How does an entrepreneur navigate through the noise, follow their passions, and reach their goals – and reach the heights of success? And how can women better achieve in a business environment against all odds?
Best-selling author and serial entrepreneur Lauren Imparato has been there and has answers. Her first disruption was launching I.AM.YOU in 2009, a groundbreaking health/wellness company and boutique studio, which she subsequently sold a decade later.
Today, she is the Co-Founder & CEO of The Association, a global leadership organization of elite and extraordinary women. She’s also CMO for Delphos Capital, the world’s first female-led impact investment bank, focusing on emerging markets.
More than five hundred media’s paid attention to the polymath’s business savvy, including Vogue, Bloomberg, CNN, New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and Financial Times.
VIVA asked her about her entrepreneurial journey, what she learned en route and her latest disruptive ventures.
What was the idea behind starting I.AM.YOU?
Lauren: I grew up being an athlete. I was working on Wall Street and absolutely loved it. It’s a myth that I quit my job because I was burned out, or that it was a ‘toxic environment’. Nothing could be further from the truth. Often I was on the trading floor at 5:30 am and having late dinners. I started to swap my daily running 60 miles a week, for a combination of yoga and daily nutrition.
I started to do this on business trips, at home, in the office. Then, I started helping my colleagues on the trading floor with their stress, anxiety and weight gain. My friends, also, none of whom worked on Wall Street. I realized there was a big gap in the health and wellness industry, and I could go out there and create it.
I’d done thousands of hours in yoga training, nutrition school, meditation school. I’d tested it. I was doing classes in my loft.
So, I quit my job at Morgan Stanley to start I.AM.YOU, the first boutique studio of its kind. Quitting Wall Street was one of the hardest things I’ve ever done. First of all, it was lucrative, and it was my dream to work on Wall Street. I just saw this other opportunity from the business sense, and also in a ‘making people better’ sense.
What were the most important tools to start a wellness business?
Knowledge. There are few barriers to entry in the wellness industry, so the more you actually know about the subject you are targeting or specializing in, the more power you will have to truly carve out your niche.
I took multiple courses in yoga teaching, anatomy, nutrition, ancient yoga philosophy, and meditation which I leveraged to enhance the customer experience. Perhaps the clients did not know my precise resume, but they could feel the difference in the quality and efficacy of the products.
Education matters, and even if it seems easier to launch a business without investing in the science and information backing your company, over time, that base of knowledge will be what will either hold you up or differentiate your business from the competition.
What are the key moments as the founder of I.AM.YOU?
There will be no way to forget the first time I got on a stage in front of two thousand people to speak and teach on the I.AM.YOU. brand and method in 2012 in Barcelona. I had never spoken in front of an audience so big. From that day, I went on to speak to 10,000 at a time …and settings across the globe. Each one introduced me to the clients that had been supporting me from afar. And each one inspired me to keep innovating, keep working.
Do you get the impression that, as a woman, things were different?
Lauren: Oh, absolutely.
When I quit Wall Street, they all thought I was nuts… When I exited I.Am.You, everyone, assumed I just wanted to have a baby. Actually, it was just that I’d been in it for 10 years and was at the top of the industry, and wanted to do something else.
Women are always judged with a different lens, for better or worse. I’m fairly certain if a man did two pivots, everyone would say, ‘Oh, wow. Look at him go!’ As a woman, they always think we have some other motive we aren’t talking about.
Tell me about The Association?
Lauren: Having worked on Wall Street, and health and wellness for 10 years, I had thousands of clients a week that I had contact with. I had this database of women and I kept seeing these same problems women were coming into. We can have all this hoopla about equal pay and breaking the glass ceiling, but there are fundamental steps on the road to get to that point that needs to be hit. You need coaching and assistance to get there – not a sisterhood, not a therapy group.
The Association is that network. We have a proprietary methodology in meetings, structured and led by coaches. They help women advance in their careers.
What is Delphos about?
Lauren: Impact investments are the concept of creating change. If we look at where growth in the world is going to happen, it is not going to have strength in the western markets, as US and Europe, but in emerging markets, like India, Africa, Latin America.
That’s where certain problems need to be solved for that growth to happen, meaning, broadband in Nigeria. Sure, the NGOs can dump all this money in for things that are actually useful and necessary. But there is a fundamental problem. That micro-finance loan you are giving is for one person. We are looking to lay the groundwork to lay Wifi, for instance, so that women can use the internet, and have a direct-to-consumer line.
What’s your next book, Between the Waves, about?
Lauren: It’s a book on transitions. If you really look at the books out there on the market, there are books about business, how to manage pivots when you are in a start-up, self-help, but no one really gets to you in the transition – career or personal. Here are the tools to get you through that other side. Because there are some really dark places in that transition period, and it feels like you have no resources to go to. This is what that book tries to help you through.
