Podcast: Growing the Entrepreneurial Landscape for Women over 40 — with Melissa Lamson, CEO, RECREATE

Russell Benaroya: Hey everyone. Welcome to the Stride 2 Freedom podcast. My name is Russell Benaroya, and I’m the co-founder of Stride Services, a virtual back office, bookkeeping, and accounting firm serving hundreds of clients around the United States.

This podcast is designed to help small business owners focus on growth and innovation. In other words, focus on those things that inspired you to start your business in the first place. We call it your genius zone. We do our job on this podcast when business owners feel like they have the trust and confidence to build the right team of partners around them that will help them grow. Thanks for joining. Let’s go.

Hey everyone. Welcome back to another episode of the Stride 2 Freedom podcast. I am your host, Russell Benaroya. It is a pleasure to see all of you and speak to all of you. Today we have a great show in store.

Just as a reminder, what is the Stride 2 Freedom podcast? The Stride 2 Freedom podcast is designed to help business leaders get and stay in their genius zone. What is your genius zone? It is that thing that you do that is seemingly effortless for you where you lose track of time, when you’re truly achieving your highest and best use where people say, “How do you do that?” 

What we do on the show is bring people on that can help business leaders and business owners achieve that state of genius, achieve that space where what they are doing is truly making the kind of impact they set out to make when they started their business. The show is sponsored by Stride Services. I’m a co-founder of Stride Services. We are a back office, bookkeeping, and accounting firm. Our genius zone is helping business leaders use data to make better business decisions.

If we can do that, we believe we are helping business leaders increase their level of confidence in the decisions that they make to run their business and achieve their dreams. Okay, great. Let’s go. I am super excited to welcome Melissa Lamson to the show today. Hi, Melissa. 

Melissa Lamson: Hi. Thank you for having me, Russell.

Russell Benaroya: So great to have you. Melissa is the co-founder of Recreate, and we’re going to spend time talking about Recreate. But just as a little sprinkling of a hint, what Melissa has enabled is the building of a community for women over 40 to come into a program to help catalyze their starting and launching a business. And that’s really awesome. Because oftentimes women over 40, and we can talk more broadly about opportunities and drawbacks for female entrepreneurs, they often lack capital, access, money, time. 

Recreate has really done a phenomenal job of developing a space to welcome female entrepreneurs into a supportive community, and they just graduated their first cohort. So we’re going to hear a lot about that. Congratulations, Melissa, on that. 

Melissa Lamson: Thank you. I’m so excited for all of them. 

Russell Benaroya: Yeah. We’re going to talk about Chris Landberg and how Chris Landberg was the top-rated Demo Day presenter and how she won some capital and she was on the news. So there’s a lot of really good attention that has come from that. For me, it’s really important to do this show because helping business leaders get and stay in their genius zone crosses all lines, crosses all demographic and socio-economic lines. 

We are here to help leaders rise, and Melissa is certainly doing that for the community that she serves. So let’s jump in. Melissa, you just graduated your first class of Action Tank cohorts.

Melissa Lamson: Yeah, we call them members. Yeah, Action Tank members. 

Russell Benaroya: Action Tank members. Congratulations. Let’s work backwards. Tell me about the pinnacle day and what happened.

Melissa Lamson: Sure. We had our first pitch event, as you said. And we invited members of the community who are supportive of entrepreneurs and who are also potentially excited to become entrepreneurs. They all came, and we had eight women pitch their businesses. There were three-minute pitches.

Then they were able to get Q & A and chat a bit with our judges’ panel, if you will. I say it like this because they’re not very judgy. They’re actually just very supportive, women who have been really successful either as entrepreneurs or as angel investors or partners in businesses.

They sat and asked some really important questions to help the women just fully flesh out their ideas in the pitch event. Then they chose one person as a winner, and we gave them $2,500 towards the startup of their business.

Russell Benaroya: Tell me about Chris and why she was selected as the winner.

Melissa Lamson: Chris is so great. In general, she just has such incredible positive energy. She’s had this idea. She came to us, in the beginning, six months ago and said, “I just hate my tennis bags.” She’s been a big tennis player all her life and she was like, “I just hate tennis bags. They slump over. They’re not easy. I replace them every year because they’re not really high quality. I want to develop a great tennis bag.” 

We’re like, “Well, okay. Neither one of us had that kind of experience in our backgrounds in terms of developing a fashion line or a product like that.” We said, “But we’ll make it work for you.” She has gotten to the point where she’s actually designing the flats, and she has the prototype in progress. She has a whole bunch of people already ready to buy the bag and funding for the bag. So she’s really far. 

But the idea is a customizable tennis bag. So it’ll have lots of pockets in different straps and different colors, and it also stands up. I don’t play tennis. But apparently, not many tennis bags actually stand up on the court. They slump over. So yeah, she’s really excited about it. And the judges obviously were, too.

Russell Benaroya: It’s great. For some reason, I keep wanting to say recreate and not re-create. I think I could say that, too. When I think about recreating, I think about action, I think about joy, I think about movement and motion and change. I don’t know. Maybe that works as well, too. But I’m going to stick with re-create, if you’d like.

Melissa Lamson: Well, no. It’s interesting you mentioned that, Russell. Because in the beginning, that’s the whole thing. We said it’s about re-creating yourself and re-inventing yourself. But oh my gosh. Is it double entendre, et cetera, et cetera?

Russell Benaroya: Entendre. Yeah, yeah. That’s the expression.

Melissa Lamson: Of recreate, and we also really need to have fun while we’re building. One of the things about women is that we stress about a lot of things, and we worry about a lot of things. We fret about a lot of things and especially if we’re building a business for the first time. That’s an incredibly overwhelming venture. And so we said we really want to make this also fun. 

We bookend the workshops and all the work we’re doing together with some fun events. We went to a jewelry store and tried on some fun jewelry and had some wine. Then we rented out a pole dancing studio and did a pole dancing class. We went to a smash room the night before the whole pitch competition just to let some energy out.

And so that helps us bond as a group, that helps us continue to build community and build trust. But it also just gives us a chance to let go and have some fun and relax. As you know, when you can relax and have fun, you can be more creative. Then you’re more innovative, and then you develop better ideas.

Russell Benaroya: Why start Recreate in the first place? What was the opportunity or problem that you sought to solve?

Melissa Lamson: Yeah. Well, I’ve been a leadership coach for over 20 years. I have really a roster of women who work internally basically from director and above. I hear constantly the disappointments, the discouragement, the exhaustion, the stress.

There’s also a lot of positives, too. The overqualified but underutilized, especially as we get older, it’s like there really is a glass ceiling. Then there’s also this, “What do I want to really be doing with my life? I’ve made a bunch of money. I’ve done a lot of great stuff internally. Maybe it’s time for me to be thinking about something else.”

Then because of the pandemic, of course, 2.3 million women left the workforce. They were like, “Well, what’s next? I want to do something that’s meaningful and has impact.” Then empty nesters, which we also know, and then entrepreneurs who had to pivot or decide how they want to grow or scale their business differently. 

Given all of those women, we went out to the market and said, “What do you really need? We have an idea that might serve you well, but what would you really need?” And that’s how we formed Recreate. It also happens to be the model that we teach, so getting customer validation and doing your market research to be able to build something. But we did that, too. 

We found that to have a platform like this which is really not available certainly not to an all women’s group and then also that particular age group where we’re impatient, we’re experienced, we have a lot of knowledge that we can leverage in the group. But we maybe never built a business before, scaled a business before. And so it’s important to really serve that niche.

Russell Benaroya: You mentioned on your website that women over 45 are the fastest-growing  group of entrepreneurs, and that was a very striking statement. I’m curious where you found that data. And yeah, just how is that evident today? How are we seeing that growth show up in the world today?

Melissa Lamson: Yeah. Well, I’ll send you the link. It’s from Forbes. Forbes is doing an amazing job talking about entrepreneurs and women in business and so forth. They have the whole 50 Over 50 project or program that they’re doing a lot of press around. So yeah. It’s interesting. I know it anecdotally and then obviously from the statistics that we keep up with. But just seeing that a lot of women are starting businesses, they’re actually starting businesses three times more often than men are. Women, generally.

Women over 45 becoming the fastest group of entrepreneurs, I think a lot of that has to do with leaving the workforce during the pandemic, for sure. And just saying, “I don’t want to have my job be just all encompassing. I really want to do what I want to do and how I want to do it and have some flexibility around it and be able to also balance that with home and family and partners and so forth.” 

That was even more emphasized during the pandemic. As people were working at home, they had a lot to juggle. As women, we feel a lot of responsibility for that. So it fell on our shoulders, but we also took it on our shoulders to manage that well. And so I think at some point, maybe they were at a breaking point. But maybe they were also at an aha moment to say, “I’ve got to make this work differently.”

Russell Benaroya: What do you either know, through your conversations, or speculate that the members that participated in this first Action Tank learned about themselves through this process? What are some things they learned about themselves, you believe?

Melissa Lamson: Yeah, for sure. Well, I would say the biggest learning is that it doesn’t matter if someone else has this idea or has had this idea or is doing this idea. It’s about, “How do I follow my instinct and then follow that up with knowledge and data to know that there’s still a need in the market for what I have to offer and that I can do it better or differently?” So that’s a really big learning. 

Then the other piece is that I’m okay with iteration and change. If this idea has to evolve and change a bit over the six months, that’s a completely normal process. Every business has evolved and iterated and changed. They had an idea in the beginning. If it’s changed a bit over the course of the six months, that’s really okay. And that they are more comfortable with that ambiguity, if you will, at the outset.

Russell Benaroya: Do you think those are perspectives that can be brought back into their lives outside of business?

Melissa Lamson: That’s a good question. Maybe. Yeah. I think that requires a big mindset shift as you’re building a business. It’s painful sometimes. You’re scared, and you’re nervous. You’re like, “Is anybody going to care about this or like me? Then is this going to be successful? Am I going to make money?” Those are all important questions. 

That’s the whole reason why we built Recreate was really to focus on that mindset evolution, if you will, and also just provide an environment where we can take as much of that overwhelm or nervousness or stress out of it so that they can just focus onto your point their genius and what they really want to build an offer the world.

Russell Benaroya: We often get so caught up in our crazy, our stories between our two ears. We live in a world of fabricating these scenarios, most of which will never happen. But it’s like, “Oh my god, what if this business doesn’t work? Or am I going to run out of money?”

It swirls and it swirls and it swirls. I think one of the greatest gifts of the vessel of a new business is learning how to manage oneself in and among the roller coaster of trying to get this fledgling business off the ground. 

Before you go and react with the crazy, which we all do—I’ve got a lot of crazy—ground that story with facts. Oftentimes, the facts don’t necessarily support the crazy. This is where I think it is very applicable in our broader lives because there’s a lot of crazy in our lives whether it be how we’re managing our families and our children and the future and our relationships. Knowing, self-awareness. 

Yes, I’ve got a lot of stories. I could tell an equally true story that serves me better rather than the one that freaks me out and makes me anxious. It’s a lot easier when you have a community of supporters around you that are good sounding boards. And it sounds like that’s what you helped facilitate.

Melissa Lamson: You’re exactly right. We offer group accountability or accountability groups that they meet in. They can decide, but at least every two weeks. Then I’ll do coaching with them individually once a month. A lot of those coaching sessions are about, “Okay, turn the volume down on the stories you’re telling yourself” if they’re negative. It’s just like, “Turn it down or try to change channel if you can, and then just keep persevering.”

I think to your point, Russell, it’s really about acceptance. It’s funny, my father always called it awfulizing when I grew up. It’s like, “Listen, stop awfulizing.” Then I’m like, “That’s such a great word.” So I’ve brought it back into my vocabulary. It’s like, “The awfulizing is going to happen.” And it’s just like, “How do we just keep going? No one gets over there.”

Russell Benaroya: Well, I think you speak to that a bit on the website. You X out a lot of phrases: “I don’t know where to start. I’m too old. I don’t have time.” It’s a clever mechanic on how you talk about the opportunity. Why was that important for you to communicate?

Melissa Lamson: Yeah. Well, those are certainly the objections. That’s the thing. When you start talking at least to this particular target group, women over 40, they have amazing ideas. All of their projects are different, and they’re all incredible. I love all of them. Actually, there were 10 projects and totally people pitched. So they’re all great. 

Every time I talk to them about a great project, it’s amazing. But then they immediately start to say, “Yeah, but I don’t think I could do it. I don’t have time, and maybe I’m too old to start this. I don’t have money” and all that. And so I wanted to highlight that like, “Look, these are just excuses. These are just head trash. This is just awfulizing. Let’s turn that around for you. Let’s make it happen.” Yeah. 

I think it’s important to say too we validate all those ideas in the interview process. If there’s an idea that for some reason isn’t a fit, we’ll either pass them on to someone else who we think could help them or tell them, “Hey, go do this and this and that.” One woman I spoke to I said, “Look, go take three days by yourself on a mountain. And go just write down a whole bunch of stuff and get clear about what it is that you really want to do.” So hopefully, we can add value that way too if they’re not quite ready to come into the Action Tank.

Russell Benaroya: If somebody is listening to this and trying to pattern match with other accelerators they’ve seen in the market like maybe a Y Combinator or TechStars, would you say that Recreate is like the Y Combinator for women over 40 or that’s not an entirely symmetrical comparison?

Melissa Lamson: No, I think that’s true. I’m not sure if that accelerator focuses on early-stage. So we’re really focusing on early stage,  pre-revenue, pre-really looking for serious funding. Then we have the opportunity to be the funnel.

In fact, the Arizona Commerce Authority has partnered with us this year because they have an accelerator program that really focuses mostly on funding and getting funded. And so they can funnel into their program when they’re really ready to chase serious capital for their business. 

We’re just really saying, “Hey, let’s get this business solidified. Let’s get you a business plan. Let’s get you a timeline and a budget. Let’s get this off the ground and running. And if we can get you your first 10 or 20 clients in the door, terrific, so that you are making some revenue by the time you get out of it.” That’s really what we’re looking at. So I don’t know for sure if that’s the goal of the other accelerators, but that’s ours and also the fun factor piece. We really want to emphasize that, too.

Russell Benaroya: Y Combinator and TechStars have fueled many businesses that you know very well like Airbnb or Uber and others. So their platform is really about accelerating the instantiation or the inception of the business idea and elevating the profile of those businesses to a group of investors that are eager and hungry to capitalize. I’m speculating that’s a little bit different here in that maybe not all of the businesses that you’re bringing into the fold are all about like, “Venture, venture, venture.” So maybe tell us a bit about that. 

Melissa Lamson: Yeah, for sure. Some of them are comfortable with self-funding, others are interested in getting some sponsorship. Actually, we had two nonprofits built with us. And they’re relying on sponsorship and funding for donations and sponsorship as for how they would fund a nonprofit. Yeah.

Russell Benaroya: Got it. Got it. So the outcome is not about, how do you capitalize on this business? The outcome may be, “Hey. You, as an entrepreneur, have a solid plan, a clear value proposition that the pillars or foundation of the business building are in place.” And now you have some level of confidence on, “Okay, what are the next steps to continue executing?”

Melissa Lamson: That’s right. We can get you to six, seven figures. Then if you really want to take it bigger than that, then we’ll make introductions for you. And that’s why we do the pitch event is because they meet these women who have really gone after big capital. They are VCs, they are angel investors. And so it goes from just mentorship to really possible, serious money from those introductions.

Russell Benaroya: Tell me about some of the other businesses that launched out of this first Action Tank.

Melissa Lamson: Oh, sure. There’s a resale shop, like Goodwill but a boutique that provides job training for youth with disabilities. Her whole thing is really the job training component of it but in the context of this resale shop, so that’s really neat.

Then there’s a woman who is a travel concierge. And so she built a platform for women over 40, actually, who want to go on adventure trips and just spend more time. They want someone who really knows that time of life to be able to build those trips for them. 

There’s another woman who is building a dating platform, so she’s writing a book and a workbook paired with that. The purpose is like, “How do I approach my dating life with a lot more intention? What do I want? Who am I? What should my partner be like?” So, for those who really are looking for long-term relationships. And it’s a terrific idea. Even though, obviously, it’s a pretty big market. There’s a lot of dating platforms out there. But she’s really nailed it in terms of her differentiation. 

Let’s see. Then there was a leadership consultant who came up with a model or framework for leadership around if you want to consider all of your employees’ leadership skills. Not only those with actual management responsibility or leadership responsibility, but how do you develop leadership skills in everyone? So it’s a pretty cool framework as well.

Russell Benaroya: What has been an unexpected challenge in getting Recreate off the ground that you hadn’t anticipated? It’s never quite a straight of a line up into the ride as we think it is to build new ventures.

Melissa Lamson: Yeah. Good question. What has been an unexpected challenge? I think I underestimated how much work it is. It’s a lot of work, and so I’ve been just in the process of getting a team together to help me execute. So I really need to be in that position of talking to potential members and talking to the press and talking to multipliers and partners to fill the Action Tanks and to continue to run them.

By the way, we do have one running in the Bay Area coming up also in April. Then I’m in conversations with other city leads as we call them around the country to start Action Tanks in every state which would be our goal eventually is to run them there. I need to be present to do all of that, but there’s so much back-end stuff that I need support with. So I guess I’d say that. Getting that team in place so that it all becomes a really well-oiled machine is great.

Russell Benaroya: Is that your genius zone? Is your genius zone being on the front end of this, being out there talking to sponsors and market leads? Where are you in your highest and best use?

Melissa Lamson: Well, it’s funny that you say that because I actually discovered that about myself. I’m really good on the back end. I built a website. I’m fine with using new software tools. I love learning them. It’s fun for me.

But the genius zone is building those relationships and pulling those people together. My biggest joy, just Saturday night, was to have the editor-in-chief of the Phoenix Business Journal be like, “Oh, wow. I really wanted to meet the managing director of Golden Seeds.” That’s awesome. And for them to be connected and to be able to introduce all these incredible, generous, lovely humans who are doing amazing things for entrepreneurs to each other.

If I can continue to do that and we get stronger and stronger as an entrepreneur community, we have more gender balance in that community, I will have achieved what I set out to do.

Russell Benaroya: Was there something strategic about starting the first Action Tank in Phoenix other than the fact that you live there? Is there something about Phoenix that made it…  And maybe this is revisionist history, but made it… Well, it’s a really good market to start.

Melissa Lamson: That’s a good question. Because maybe if I lived in Austin or Silicon… We actually moved here from the Bay Area. If I still lived there or in Austin or Denver or someplace where the entrepreneur community is really strong and really big, I don’t know if there would have been as much opportunity or if I would have seen as much of a need. But here, it’s still just very fresh. It’s growing. There is a really solid community here. I’ve good friends who are doing incredible things with Phoenix Startup Week, with Startup AZ Foundation. They all have similar names. I don’t remember it all. Arizona Commerce Authority, obviously, as I said.

They’re all just trying to do great things, and we’re growing as a city. But I think that’s exactly it. We have the opportunity to grow a lot more business here locally. And so that was one of my interests in starting this is, how can we get more women contributing to that economic growth, to that startup growth in the cities that maybe doesn’t have as much of it?

Russell Benaroya: What can we be doing as listeners to support female entrepreneurs in our community? 

Melissa Lamson: Love, love, love that question. Literally, if you’re sitting around having a glass of wine or a cup of coffee with your friend and she says, “Gosh, I’d really love to X. I’ve been dreaming about Y.” Then you go, “Go do it. Go talk to Melissa. Go find out how you can do it. Go talk to the local agencies that support entrepreneurs. Go out there to any entrepreneur group and just talk about your idea, and just start doing it.” Because I guarantee that at least 50% of those ideas could turn into viable businesses.

Russell Benaroya: Mm-hmm. Great advice. I want you to touch one more time on your expansion plan. So you said in April, you’re launching an Action Tank in the Bay Area. Can you still hear me, by the way? 

Melissa Lamson: I can. Yeah. 

Russell Benaroya: Okay. Oh, great. You never know with technology blips here and there. Okay, so what else is-

Melissa Lamson: Coming up? 

Russell Benaroya: -slated? 

Melissa Lamson: Yeah. We have one scheduled for Phoenix, and they’re all hybrid models. So there’s three live events in each Action Tank. We had about half of the group fly in for those in Phoenix. So, Phoenix and then the Bay Area are scheduled starting in April. Then working on Denver, working on Boston, getting those scheduled. Those would probably start in June.

Russell Benaroya: This is a six-month commitment?

Melissa Lamson: Correct. 

Russell Benaroya: Okay. What other commitments are embedded in that? So it sounds like you got to be present some portion of the time, what else?

Melissa Lamson: Yeah, you need to be present for the live events and then attend the accountability groups which is a smaller pod of three or four or five women depending on the size of the group. Then the individual coaching. There are three virtual classes.

So there’s funding options, there’s legal advice in terms of trademarks and patents and setting up your entity, and then there’s also tech tools. And so it’s good, obviously, if you can attend those as well.

Russell Benaroya: Unlike some of the other accelerators where you’re accepted into the program and then that accelerator takes an equity stake in the business, your program asks the participant should they be accepted to make an investment, they have to pay to participate. Is that somewhat circumstantial in where you’re at right now in the journey of the idea? Or is that actually a really important part of the overall experience?

Melissa Lamson: Yeah. We believe that it’s an important part of the overall experience because when people invest money, they tend to be more committed. Yeah, that’s really important at the moment. It may be down the line that there’s an equity play. We’ll see how it evolves. But right now, yeah, there’s a payment that’s paid.

Russell Benaroya: Yeah. Great. Okay, so the last question for you. What is something that you wish people asked you about Recreate or about you and all the DEI work that you do that they don’t often ask you but you’d love to share?

Melissa Lamson: Okay. Oh my gosh, that’s a hard question. What I wish people would ask me.

Well, I guess, what is your real passion in all of this? The bottom line is I want more women to be… I guess I see a lot of us working long days whether it’s home, family, work, jobs for everybody else. Then we spend our evenings in front of Netflix. I feel like that’s such a waste of brainpower and energy. Not the working hard part but the evening just decompressing time. 

If we can find a way to balance that a bit more and just take some of the great ideas that we have that give us a lot of energy and happiness and get them out there in the world, that’s the ultimate reason why I do this is I’m just really passionate about women, particularly, feeling happier and excited about their lives.

Russell Benaroya: If somebody wanted to go and learn about Recreate right now, where would they go?

Melissa Lamson: Yes, at recreatenow.org. Or you can email me directly at info@recreatenow.org.

Russell Benaroya: Terrific. Melissa, thank you so much. Such a pleasure to spend time with you today. You’ve definitely opened up a vehicle or a vessel of opportunity for women over the age of 40 to find themselves or community to realize these great ideas that they have. But for all the reasons we talked about, they tell stories about they don’t have time or they don’t have access or they’re too old or whatever. You’re like, “No, you can do this.”

You’ve created a place to make that happen, and the results are showing. You have a cohort of members that just graduated. You’ve received some great media attention. You have new markets that you’re expanding to. So thank you for all the work that you’re doing and for helping create opportunities for entrepreneurship to thrive.

Melissa Lamson: Thank you, Russell. It’s been a pleasure. You’re a great podcaster.

Russell Benaroya: Well, thank you so much. Thanks so much, everybody. Have a great day. Appreciate you spending time on the Stride 2 Freedom podcast. We will see you next week. Bye, everyone. 

Melissa Lamson: Bye.