Hello NAWBO Chicago!
I am excited to take the helm for the year ahead as we navigate together through what promises to be another challenging year. As your President for the 2025-26 term, my primary goal is to guide each of you to leverage NAWBO as a powerful tool to champion your own business. Did you know that women business owners now constitute over 40% of all business owners in America—a statistic I love and one that underscores our collective strength.
As women business owners, we inherently wear many hats. We are the strategists, the innovators, the marketers, the customer service representatives, and, often, the chief coffee makers. In the whirlwind of entrepreneurship, it is so easy to get caught up in the day-to-day grind and inadvertently lose sight of one crucial truth: we are the most important champion our business has. Consider this: Who understands your vision better than you do? Who can articulate your passion with more conviction? And who will fight harder for your dream? The answer, unequivocally, is you. Yet, how often do we tend to shy away from the spotlight, defer to others, or even downplay our own significant contributions?
NAWBO’s core position and promise is to be a welcoming collective of women business owners, providing an engaging community that actively fosters connections, collaboration, advocacy, and inspiration. During my term, we are committed to getting granular on what this truly means for each of us. We need to have a CLEAR mission – we “NAWBO” because we need what clarity brings – Confidence, Leadership, Education, Advocacy, and Relationships.
* Confidence to enter any room and genuinely hold our own space while garnering respect with integrity.
* Leadership to inspire those who are coming up behind us, guiding them with our experiences.
* Education to continuously grow in our respective fields of expertise and in our employment of others – we always need to be learning and developing.
* Advocacy to use our collective voices to inspire change that helps us all reach higher as business owners.
* Relationships to offer a helping hand or a listening ear to another woman business owner, or to confidently use another sister’s helping hand or listening ear when we ourselves are in need.
These examples are just the tip of the iceberg of what we can achieve when we fully understand why we NAWBO and then use this newfound clarity, combined with our collective voices, to inspire meaningful change, support ourselves and others, and leave a lasting legacy of mentorship for those who will follow in our footsteps.
I sincerely hope you’ll join me as we embark on this journey to make NAWBO even better for all of us, both now and in the years to come. I genuinely look forward to meeting all of you, whether in person or virtually, over these next 12 months. Please do not hesitate to reach out to me or any NAWBO staff member if we can assist you in any way.
All my best,
Lynette DeRose
Managing Director of Supporting Strategies | Chicago Southland
President of NAWBO Chicago