A Program Dedicated To Helping Women Move Forward With Their Business by Gail Lara

Executive Director for the Women’s Collaborative Mentoring Program, Gail Lara: Today we have so many business support programs out there, portals, apps, new business development programs but really there is an 80% failure rate even with all of these supports in place.

Good afternoon, I’m Gail Laura, the executive director for the Women’s Collaborative Mentoring Program and it’s a program dedicated to supporting women in business, mainly the economically disadvantaged women-owned small businesses. The ones that make less than $150,000 in revenue.  These are the women who are having the hardest time to get the loans, to get the revenue where they need to be and to move forward with their businesses.

And so today women are starting businesses five to one but the revenue isn’t five to one. And the loans aren’t five to one and the diversity.  So this is where we put together a grant to help them be successful in their business.

I’ve been training women in business for the last 17 years. And during that time I’ve built a platform for over 340 mentors to speak about their business programs. I have helped over 3,900 entrepreneurs and pointed them in the right directions.

I have helped work with all of the business development programs there are and studied what’s working. Why is it working and what do we need to tweak?

And so this is how I just became involved in helping what is needed, what is the next step. What works and what doesn’t work, depends on what is needed. Today we have so many business support programs out there, portals, apps, new business development programs but really there is an 80% failure rate even with all of these supports in place.

A lot of it is because they don’t know what the next step is, they give up on themselves.  Really you need more than just business essentials and marketing, you need confidence builder and you need personal development. These two things added to your basic curriculum is what I see women (successful women) doing. They are reaching out, they are no longer doing it alone, they are building their team and this is what the Women’s Collaborative is about. It’s stop doing it alone and build your team and that’s what we put together for them, a team of 20 mentors to help them with their step-by-step sequence to get their business moved forward.

About Gail Lara:

Gail Lara is Director of the Women’s Collaborative Mentoring Program (WCMP) at The Valley Economic Alliance (TVEA). Gail offers over fifteen years of experience in small business development, training, and as a business owner. The Women’s Collaborative Mentoring Program (WCMP) under the The Valley Economic Alliance (TVEA) offers mentoring grants to serve the Economically Disadvantaged Women Owned Small Business (EDWOSB) community.

Our goal is to help women achieve $150k in annual revenue and prepare her for funding.

Mission: To position underserved women entrepreneurs to thrive by providing customized mentoring to achieve sustainable business growth.

CONNECT WITH WOMEN’S COLLABORATIVE MENTORING PROGRAM
Thewcmp.com
Thevalley.net/wcmp
Facebook.com/valleyeconomicalliance
Instagram.com/ValleyAlliance
Twitter.com/valleyalliance

CONNECT WITH GAIL LARA
Linkedin.com/in/gaillara

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