Hera Hub is excited to share Startup Stories of our members. We periodically interview incredible business women from a variety of backgrounds and disciplines. Our goal is to share our members’ wonderful stories with the public.
Nancy Chorpenning is the Founder and Executive Director of CEO School for Women, a virtual, online, and in-person learning community and incubator for women entrepreneurs. It is the second iteration of a business support program that launched in 2014 in Atlanta as an in-person incubator/accelerator.
They combine practical and foundational business education (delivered by experts who are themselves women business owners), peer-mentoring, and most important a network of life-minded businesswomen who are Serious About Their Business. Their goal is to provide the skills, tools, understanding, and relationships for the long haul to help each member become a confident and well-equipped, happy and successful business owner – THEIR concept of success at that.
They offer a year-long curriculum broken into 12-week terms. The learning modules are self-paced and available 24/7 to meet busy owners’ scheduling challenges. All the virtual coaching and conferencing are recorded so if a member needs to miss one, they can submit questions ahead and watch at their convenience. And they host quarterly daylong retreats and a 3-day “graduation retreat” at the end of each cohort year where they focus on self-care and learning to integrate priorities into a flow that works for the individual.
Nancy is a founding member of Hera Hub Atlanta.
What was the inspiration behind your business?
I am a Corporate Refugee, a Returned Peace Corps Volunteer (following a 2-year midlife tour in Papua New Guinea)and I claim a “Millennial Mind in a Boomer Body.” After many years as a corporate executive, I pushed the eject button from my first startup (WebMD) to start my own business and proceeded to make every mistake in the book doing so. CEO School is the program I WISHED I’d had to nurture my learning and success.
Though I inaugurated my corporate entity (C-Suite Advisors, LLC) as a small business advisory, I knew next-to-nothing about the small business community. Once I learned the sad statistics of business failures, I was determined to do something to turn that around.
My initial loneliness prompted me to look for a group of women business owners, and I found NAWBO (the National Association of Women Business Owners). My NAWBO sisters across the US have taught me and supported my business as it has evolved from a high-touch 1-to-1 business advisory to a 1-to-many model that is now going online. They also showed me how much women entrepreneurs have in common, and how we support one another.
Focusing on an audience I’d been a part of, I was determined to provide the learning resource and community that I couldn’t find when I needed it most. Thus, CEO School was born, and it continues to evolve.
Who are your clients and what do you do for them?
Women Business Owners across the US/Canada form our client base. Our programs help those who have survived startup whether they have an emerging business, an accelerating business, or are transitioning their business for a possible exit. We provide practical training that cut across industries and is first and foremost PRACTICAL. They may be beginning to realize that they need to gain traction to build their business beyond startup, and transitioning from startup can throw one easily into overwhelm. So we begin with a foundation of planning, teaching skills about business models, value propositions, customer avatars, and various forms of business planning – strategic and operational. Then we move into Terms that focus on marketing and sales, building a team and understanding when and how to outsource, legal matters and how to select counsel, practices for scaling and growing their businesses, understanding funding options and how to select the right ones at the right time.
What are your business’ values? How do they align with your personal values?
I stand for women who are serious about building and growing their own business. Business was designed BY men, FOR men. Too often its conventions exclude or devalue the feminine gifts and approaches that may accomplish goals as well, if not better.
I want women to value themselves because of, not despite, their talents.
I hold a mirror up before women entrepreneurs who are too hard on themselves and tell them who and what I see, helping bring them into the authentic confidence they deserve to keep going.
More than a cheerleader, I am a coach, truth-teller, and tireless advocate for women.
We believe that wine is a necessary lubricant for our hard work, and it’s more fun in a group of like-minded sisters, even virtually!
And FUN is imperative.
How/Why did you choose your business name?
Years ago, I read an interview with Steve Ballmer (then head of Microsoft) who said he’d relied on his fellow Silicon Valley CEOs to learn HOW to be a CEO because there wasn’t “a CEO School” he could attend. Instinctively, he understood that business school is NOT the same as mentoring and practical application in business. And I never forgot that statement.
We further defined the CEO School concept to focus on women: because the way we think, the way we work, and how we manage our lives is different than our male counterparts. Women are communal and inclusive by nature. We find asking for help easier sometimes than men do, and we rely on “girlfriends” to hold us accountable and empathize with our journey. We also learn experientially, and applying our learnings immediately to our business brings immediate and tangible rewards.
CEO School for Women has resonated with so many in that audience (and it lends itself to other audiences still under development)
What do you love most about your work?
Watching the transformations of already-accomplished business women as they learn skills that will help them soar and gain the confidence they so richly deserve. They then pay that forward to others coming behind them, too.
I’ve always valued curiosity and continual learning. And I’ve come to understand the incredible Power of a Circle of Women, so much that the community portion of our programs are at the heart of CEO School. I love to watch members show up to help and support their sisters, cheering them onward despite self-doubt and risks involved in entrepreneurial ventures.
Curating our cohorts of members is always fun, as is learning more about their businesses and the path that brings them to CEO School.
What is the biggest challenge in running your own business?
Trying to do it all! I teach my coaching clients to find their own highest and best good, what they can do that no one else could do, and delegate or outsource the rest.
And I learned that transitioning to an online model is tantamount to another startup!
It can also get very lonely. Business owners are inherently lonely as we spend so much time IN our businesses, it’s easy to lose sight of the importance to step back and work ON our business. Just another reason we need community of like-minded individuals to help give us critical perspective.
What are your/your business’ goals for the future?
I want to see CEO School continue after my daily involvement, so I have an exit plan in mind at the gitgo.
Currently, I am in the process of taking my entire business online so I can:
1) Reach more women, who may not have local access to support for their businesses
2) Spread our culture and values so women entrepreneurs don’t feel so alone
3) To give me more flexibility to be mobile!
Next year, I am launching a “Train the Facilitator” program for CEO School. Several of my friends and colleagues around the country have wished they could have a CEO School in their community, but few were interested in developing the curriculum I’ve built over the past several years. We have on-demand learning, virtual office hours, occasional retreats in person, and the final component of CEO School is our peer-mentoring MasterMind circles that meet monthly.
Professionals in business services (attorneys, CPAs, etc) whose clientele are women entrepreneurs have reason to want to see them in-person at least once a month, plus there is enormous value to members meeting face-to-face in a facilitated MasterMind group. So selected professionals will be invited to train in facilitation roles whereby they become an affiliate CEO School in their city, while their constituents get much of their learning online with the rest of the cohort.
What advice would you give to a new entrepreneur?
Get the fundamentals DOWN. You MUST understand planning as a practice, not a discrete event. You NEED a clear, realistic and achievable Vision for your business destination. Get comfortable with the lean startup approach so you focus on your customer and build your product or service to meet their needs, testing and iterating before you invest gobs of $$ in something that has a fatal flaw. Though numbers can be super scary, if you want to run a business, you gotta know your numbers! It’s the reason we have a parallel course included in CEO School called “Conquering Your Fear of Finance.” It’s designed to help non-financial professionals learn the foundations they need so they know “when and how to hire an expert,” and can manage relationships with confidence knowing the right questions to ask and what outcomes they should be looking for in managing the financial side of their business.
