering women entrepreneurs worldwide
Saturday, November 15, 2025
The BIG wegg® 10-Year Anniversary Gala in Chicago on 11/6/25!
Oh what a party and oh what a turnout! Thank you to everyone who celebrated with us. The pictures say it all.
More here. Happy 10 Years wegg!
All photos courtesy: Lisa Miller Photography
Saturday, November 08, 2025
The Role of Women's Entrepreneurship, Unemployment, Global Warming, and Technology in Sustainable Development
Saturday, November 01, 2025
Success On Her Terms With Shelly Sun Berkowitz Discussing "Finding Your Truth North" (11/4/25 at 11 AM CT)
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| ©Women Entrepreneurs Grow Global® All rights reserved. |
More about Success On Her Terms (SoHT)
Women Entrepreneurs Grow Global unveils its newest and most exciting program yet! "Success On Her Terms," a dynamic four-part series presented by Women Entrepreneurs Grow Global® in collaboration with Merrill’s Baldwin Marcovici Group and moderated by Alex Didac.
More about Shelly Sun Berkowitz
Shelly now serves as CEO of her advisory firm, Founder 2 Founder, where she is helping other founders scale, sell, and secure their business legacies. Through her family office, Next Phase Capital (NPC), Shelly offers patient, values-aligned capital to franchise businesses.
To register
Again, to learn more and to register (free of charge) for the first session that Shelly is kicking off, visit: https://womenentrepreneursgrowglobal.org/programs/success-on-her-terms/
I [Laurel Delaney] hope to see you there!
Saturday, October 25, 2025
Illinois Rocks When It Comes to Supporting Women-Owned Businesses
During October DCEO is celebrating National Women's Business Month throughout October by recognizing the significant contributions of women-owned businesses across the state.
“I’m proud to celebrate the wealth of women-owned businesses across our state – and the thousands of talented women who’ve helped establish Illinois’ vibrant business community as the best in the nation,” said Gov. JB Pritzker.
Read on to learn of additional resources that are available to women-owned IL businesses.
Saturday, October 18, 2025
How to Create Trustworthy Brands
How has he done it?
Before jumping into reading the entire article, I'll give you a spoiler alert: Raider’s advice to aspiring [women] entrepreneurs is to, “Create a product that is unique, different, and better in some way, and make it easy to explain.”
Saturday, October 11, 2025
Black Women Shoulder Additional Burdens On Their Path to Success
Alicia Sheares’ research on Black tech entrepreneurship in Atlanta and Silicon Valley identifies additional barriers faced by Black women in the field due to negative assumptions about their abilities, signals that they do not belong, sexual advances, and distractions relating to their appearance and attractiveness.
These challenges for Black women are distinct from those reported by Black men and by white women.
For her presentation to the Clayman Institute, Sheares dug into her research on Black women.
Saturday, October 04, 2025
Celebrate 10 Years of Success with Women Entrepreneurs Grow Global on 11/6/25 in Chicago!
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| ©2025 Women Entrepreneurs Grow Global. All rights reserved. |
Enjoy exceptional food, signature cocktails, lively conversation, and a soundtrack curated entirely by women artists—plus gift bags filled with products made by women. And to top it all off, the evening will be emceed by the sensational Whitney Reynolds!
To learn more and to buy your tickets, visit: https://womenentrepreneursgrowglobal.org/about/10yr-anniversary/
Saturday, September 27, 2025
Listening to Women's Lived Experience Is Essential to Economic Empowerment
One influential voice pushing against the “anti-woke” tide is Cherie Blair, a leading British barrister and, most famously, wife of former UK Prime Minister (1997-2007) Tony Blair.
As a feminist, the 71-year-old international trade and human rights specialist is focused on what she sees as business’s systemic bias against women. “Business was built by men, for men, on the assumption that a lot of other things were being done by somebody else; (i.e.) women,” she says.
Blair compares female economic exclusion to an airplane flying with one engine; companies will eventually get to their destination, she says, but they would get there much quicker with two.
She concedes that philanthropic approaches can only go so far: Companies need to think harder about how women’s lived experience can be designed into their digital products and services. Her goal is to empower one million women entrepreneurs by 2030.
Learn more about Cherie Blair, her program and how she encourages women to back themselves.
Saturday, September 20, 2025
The Funding Gap Continues For Women Entrepreneurs
Female entrepreneurs are on equal footing with their male counterparts in creating businesses with a societal impact. But there is still a colossal gap in startup funding between women and men who prioritize social issues alongside corporate profit. That is in danger of growing even larger as DEI policies are increasingly removed.
Saturday, September 13, 2025
For Women Entrepreneurs, Setbacks Can Be Turning Points That Fuel Growth
For many women entrepreneurs, the old saying rings true: When one door closes, another opens. Tariffs, changing corporate priorities, and economic uncertainty may shut down opportunities, but resilience and adaptability often lead to new paths forward.
Geri spoke with two CEOs—Karla Trotman of Electro Soft and Dee C. Marshall of Diverse & Engaged—who shared how their companies evolved in response to challenges. She also spoke with Carolyn Rodz, CEO and cofounder of Hello Alice, whose platform serves thousands of small businesses nationwide. Her observations, based on working directly with women entrepreneurs, add another layer to understanding how business owners can turn challenges into opportunities for growth.
As Geri concludes, "For women entrepreneurs, setbacks are not just obstacles. They are the turning points that fuel reinvention and drive future growth."
Read the entire article here.
Saturday, September 06, 2025
US Investment Trends For Women Startup Founders
This dashboard dives into US investment trends for women startup founders over the last 16 years with data on deal counts and capital raised by state, industry and stage, and featuring select female-founded startups and firms. The data is sourced from the PitchBook Platform and will be updated monthly.
Saturday, August 30, 2025
Everything For a Small Business Is Urgent: Where's the Funding For Women Business Owners?
A preliminary proposal from the Trump administration called for a halt to federal funding for women's business centers nationwide.
The budget uncertainty in Washington, the federal funding situation for both Women Business Centers and SCORE, is concerning.
We salute the Association of Women's Business Centers for their five-city Media Spotlight Tour to showcase the impact of women-owned businesses and the Women's Business Centers (WBCs) that support them.
There's a reason women are defined as resilient and courageous. If you strip them of funding, there are no alternatives but to become fearless, resilient and courageous to grow a business. We exist. Show us support will you?
Saturday, August 23, 2025
Women Entrepreneurs Grow Global® Celebrates 10 Years of Success in Chicago 11/6/25
Enjoy exceptional food, signature cocktails, lively conversation, and a soundtrack curated entirely by women artists—plus gift bags filled with products made by women. And to top it all off, the evening will be emceed by the sensational Whitney Reynolds!
To learn more and to attend, visit: https://womenentrepreneursgrowglobal.org/about/10yr-anniversary/
Saturday, August 16, 2025
Women in Business 2025 Report
Saturday, August 09, 2025
Meet Trailblazing Impact Investor and Serial Entrepreneur Kim Folsom
Kim's firm has built a comprehensive ecosystem through its proprietary platform to empower underrepresented founders to become leading premium wage job creators within their communities. She supports inclusive businesses including those led by women, people of color, Hispanic, LGBTQ+, military veterans, diverse teams and businesses located in low to moderate-income areas.
Founders First provides revenue-based funding, term loans and advisory services to service-based small businesses located outside of major capital markets.
To learn more, visit: Founders First Capital Partners.
Side note: Really like this article Kim wrote.
Saturday, August 02, 2025
The Next Level For Women Entrepreneurs Is Always Within Our Grasp
Marsha Ralls says, "remember that the next level is always within our grasp. Together, the trailblazers and upcoming women leaders will rise beyond us, knowing that new heights are indeed possible. They need only to reach for them, together."
After a decade building a community of empowered women entrepreneurs and business leaders, Marsha realized that life’s most profound lessons come masked as confirmations of what you already know inside but have not yet been able to put into words. Below, she finds those words.
Tuesday, July 29, 2025
Saturday, July 26, 2025
Mahjong Creates Business and Networking Opportunities for Women Entrepreneurs
From 2024 to 2025, mahjong events on digital event platform Evite spiked 46 percent year-over-year. “What started as a niche hobby has really become a full-on trend,” says Olivia Pollock, senior director of brand marketing and party data analyst at Evite. “It’s really started to pick up steam in a networking setting.”
Find out why here.
Saturday, July 19, 2025
Women Are Turning Visions Into Ventures
Since 2018, the CWE has awarded over $2.3 million in grants to women entrepreneurs, Irby said. Grant-funded opportunities include the Veteran Woman Entrepreneur grant, the StartHER and Texas Rural Woman Entrepreneur grants, which are available to women-owned startups or small businesses.
As one woman business owner says, "In the world in which we live right now, being a woman can be hard and finding community with women makes it worth it."
Enough said.
Saturday, July 12, 2025
The Foundation of the Future: Artificial Intelligence
Cuban sees AI as the most powerful opportunity to reshape business, creativity, and innovation. Simply understanding how to use AI, he said, can open the door to countless ventures from launching your own startup to consulting for others.
Monday, July 07, 2025
Happy 21st Birthday Escape From Corporate America Blog!
Saturday, July 05, 2025
Young, Gifted and Black
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| ©2025 Laurel J. Delaney. All rights reserved. |
Saturday, June 28, 2025
Founder and Celebrity Hair Stylist Jen Atkin’s Brand Eyes Expansion
The Los Angeles-based company Ouai didn’t become a household name in its own right until around 2019 when the team made a gamble on a novel means of distribution. Ouai sampled one million units of its leave-in conditioner in FabFitFun subscription boxes. It was the company’s biggest sampling program ever.
Find out what happened. It's better than you think.
Saturday, June 21, 2025
Women Entrepreneurs Are Incredibly Resilient
McLoghlin knows just how hard entrepreneurship can be. She launched her Los Angeles-based company in 2009 after declaring personal bankruptcy during the Great Recession and spent the next decade fighting to turn it into a success, which she did.
Now her goal is to make more successful women entrepreneurs. Read about her story, Tory Burch's, Tiffany Dufu's, and Nancy Twine's here.
Saturday, June 14, 2025
Grants, Loans, and Programs to Benefit Your Small Business
Here are more than 100 grants, loans, and programs to benefit your small business.
Sunday, June 08, 2025
Teens Are Open to Pursuing Entrepreneurship
Many of the young entrepreneurs below fall into that camp and have continued on their path of success in the years that followed, thanks to great ideas, unwavering determination, and support and guidance from the right mentors.
Archika Dogra, Grace Leger and Caitie Sfingi are among them.
The stories of these young business owners are a reminder that entrepreneurship isn’t about waiting for the perfect moment. It’s about starting where you are, learning as you go, and staying open to feedback, mentors, and change.
Saturday, May 31, 2025
Fasting Growing Group of Entrepreneurs: Black Woman-Owned Businesses
According to the Brookings Institution, between 2017 and 2020, the number of Black women-owned small businesses increased by nearly 20%, far exceeding the growth of women-owned businesses and Black-owned businesses overall.
In this interview, Jean Chatzky is joined by Tiffany Dufu, President of the Tory Burch Foundation and author of Drop the Ball: Achieving More By Doing Less. Tiffany shares the best ways to support Black women-owned businesses right now.
Saturday, May 24, 2025
This Female Entrepreneur's Got It: From a Background in Engineering to a Multi-Million Dollar Apparel Business
Audrey wanted to reinvent the button-up shirt for women using unbelievable menswear fabrics.
Visit Frank & Eileen. The name? Audrey's grandparents, Frank and Eileen. "They were married in Ireland in 1947, and they lived a beautiful, romantic, old-fashioned life — I don't know if they would describe it that way, but they lived in a little stone cottage, never owned a car, just had a really charming life," says Audrey.
Audrey goes on to say, "The world would be a completely different place if at least 50% of the entrepreneurs and business owners out there were women. We'd live in a very different place."
Saturday, May 17, 2025
The Presence of Women in Business Is Growing
Women in leadership, and ownership roles have revolutionized certain aspects of business. According to a report from Women’s Entrepreneurship Knowledge Hub (Canada), the majority of women-run businesses were more proactive in addressing employees’ skills gaps, as 15.6 per cent of all businesses had no plans to do so compared to only 11.7 per cent of majority women-owned businesses.
For a look at the state of women in business (2024) in USA, visit here and their impact (2025), visit here.
It is important to lean on the other women in business, such as the members of the Women Presidents Organization or Women Entrepreneurs Grow Global®.
Stay true to your values and keep growing.
Sunday, May 11, 2025
Two Illinois-Based Women Business Owners Are Rocking It for Mother's Day
Who are the lucky business owners? Jana Farmer, owner of Ms. Jana’s Candy located at 1649 Montgomery Road, Unit #10, in Aurora, Illinois, and Dominique Leach, owner of Lexington Betty Smokehouse restaurant, located at 756 E. 111th St., in the historic Pullman community.
The Illinois Made Program celebrates small businesses and includes them in the state’s Traveler’s Guide and other tourism information. The program helps drive more customers to the highlighted businesses.
Learn more about Jana's and Dominique's businesses here.
Saturday, May 03, 2025
Who Are the Most Courageous People and Leaders on the Planet?
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| ©2025 Laurel J. Delaney. All rights reserved. |
I look forward to reading his book, "Return on Courage – A Playbook for Courageous Change."
Saturday, April 26, 2025
A New Playbook is Helping Women Entrepreneurs Navigate the Economic Storm
It’s a tough time to be a founder no matter what your background. High interest rates, the post-pandemic crash in consumer brand valuations and a gloomy economic outlook have made fundraising difficult.
Women and minority entrepreneurs have an extra layer of challenge, as they’re already underrepresented — female-led start-ups received just shy of 20 percent of overall investment in 2024, according to Pitchbook. They’re now seeing many of the initiatives designed to give them a seat at the table rolled back amid legal threats by the Trump administration and conservative activists.
The picture isn’t entirely bleak. Here's why.
It’s true that diligence is key for any founder, but women and those from underrepresented groups have to push even harder on all fronts with the playing field stacked against them, experts say. To come out a winner, you have to be unstoppable with your efforts.
Saturday, April 19, 2025
Inspiring People Who Overcame Adversity
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| ©2025 Laurel J. Delaney. All rights reserved. |
Be inspired. As Walt Disney said, "If you can dream, you can do it."
Saturday, April 12, 2025
Women Are Creating Their Own Destiny
This is why fashion designer Rebecca Minkoff created The Female Founder Collective, a powerful, high-impact network and education platform designed to help women build wealth, scale their businesses, and offer access to content, learning and capital.
Women need community to support one another.
Today, the FFC has grown into a thriving community of 25,000 founders, spanning industries from beauty to healthcare to tech. Most of their early supporters, including prominent founders Aurora James, Zanna Roberts Rassi, Michelle Cordeiro Grant and others, are still part of the network today.
Learn more about the movement here, which is needed more than ever now in such a volatile market.
Saturday, April 05, 2025
Alice Walton Joins the $100 Billion Club
In September, 2024 Walton became the world’s wealthiest woman once again, overtaking French L’Oréal heiress Françoise Bettencourt Meyers, who had surpassed her for the previous two and a half years. The Walmart heiress is best known for spearheading the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in her family’s hometown of Bentonville, Arkansas. She has given away an estimated $1.7 billion, including a recent gift of $249 million to help fund the new Alice L. Walton School of Medicine, also in Bentonville.
In all, the 15 “centibillionaires” are worth $2.4 trillion, nearly $400 billion more than a year ago—and more than the planet’s 1,500 “poorest” billionaires combined. Put another way, this group of just 0.5% of the world’s 3,028 billionaires holds an incredible 15% of all billionaire wealth.
Here's more focusing on the world's richest women 2025.
Saturday, March 29, 2025
How Women Entrepreneurs Navigate Being in a Male-Dominated Field
One was Mary Crumley-Effinger, Managing Partner at Texas Roadhouse. She shares how she navigates being in a male-dominated field.
"For me, like we said before, it's a male-dominated field, so making sure you find those allies and the people to look up to whether they're in your business or a business like yours. It doesn't necessarily have to be the same restaurant business. Someone that you can ask to support you in your endeavors," Crumley-Effinger said.
Read the entire article here to learn what other female business owners had to say.
Saturday, March 22, 2025
Women Entrepreneurs Are Paving the Way and Motivating Others to Take the Leap
Here are several businesswomen from diverse sectors, including footwear, fashion, beauty, women’s health, food, auto repair and more sharing their stories and what motivated them to embark on their entrepreneurial journeys.
Saturday, March 15, 2025
St. Patrick's Day in Chicago 3/15/25
Saturday, March 08, 2025
Happy International Women's Day 2025!
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| ©2025 Laurel J. Delaney. All rights reserved |
Saturday, March 01, 2025
Strong Leaders Stand With Their Allies
Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro makes a great statement:
"Strong leaders stand with their allies and they stand on their principles – and I believe we must continue to advocate for the values of freedom and liberty, not cower to dangerous dictators like Vladimir Putin."
And as Zelenskyy says, "It's very important to save our country, our values, our freedom and democracy."
I ask all women to #standwithUkraine and their valiant people.
Saturday, February 22, 2025
Make Sacrifices Really Happily
“I’m one of those people who prefer to work 24 hours a day and when you have your own business that’s exactly what you do,” [Terri] Cooper said. “This is not my first business. I owned a cheerleading camp for 20 years and I was a teacher and a coach and a counsellor before this, so I knew what I was in for, and I make the sacrifices really happily.”
Terri, one of the entrepreneurs featured in the article, runs Village Boutique in Detroit.
Saturday, February 15, 2025
Key Factors That Propel Women's Business Success
The report by KPMG is a decade old (2015). See, if in your opinion, anything has changed since then. The table of contents is:
- Perspectives of the successful female entrepreneur
- Controlling their destinies
- Good advice: Welcome, but sometimes hard to find
- Room for self-improvement
- Not-so-risky business decisions
- Conclusion
Discover good answers to the following questions:
- What motivates women to launch their own companies?
- What traits do they believe are most responsible for their success?
- What are the challenges they encounter in building their businesses?
- And in what ways do they hope to improve in order to advance even further professionally?
Read the report: Women Entrepreneurs: Passion, Purpose and Perseverance


















































