What 8 Years of Backing Women Founders Taught Me About What It Takes to Build a Business That Lasts

The Women Presidents’ Organization, a peer advisory network for women running multimillion-dollar companies, announced its 19th annual list of the 50 Fastest Growing Women-Owned/Led Companies in May 2026. The honorees generated more than $8.5 billion in combined revenue and employed more than 23,000 people in 2025.

WPO functions as a peer group. Founders apply, get vetted by other founders and build inside rooms designed specifically for that purpose. Plenty of other factors explain why these particular businesses ended up on a list like this, and the peer structure is only one piece of that picture. Still, relationships showing up this consistently in the background of durable, fast-growing businesses is hard to write off as coincidence.

I’ve spent eight years investing in and working alongside early-stage women entrepreneurs, and the founders who make it rarely do it alone. The entrepreneurial journey is a relentless climb full of sudden drops and sharp turns, and it can feel isolating, especially for women navigating the added pressure to prove themselves.

The founders who struggle are rarely short on talent or a strong product. More often, they’re isolated at the exact moment they need support the most — trying to solve funding, marketing and production challenges all at once with no one to call when things go sideways. The ones who make it have mentors and peer networks to turn to who have already walked a version of the road ahead.

An audience watches a founder succeed. A community is invested in helping her keep going. Attention gathers around the visible wins, the launch, the press coverage, the funding announcement. What’s harder, and far more valuable, is building a group of people who are present while a founder is still figuring things out.

Sometimes that group is customers who become genuine believers. Sometimes it’s other founders who show up when things are falling apart. Either way, it’s the group that refers others, rallies when it matters and comes back again, and it produces something an ad budget can’t buy: retention, real word-of-mouth and long-term loyalty.

Here are four shifts I’ve watched define the founders who build it:

1. Build the room before the audience

One piece of advice founders hear constantly is to get in front of as many people as possible, as quickly as possible. It sounds right, but reach without trust is just expensive noise. I’d replace it with something less flashy. Go deep with a small circle of mentors and peers who understand what’s being built and believe in it, then go wide.

That sequencing is the thesis behind how we built the Enthuse Foundation: community, education and capital, in that order. Capital alone doesn’t solve a growth problem if a founder hasn’t built the relationships and support system to use it well. I’d rather see a founder spend a year building 50 real relationships than a year buying reach from strangers.

In practice, that work is slower than most founders want, which is exactly why so many skip it. It starts with creating a space where people can be honest about setbacks as openly as they celebrate wins. Some of the most powerful community moments I’ve watched happened outside formal programming, such as two founders genuinely connecting, or one founder calling a peer instead of sitting alone with doubt.

2. Let community shape the product

Beauty brand Live Tinted is a well-documented example of this. Founder Deepica Mutyala built a community platform around open conversations about colorism and beauty standards years before Live Tinted sold a single product. By 2025, that brand had grown its retail footprint to every Ulta Beauty location — 1,400 stores nationwide — and marked the milestone with its first national TV campaign, according to trade coverage of the launch. Mutyala has described the growth as driven largely by word of mouth, a result of building the conversation space before there was a product to sell.

That sequencing is the opposite of how most founders are told to launch. Instead of building an audience to eventually sell to, structure the earliest version of the business around a smaller group’s actual problems, then let the product follow.

3. Measure relationships, not reach

In 2023, a bracelet from Little Words Project’s Taylor Swift-referencing collection went viral. Founder Adriana Carrig kept the collection limited, in part to protect the independent retailer relationships the brand had spent a decade building. According to Carrig’s account on the Modern Retail Podcast, the viral moment added less than 1% to sales, since the brand’s community was already built before Swift’s fans discovered it. Other brands that leaned harder into similar viral moments saw bigger spikes, but less staying power.

That’s the same instinct that separates founders creating value for their community from founders extracting it. Impressions and follower counts don’t capture that kind of restraint, and neither does revenue if it comes at the community’s expense.

I ask founders to keep checking a simpler question: Are they creating value for the people who trust them, or extracting it? The founders getting this right treat every viral moment, product drop or partnership as one more chance to serve the people who already trust them.

4. Build systems that scale beyond you

The other pattern I’ve watched separate founders who last from founders who stall is what she does with the time her peer network buys her. Founder thinking runs on gut instinct and personal conviction, solving problems only the founder fully understands. CEO thinking builds systems, such as delegation, institutional memory and planning on a longer horizon, so the business keeps working when the founder isn’t in the room.

The stakes here are well-documented. A 2025 McKinsey analysis found that 78% of companies that build a successful product and reach product-market fit still fail to scale, largely because they never make the shift from founder-led, instinct-driven decision-making to a repeatable, systemized approach.

In my experience, founders who don’t make that transition tend to hit the same wall, usually right around the point where the business outgrows what one person can hold together. The ones who make it deliberately, rather than being forced into it by a crisis, are almost always the ones who had someone else to call while they figured it out.

Reach still matters. A brand needs to be discoverable. But discoverability without a community behind it tends to produce a spike rather than lasting revenue. The founders on this year’s WPO list got there by spending years investing in relationships, and even at nine and 10 figures of revenue, those relationships are still what they call on when things get hard. That’s the growth strategy I keep telling founders to run: fewer impressions, deeper rooms, longer relationships.