Category: Stories of Women Entrepreneurs

How to Build a Fitness Business: Marvil Fit

Have you ever wondered if you could turn your passion for fitness into a business of some kind?

Marisella Villano, founder of Marvil Fit, has done just that. Marvil Fit offers spin-related fitness classes (including some unique spin and floor combination classes). She also offers personal training. She’s tried different combinations of offerings over the years, and found this works best for her and her clients.

Marisella shares some of the challenges she’s faced. But she also has lots of suggestions on how you might go about creative a fitness-based business, as well as some key things to think about.

Her creativity and ability to pivot helped her through difficult times, including Covid, which caused a lot of smaller fitness studios to go under.

She shares her story with The Savvy Entrepreneur. She’s full of energy and enthusiasm — just what you’d expect from the owner and founder of a successful fitness studio like Marvil Fit!

Click on the arrow to take a listen to her fun and relatable story!

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Entrepreneurs: Say “No” to Silos!

Laura Gallagher, the founder & CEO of The Creative Company, talks with The Savvy Entrepreneur about some of the many challenges women entrepreneurs face.

Laura started The Creative Company, a full-service marketing firm, during her senior year in college. That was in 1989, the year after Wisconsin finally allowed women business owners to sign for a business loan in their own name.

Laura says there were so much she had to learn the hard way. But she realized just how much she still didn’t know, after attending Goldman Sachs-sponosored programs at Colombia University and Babson College. She saw the huge gap between what was readily available to women business owners and what they needed to know.

That led her to sponsor and organize the first two Wisconsin Women’s Entrepreneurship Day. Although well-attended and well-received, she took away some painful learnings from these events as well.

In the end, I sensed that Laura doesn’t feel these big 1-day splashy conferences are really the solution. She offers a number of thoughtful suggestions — listen in as she shares the learnings from her journey, and her thoughts on how women entrepreneurs can truly support each other (Hint: break down barriers and just say “No” to silos!)

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Blythe-Martin Productions: How to Be a Successful Enterpreneur

Ever dreamed of making a living by singing, acting, or dancing? If so, this is an interview you need to listen to!

Jamie Blythe Martin is a self-professed “Enterpreneur” — a successful entrepreneur in the entertainment world. She found success on the stage as early as middle school, and was buoyed by lots of support from her parents.

As a musician and performer myself, I know how easy it is to fall in love with music and performing. The key, of course, is figuring out how to make a decent living doing that.

Jamie has pivoted a number of times in her life, but for several years now has successfully built a stable business around lucrative voice over work and doing farm-themed musical performances to entertain young kids as “Miss Jamie.”

Jamie shares some major nuggets of advice for anyone thinking of becoming an enterpreneur. Most of us think that we don’t do it because we might not be talented enough. Miss Jamie says that’s “hogwash!” Jamie believes that there are actually many successful enterpreneurs who don’t really have that much talent.

She says two things separate successful enterpreneurs: (1) they face their fears and move forward, believing in themselves and (2) they are very disciplined about treating their talent & gigs as a business.

Click on the arrow to listen to The Savvy Entrepreneur’s interview of “Miss Jamie” Blythe-Martin, as she shares how she & her husband worked through several personal challenges in building Blythe Martin Productions. And for those of you aspiring enterpreneurs, she shares plenty of candid tips to help you build your business.

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Advantages of CEO Peer Group Mentoring

Being the founder/CEO of a startup or small business can often be lonely, confusing, discouraging, and downright overwhelming. Most of us start a business around an idea we’re passionate about, and it often revolves around something we’re good at or know well.

But building and running a business requires many skills, and few of us are good at all of them. We need to make good decisions, but we don’t always have the expertise or skill to make them.

That’s why there are many CEO peer mentoring groups, both formal and informal. There are Meetup Groups, and online groups. But there are also in-person, more structured groups. For these groups, a time commitment is required, and a membership fee assessed.

There are nationwide organizations that match and facilitate these groups. The best-known is probably Vistage, but YPO and LX Council, among others, are also well-established.

And if you poke around, you’ll also find lots of CEO peer mentoring groups that are locally organized. Some are industry-focused. Others focus on startups. Some are based on religious affiliation. There are even groups for entrepreneurs who are moms, juggling business and family. Some focus meetings driven mostly by current member challenges, and others have a fairly formal curriculum.

Lori Dann’s President’s Leadership Council is a Chicago-based CEO peer mentoring group facilitator. She puts togethers groups of CEOs of small but fairly well-established businesses in non-competing industries. Lori says their working sessions are focused on solving existing problems experienced by the group members.

She joins The Savvy Entrepreneur Radio Show to share a bit of her own journey and how she decided to create her business.

Lori also offers some helpful tips on how to find the right CEO peer mentoring group for you, if you’re a CEO and/or founder.

Click on the arrow to take a listen!

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Fluid Running

What do you do if, six weeks before the biggest and most important marathon race of your life, you tear your calf muscle?

Jennifer Conroyd’s 5 siblings were all coming to town to run the Chicago Marathon with her. They were raising money for Juvenile Diabetes, a disease her nephew had been diagnosed with at age 2. Jennifer had organized all of this, and so the race was a big deal for her.

Her doctor was adamant that she couldn’t run. A lot of people — maybe most of us — would simply chalk it up to bad luck and wait for our next opportunity.

But most of us aren’t Jennifer Conroyd. She researched deep water running, and decided to try it, even though there’s not much known about it in the U.S. She hired a coach and diligently did a deep water running program.

And guess what? She not only was able to run her full marathon — the first time she had run on land in 6 weeks — she even qualified for the Boston Marathon!

At that point, Jennifer knew she was onto something pretty special. She shares with The Savvy Entrepreneur the story of how she’s built and grown Fluid Running. Fluid Running is a novel fitness concept — although popular in Australia and Canada, it really is unknown in the U.S.

Jennifer has been through a number of iterations with her business models, and trying different ways to build awareness of the benefits of deep water running.

It’s a wonderful story, and well worth a listen, especially for any new business trying to create awareness for a great idea that people don’t yet know they need!

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