Celebrating Female Success and Entrepreneurship

When Tara Lorigan had the idea for Co.OfWomen , a company dedicated to encouraging and championing female entrepreneurship, she had been struggling to find her own female mentorship for another project.

“It was about supporting entrepreneurs. I formed an advisory board of four fantastic guys and off I went. It became apparent to us all within about 18 months that the model wasn't going to scale or it definitely wasn't going to scale easily.”

“I was looking around for entrepreneurs to provide some mentoring or input into what I was doing. I became aware that, as women, we were not really well served at all, in terms of trying to be serious in our business endeavours.”

It was here that she found the gap in the market.

“I thought, "This could well be the opportunity.” I spoke to my advisors and they said, "Do some research and see if it is a thing that you'd like to do”. At the time also, by their encouragement, I went off to find a female entrepreneur to be my mentor.”

“That was Dr. Lee Mathias, who is the founder of Birthcare and Labtests, amongst a range of other things. Lee mentored me through the process of researching and trying to develop a model that could scale, which took another 18 months to do. That involved a whole lot of research and trying things. That was really the driver I think, my own personal journey of saying, ‘Where are the people that I can go to who can inform my journey because they've been there and done it?’”

“I honestly didn't realise that’s what it was at the beginning. When we started to grow after we launched our in March 2012, I had several conversations with our members and got to work out how best to do the job of helping them to grow their business and how to get this intelligence, this wisdom and understanding out to as many women as possible.”

“Our original model, which was a very traditional ‘hands-on’ business support model, was distinguished only by the fact that it was about business owners sharing their intelligence. But as we started to build more and more millennials in our original membership offering, we started asking, ‘How can we use digital?’ Taking the intelligence of our community, putting it into a digital format, and sharing that with women.”

“It became a wonderful combination of these women getting to be generous and getting to share their business with the world. It's a really great marriage of business advantages and a female desire to be supportive.”

Today, Co.OfWomen is in its sixth year. The brand, now the largest female business brand in the country, encompasses both a comprehensive digital platform that features members sharing about success as well as how-to tools and thinking, and the hands-on business support options.

Co.OfWomen instigated both Women’s Entrepreneurs Week, which ran alongside International Women’s Day (the 8th of March), and the New Zealand Hall of Fame for Women Entrepreneurs, to celebrate the diverse accomplishments of women as platforms to encourage women working on their own success.

Lorigan is immensely proud, but it wasn’t always easy. Beyond the extensive time researching, she experienced a lot of self-doubt.

"I think what happened in the early years as I learned how much I had to learn myself was my confidence just got eaten away. My vision went from being really big to actually thinking, 'Oh, can I even do this thing?' even after we launched."

“Of course, by this stage I had a board of some of the country's most experienced women and really had the benefit of their input. I suppose I got lucky in many ways. Through some good fortune, I collected these women's brains and was able to draw from them and grow my confidence in that process.”

 “Support organisations like Co.OfWomen are [almost] non-existent. Everything else for women is just networking. We exist because we don't want women to end up going through life feeling pain that's completely unnecessary because actually, they have whatever it takes. Learning how to be commercially successful, anybody can do that, but it's the whole response to it. We're trying to make women aware of this at the early stage, so that they don't have to go through that.”

“Women tend not to look at what their strengths are. They tend to be aware of what they don't have and go after learning, learning, learning. My advice is, you have already got what you need to be successful and you're going to learn the rest. You'll be fine.”

Learn more about Co.OfWomen on their website.