A Renaissance Moment

Every so often, the economy shifts in a way that changes how people work and, more importantly, how they think about work itself. We are standing in one of those moments now. Call it what it is: a renaissance. The original Renaissance was born of disruption, when old certainties collapsed and people responded with creativity, craft, and commerce. Ours is no different.

Across the country and around the world, women are reassessing their relationship with income, security, and control. Inflation has redrawn household budgets. Technology is reshaping entire industries faster than institutions can respond. The single paycheck, once the bedrock of financial planning, now feels to many like a single point of failure. And so women everywhere are doing what women have always done when the landscape changes: they are building.

Some are professionalizing what used to be dismissed as a side hustle, turning skill and passion into a structured source of alternative income, whether passive, semi-passive, or fully active. Some are launching a first enterprise after years of thinking about it. And many are already deep in the work, running micro enterprises and small-to-medium businesses that employ people, serve communities, and carry families. Every one of these women belongs in this committee.

I came to entrepreneurship the way many of us do, through necessity at times of transition in life, walking through doors that opened because I kept moving forward in spite of the challenges. Over the years I have built companies operating across twenty-six countries, in markets that could hardly be more different from one another. I have learned in boardrooms and governmental ministries, but the lessons that stayed with me were mostly learned the hard way: the contract that fell through, the market that changed overnight, and the seasons when the business grew faster than I did. I share this for one reason. I know what the road feels like at every stage, and I know that no one builds anything that lasts and succeeds alone.

That conviction was formed in some unusual places. Today I serve as CEO of Phoenix Global, headquartered in the United States and the Middle East, advising governments, ministries, and Fortune 500 companies in some of the world's most complex markets, and as co-founder and principal of Provenance Family Office Advisory. My road has run through a senior business development role supporting members of the Royal Family of Abu Dhabi, and through humanitarian work in refugee camps, where I saw what a single small enterprise can mean to a family with nothing else to stand on. In June, I launched my newest venture, Wealth Warriors. I list these things for the same reason I listed the failures: they taught me that opportunity is built, never found, and that every builder is stronger with a network behind her.

That word, stage, sits at the center of how this committee will operate. A business moves through distinct seasons. There is the starting phase, where an idea must be validated, structured, and protected. There is the growth phase, where demand tests capacity and every decision about money, people, and time carries significant weight. There is the long middle, the maintenance-and-innovation phase, where a business must hold what it has built while constantly reinventing itself, because standing still in this economy is akin to moving backward. And there is the operational phase, where the enterprise is established, either thriving or still finding its footing, and where questions of leadership, succession, and legacy come into view.

The NFBPWC Entrepreneur & Small Business Committee will serve women in every one of those seasons, deliberately and without division. We will never split our programming into beginner and expert tracks. Every topic we take up will be framed twice: what it means when you are starting, and what it means when you are scaling. The founder validating her first idea and the owner negotiating her tenth contract will sit together, because each stage carries something the other needs. Experience flows down. Fresh eyes flow up. That exchange is the whole point of not only this ESB Committee, but NFBPWC as a federation.

I say that as someone who has lived it. BPW has been part of my life for years and across borders. Within NFBPWC, I serve as Vice President of the NFBPWC Virtual Club and spent 2024 to 2026 as our International Liaison. Internationally, I am a member of BPW Galway in Ireland, the BPW International U.N. Standing Committee, the BPW Women on Boards Committee, and the BPW Strategic Redesign Group for Governance and Leadership. Everywhere I have worked in this federation, I have watched the same thing happen: a woman walks in with a question and walks out with a network. That is what I intend this committee to be, at scale.

You will feel that commitment in our rhythm. As your chair, I commit that together we will deliver a full twelve-month calendar: a public-facing webinar and a working committee meeting every month, promoted together and recorded, with no dark months. Consistency builds trust, and trust builds community.

My intention is plain. This committee will be the epicenter of entrepreneurship, business growth, and leadership within NFBPWC. We will meet the marketplace as it actually is: challenging, ever-changing, and increasingly borderless. Every business today, whether a one-woman consultancy or a fifty-person firm, must look at itself through a lens of constant transformation and network expansion. Technology is rewriting cost structures, geopolitics is reshaping supply chains, and connectivity allows us to take a community business and make it global. Customers can be anywhere. Talent can be found across oceans. Globalization is the water every business now swims in, whatever its size, and our programming will reflect that reality, from practical technology adoption to certification and government contracting to taking a business beyond our borders.

Education, though, is only half of our work. The other half is commerce and community. We will come together to learn from one another's experience, and we will go further: we will build with one another, finding collaborators, customers, suppliers, and partners inside our own membership. The NFBPWC Member Business Directory and our Marketplace exist so that when a member needs a service, her first call is to another member. A federation that buys from itself, refers to itself, and invests in itself grows stronger with every transaction.

What makes this committee unlike any other seat at the table: entrepreneurship touches everything. Finance touches it. Health touches it, because a burned-out founder builds nothing. Advocacy touches it, because policy shapes the environment in which small business lives or dies. Our military-affiliated members bring bespoke knowledge pathways. Our sustainability advocates are shaping how every business will be judged for decades to come. Our leadership and mentoring programs are developing the very women who will run these companies. This committee touches every other committee and working group in NFBPWC, and cross-organization cooperation will be a defining feature of how we operate. Expect co-hosted programming, shared platforms, and formal partnerships across the federation, because a member's business does not live in a silo, and neither will we.

So, consider this an open door. If you are thinking about starting something, come. If you are three years in and tired, come. If you have built, sold, and are building again, come, because someone in this room needs exactly what you know. Watch for our monthly webinars and committee meetings, add your business to the Member Business Directory, and reach us anytime at smallbusiness@nfbpwc.org.

The renaissance is here. The business landscape will keep shifting and evolving; that much is certain. The only real question is whether we face it alone or together. In this committee, the answer is together, and we are just getting started.

Larisa B. Miller
Chair Entrepreneur & Small Business
smallbusiness@nfbpwc.org