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For many people, the word ‘entrepreneur’ conjures images of no-nonsense men in stuffy suits, but it’s an outdated idea.
Many people want to be entrepreneurs; it’s one of the fastest-growing career paths today. But most people who decide to make that leap don’t get very far. A successful entrepreneur needs to cultivate the proper connections, have creative and innovative ideas, and be honest in the way they run their business.
While entrepreneurship may have been dominated by men in the past, today women forging their own paths are nothing unusual.
In fact, here are seven female entrepreneurs to keep an eye on as we make our way into 2021. We’ll go more in-depth on what it is that lets them stand out from the rest of the pack.
Annetta Powell
When it comes to hard work and perseverance, Annetta Powell is no stranger. Born to deaf parents in Pontiac, Michigan, she experienced her fair share of early challenges and hardship.
These challenges only served as fuel to her passion. She knew she wanted more and that she would have to make it happen herself. By age 24, she realized that she could never become a millionaire working for someone else. She had to think bigger.
Since 2001, she’s formed her very own real estate investment firm, Infinity Properties Group, which has done over $50 million in transactions, she’s also built five tax franchises known as The Tax Experts and published her first book, Finding, Fixing, and Flipping Properties.
Today, she is working on new ideas to help others realize their potential such as her newest endeavor, The Wealth Connect, an initiative created to accelerate entrepreneurs toward success.
Success doesn’t come without its challenges. 2009 brought forth a recession that affected not just her but the entire nation and to make matters even more complicated, Annetta was investigated and indicted for fraud.
Instead of feeling defeated, she used that fuel to create a comeback. She rebuilt her real estate empire to new higher levels, created her dream life, and now she aims to help millions of others create and live their dream lives as well.
Sharon Ourian
Sharon Ourian—a lawyer, a businesswoman, a real estate investor, and overall a visionary—has never been one to let an opportunity pass her by. When she realized how the driving school industry could be improved, she leaped headfirst into revolutionizing it, even when it meant building the foundation of CyberActive in a spare office. A Female Entrepreneurial Mindset was about to revolutionize the industry. Before her intervention, traffic school and driver’s education were frequently regarded as an inconvenience that many people have dreaded. At one time, the idea of taking these courses online wasn’t even a glimmer in anyone’s eye, but now her business is spreading, one state at a time. Today, they have graduated over 7 million students and counting.
In 2020, when it seemed that much of the world was closed for business because of the pandemic, Sharon and CyberActive took up the slack when going to the DMV and in-person driving lessons were no longer an option. In May, CyberActive unveiled their white label solution and began allowing school districts and driving schools to enroll new students to take the necessary driver’s education courses on platforms that resembled their own websites, even waiving setup and licensing fees.
Much of the money that Sharon has made with her driver’s education program has gone into her large portfolio of real estate in California.
Maya Comerota
Maya Comerota is a former health executive turned visionary entrepreneur and transformational teacher. At the age of 30, Maya had everything; a beautiful family, a beautiful home, and an incredible career, and yet something inside her was yearning for more.
After a car accident in 2015, Maya realized that tomorrow is not a guarantee and she needed to be the woman she was born to be today. This led her to leave her position and embark on a journey across the globe working with leading scientists, researchers, coaches, healers, and shamans to discover the secret sauce of success and fulfillment. Once she applied the lessons to her own life and experienced intense transformation and fulfillment, she knew she had to shout it from the rooftops... and laptops.
Since then, Maya has become an expert at personal innovation. She has created multiple six- and seven-figure companies, including a personal transformation company, 528HzInc.
Maya launched two new programs in 2020—Born For This and Living Legendary—designed to ignite and unlock the astounding potential we all have within. Because of her expertise in the field of human potential her transformation company is seeing exponential growth even during the pandemic.
She has reached upwards of 1.5 million people globally in addition to joining incredible leaders like Tony Robbins, Dean Graziosi, Pedro Adao, Bo Eason & Kyle Cease on stages around the world.
She just held her inaugural Born For This live event in December and has many more events on the books in 2021.
Dr. Bao-Tran Nguyen
Dr. Bao-Tran Nguyen is the only female-led, multi-location dental practice and entrepreneur-dentist who helps other dentists grow their practices with authority in marketing, sales and conversion.
In 1986, as a child, she almost drowned at sea while escaping communist Vietnam. This early experience is the key driver of her desire to be her own boss and never leave any opportunity on the table. With her fiery personality and "no excuses" mindset, she scaled in two short years from zero to five dental practices. Her strength is in perfecting systems and processes that allow her to view dentistry with real business objectives.
Beyond her dental practices, Bao-Tran allocates time for mentorship and advises fellow dentists to fast track their growth in her Fast Growth Practice program. Her success is due to understanding that in today’s competitive market, growing a business requires out of the box thinking. Alongside her business partner and husband, who is also a dentist, she has developed innovative ways to make sure her message is heard. Their most recent success story was building a practice from the ground up during the pandemic, and taking it from zero to seven figures in ten months. In addition, Bao-Tran is the co-creator of the “$100,000 Day Formula,” which provides a step-by-step process so others can replicate some of the same success she has attained.
Marcela Lopez
Marcela Lopez came to the US from Colombia when she was nine. Though her family had been reasonably well off, life in Colombia was dangerous. Guerilla warfare was common and her father wound up getting shot and falling into a coma for several months. When he was healthy enough to leave the hospital, he, Marcela, and her sisters left everything, forced to leave her mother behind as the breadwinner.
When they reached the US, Marcela already had big dreams. She excelled in school, eventually graduating from the University of Florida with a degree in Aerospace and Mechanical Engineering. She worked with several Fortune 100 and 500 companies, but the treatment was subpar. Sick of dealing with discrimination, she left to follow her own path.
Marcela is adept at helping people figure out where they fit in the world, so it was natural to pair that inclination with everything she had learned in the corporate world. In 2017, Marcela launched Job Platform, an engineer-focused consulting agency dedicated to helping clients land their dream jobs.
She still has big dreams, and she’s successfully helped more than 300 individuals in the technical and engineering field. With time, she intends to branch out further in the job market and launch businesses to master hiring high performers, strategize systems and corporations, and mix new engineering innovations.
Charlene Izere
Charlene Izere was young when her family fled to the United States from Rwanda as war refugees. Her upbringing in Manchester, NH left her hurtling through trauma and the gnawing feeling of otherness. Charlene grew up with the fear that she would never truly find where she was supposed to be in the world.
At age 22, Charlene moved to Boston after university, though living in the city wasn’t cheap and working for a nonprofit wasn’t lucrative. She did whatever she needed to in order to make ends meet, whether it was cleaning, babysitting, or designing assets for an ostrich company.
This led to Charlene’s first business venture as an online fitness coach. It was her first time starting and scaling a business, and she took to it like a fish to water, even with no support network, no financial help, and a limited frame of reference. Soon after, she started Soulful Systems, a VA business that recently scaled to a boutique agency, and then Melanin & Money, a hub for entrepreneurial Black women.
Charlene founded three businesses—Wellness Delivered, Melanin & Money, and Soulful Systems—but her biggest passion and goal is to make Black people, and especially Black women, more visible in the world of entrepreneurs. She is a quintessential example of why the world needs more women entrepreneurs and leaders. As a refugee, woman, and Black entrepreneur, Charlene is all too familiar with the cataclysmic barriers that welcome those who are not afforded the privileges of whiteness, but it is this ever present struggle that has only made her all the more determined to carve out her empire.
Kelly Wing
Born in the small town of Gisborne, New Zealand, Kelly Wing was a shy child, but it never stopped her from reaching for what she wanted. She began working at the age of 12 and carried on to work multiple jobs throughout university. As a result she was able to pay off her student loan by the age of 21 and went on to purchase her first property two years later.
Not content to rest on her laurels, Kelly continued working hard, and throughout her 20’s she had invested in a couple pieces of property, and within three years she had nearly $500,000 in profit just from real estate.
Kelly now lives in Bali where she works remotely and lives her dream life, running Ohwabisabi, a media platform where conscious creators and industry thought-leaders share their stories, messages, and insights with a growing fan base of thousands around the globe. Also a PR and media agency, Ohwabisabi Media is keen on helping leaders amplify their message across multiple channels, leveraging audiences well into the millions.
Initially, Kelly tried to do what she was “supposed” to do, following the established strategies that others had laid out before her. Business stagnated. Now that she’s using her own intuitive methods and forging her own path, she scaled Ohwabisabi Media to its first 30,000 month only five months since its launch.
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