Spotlight
Meet Adrienne Garland, The Founder of She Leads Media
She Leads Media is a women-focused and led conference, production, and marketing communications consulting company.
Adrienne Garland is the CEO and Founder.
She Leads Media not only upholds women in the business space, but helps women attain the knowledge they need to launch, ground, and scale their own businesses. Garland’s business serves a variety of clients. They range from non-profit, for-profit, psychological services, art, marketing, and more.
She Leads help women to reassess their marketing plans/strategies, support their overall business objectives and ensure they are generating profit and revenue.
After Garland graduated from The New York University School of Business, she began working in corporate America and noticed a few things. First, there was a lack of women role models for young, female entrepreneurs.
Second, she realized women did not hold the same levels of power in meetings as their male counterparts. Lastly, the women who were in leadership roles were leading very unhappy lives. Garland did not want that for herself or her colleagues.
As she went through her career, she realized that the majority of businesspeople were all men. Women were not being represented to the same capacity as men.
Frustrated, Garland took off her rose-colored glasses and worked towards a more inclusive business world with the start of her business – She Leads Media.
Since 2013, Garland has held a conference every year in New York City. For the first 4 years, she hosted the WomanCon conference. She describes this conference as being “simply” a conference for women. However, she wanted to create a name that encompassed the higher ideal of “leadership” for women.
In 2017, she rebranded to the She Leads Conference. This conference is a platform for women, who are entrepreneurs and leaders, to step into leadership. It attracts between 200-250 women each fall.
When Garland graduated from business school, she still did not know how to start her own business. She didn’t know what it meant to be an entrepreneur. With the She Leads Conferences, Garland brings experts together to make this process a lot easier.
At the conference, around 30 speakers with a variety of backgrounds guide women through the difficulties of navigating through a world that doesn’t always support them. There were years where Garland made no profit and questioned the conference as a whole. The She Leads 2018 Conference was different.
For the first time this past October, high-level speakers were reaching out to her. In prior years, she did all the outreach. She Leads became a brand and conference that was becoming known in public relation and leadership circles. It is coming out as a conference to speak at. The conference received excellent feedback across the board, better than ever before.
She Leads provides women with technological services that can be difficult for them to acquire themselves. Garland is focusing on creating a collaborative space where women could come together to work and network.
Along with a collaborative space, Garland is hoping to own larger events spaces, video production studios, and podcasting booths. With the podcasting booths, women can come in and get their name or business out there. She Leads would provide them with editing and distribution services. These women would have access to the equipment without having to buy it themselves.
She Leads is a trusted resource for women with their best interest in mind.
The frustration Garland felt by being a businesswoman working in a world that wasn’t designed to support her has translated to a company helping hundreds and thousands of women.
With each conference, word gets out about the company and it grows.
Women are networking and supporting other women through She Leads. They are combating the disparity while coming out on top as prosperous businesswomen.
Visit She Leads to learn more about the Upcoming 2019 Annual Conference.
By: Vivianna Shields
