How a Wedding Media Magnate Is Redefining the Exit Process for Female Founders

Intro  0:00  

Paul, welcome to the Growth + Exit podcast, where owners of privately held middle market companies talk about founding, scaling, and exiting their businesses successfully. Learn how to maximize and monetize your business on your own terms, let’s get started.

Heather Bennett  0:30  

Hello, I’m Heather Bennett, your host for the Growth + Exit podcast, featuring middle market owners and experts talking about founding, growing, scaling, and exiting their businesses on their own terms. Past guests have included Danguole Altman, CEO of CX Precision Medicine Incorporated, Aneesa Muthana, CEO of Pioneer Service and M&M Quality Grinding, and Allison Cummins, founder and CEO of Blue Outcomes. To learn more about these, please listen to their episodes on Spotify, Apple, Audible, and all the platforms that the Growth + Exit podcast is on. This episode is brought to you by Newport LLC, a team of seasoned executives who help CEOs of privately held companies grow, de-risk, and exit their businesses successfully. Newport LLC is a winner of the prestigious Inc. magazine 2025 Power Partner Awards, a list of elite b companies from across the globe. To see the entire list, visit inc.com/power-partner-awards. To learn more about Newport, please visit us at Newportllc.com or, of course, find us on LinkedIn. Before introducing today’s guest, I would like to thank Carrie Kerpen for introducing us. You can find Carrie on LinkedIn or her company’s website, wearethewhispergroup.com Today’s guest is Maggie Lord. Maggie Lord is an entrepreneur, author of six books, and the founder of Rustic Wedding Chic, the pioneering digital wedding media brand she built to millions of monthly readers before its acquisition by David’s Bridal in 2020 She is now a strategic advisor, exit readiness expert, and co-founder of The Whisper Group, where she helps female founders prepare for and execute successful exits. Maggie has become a nationally recognized voice on digital brand building, business growth, and founder-led exits, and a sought-after board director. She brings a practical founder first perspective shaped by building a category defining business. Maggie, welcome to the show.

Maggie Lord  2:47  

Thank you. I’m so excited to be here.

Heather Bennett  2:49  

So, let’s start right away with the wedding business. How, what inspired you to create Rustic Wedding Chic? Where did the idea come from?

Maggie Lord  2:58  

I was 26 and very, I guess, naive in my wedding planning journey, and I started to find some real difficulties, and this is 2008 and so this is before Pinterest and Instagram, and some of the modern tools that brides have today, and it was right at this moment in time where there was still physical wedding magazines that people were buying and looking through, and this move to a more digital experience, and so it was this perfect moment, and I was struggling. I was planning a wedding, live in Connecticut, but I was planning my wedding in northern Wisconsin. I was trying to share my vision with my vendors, I was taking blurry photos on my BlackBerry of things from a magazine, and I was like, there’s got to be a better way to do this, and so I created a very personal blog in the beginning, just very simple blog format, in order to share photos that I found from other wedding photographers’ websites, from their past weddings, and say, see, this is the type of flowers I want, this is the type of feel I want, and I very quickly realized that if I was having this challenge, so were other brides. There was not a place where we were finding a lot of ideas and inspiration in one, and it was also a perfect moment in time, because the rustic wedding scene was really popular, and rustic became this overarching term for outdoor barn farm backyard DIY garden like it really had a whole like subdivision under the word rustic and so a lot of brides were looking for this inspiration and coming up empty handed and so I decided to be that central hub where they could find resources for how to plan vendors to help them plan their big day, and then all the ideas and inspiration that they needed to make their day be as beautiful as they wanted it to be.

Heather Bennett  4:51  

That’s phenomenal. Okay, so let’s talk about those early years, because you know everyone knows, like, the when social media started, the goal was to. Go viral, so what was it like in that journey? How did you get to the point where I should say, like, what did it take to get to the point where you’re like, ‘Wow, I really have something here.

Maggie Lord  5:10  

Yeah, I mean, we, I bootstrapped. I didn’t start with a formal business plan. It was a lot of stumbling over my own feet and seeing what worked and what didn’t, but I was very confident in the niche that I has was talking to, and the niche that I was kind of creating, so these brides were obsessively reading our content, right, sometimes multiple times a day, coming to look for information and ideas, and I very early on emailed every everybody on Etsy that I could get their email address, who had a product that I thought our reader would want, and offered them advertising and opportunities, and that was the beginning of monetizing this, and that was within like the first three to four months of us really becoming a company, and when I say us, it was really just me in the early days, I quickly realized, okay, we have great readership now. I figured out how to monetize it, but we really needed to look for, like, long term, right? And so we couldn’t just depend on one revenue source, and so we created a vendor directory that was one. Then we licensed our name to product, and then we were able to, you know, write books along the way. And so we really created a lifestyle brand around this, so it wasn’t just the publishing and the media side that was just one side of it. The scaling, you know, is always harder than you think it’s going to be, and just when you hit one milestone, right, getting to the next is harder and harder. But I was really, really, really focused on on where I was going, and how I was building, and I did it with a lot of contractor employees, not many employees, a lot of contractors, and it was a phenomenal way in order to grow something from nothing, and I look at the whole trajectory of when I started at 26 not married to selling in 2020 married three kids, right, have been through the entire life cycle of this business, but I think the, the scaling parts are what you, what are the challenges, and for us, we had a huge unlock when, so, when social media, outside of just Facebook, became part of how businesses were promoting themselves, so 2008 then into like 2010 and when, when Pinterest became part of the game was when we really exploded and hit those next levels. Instagram became very, very popular for us as well to communicate and share, but for us Pinterest was phenomenal, and when we exited, I think our content on Pinterest, we had hit 10 million plus monthly impressions of our content on Pinterest.

Heather Bennett  7:52  

Wow, that is phenomenal, really. I mean, amazing, especially during that time period, as everyone was trying to get a piece of the action on social, so you talked about hiring. How did you decide who to work with, and not just like who you hired, you know, you talk about the contractors, but also like which vendors to pair with, besides the esthetic appeal, obviously that matched, but how did you decide who to work with?

Maggie Lord  8:19  

So we were very intentional. I know that, like, in order to grow a lot of times, right, you do have to hire, and we.. I kept things very personal that I was like, yes, I’m in charge of all editorial, and I ran our social strategy for a very, very, very long time. I got to the point when I realized I needed a few key hires, and they were all contractors, but one was our community manager, who handled all of our wedding vendors, who advertised with us. They wanted to change photos, and they, you know, we up sold them on different packages, and that person was really critical to the growth outside of the ad revenue. I also, you know, I don’t have a tech background, and so I quickly got a tech advisor who became part of our team, who would help as we grew, and as technology was changing, right, and I mean, we were originally built on a very simple blog format, then we got upgraded to, you know, a much bigger, and then, of course, as we got to be more of an enterprise company, we really had to build out our own technology, so surrounding myself with the people who I know needed to do very important parts of what I needed done within the company was critical, and then from, you know, an advertiser standpoint, and our vendors, we worked with everyone from very large national brands to mom and pop wedding venues on a barn in Vermont, and the reason they came to us was a couple of reasons. One, we obviously had a look and feel, right, and so it was worth their time and money to advertise or do work with us, because they knew that our brides were looking for them. And then two. Two, the data that we collected from our readers mostly were female, and they were in the active planning stage. So we know there’s so much that goes into that wedding planning experience, and the information that they need, and what they’re looking for. So they, everybody that we worked with, or advertised with us, or spend money with us, wanted to get in front of that consumer as she was actively planning right and so we had this data about kind of where they were in their stage of planning and that was important to

Heather Bennett  10:32  

them and that is so true I love that you you mentioned when you’re choosing who to work with and who to hire is and I found this that the founders that are most successful are the ones who recognize their limitations in terms of what they know or what they can do, and that’s such a great area to outsource, and there’s so many different levels and ways to do that, so really a really good point.

Maggie Lord  10:54  

Yep, I think you know you have to know what you’re good at and where your limits are, and then you seek out people who are going to compliment you in that space, and it’s going to allow you to focus on the stuff that you do very, very well, and allow you know the company to continue to move forward.

Heather Bennett  11:10  

And you mentioned some of the, you know, the turning points as you were growing. What are some other turning points? What are some other moments that, like, really stick in your head as being really really really hard or really huge wins for you while you were building

Maggie Lord  11:25  

so definitely I think getting our first publishing deal and having our first book come out in 2012 was fantastic it allowed us to to speak to our reader both online and offline right and it, it allowed me to really be a voice within the, in the wedding space, and so what, because there you know, anybody could start online, right, but when you have a published book and it’s in Barnes and Noble and all the stores, you become this expert on the subject, and so it was when the first book came out that I realized, oh, I’ve gone from just running really like presenting really great editorial and beautiful images, to I am now this expert in this this planning process. And when a book comes out, there’s all the press stuff that goes with it, and I found myself very quickly not being behind my computer, but doing the morning talk shows and the trend reports and weddings. I was, I loved that part of the company, because it allowed me to be a voice in the bigger wedding space, right. So I would go on the morning shows in the spring and talk about, here’s the top trends we’re seeing for weddings this year, you know, colors, all the things, and a lot of that came from the book publishing. I think if we hadn’t done the publishing deal, we probably would not have been able to be seen as that level of an expert, and I’m glad I, I’m glad I was in my early 30s when that happened, and had a lot of energy to do those shows, and you know, I have cute videos of my son, who was little, watching me on TV, going, “Oh, Mama, Mama, you know, and so it was a great, great time within the company, but, and personally, I was, I was so driven creatively, and to be out there, and I, it was, it was really a wonderful growth moment for the company.

Heather Bennett  13:10  

Okay, so next, you get these books, which is very exciting, and published off there, so I get that, what that feel, it’s, it’s a lot, it’s, you know, half the work is writing the book and publishing it, the other half the work is promoting it for the rest of your life, but so talk about the branded products, so you’re moving that, because I’m guessing that was the next phase after, yeah,

Maggie Lord  13:32  

yes, yes, we were approached by a licensing company who said, okay, we love your look and feel, it actually, I can back up from there. It started with a conversation with a very, very large national invitation and card company who said, we think the cards that you see in the grocery store for weddings are kind of outdated and you know old. We would love to work with you on what updating that, so that it’s matching the vibe, ultimately, that deal did not go through for a variety of reasons, but what it did was there was conversations then about, oh, Rustic Wedding Chic can license its name to product, and so we license our name to a variety of wedding products. We worked with a bridal retailer to do a line of bridesmaids’ dresses as well, that we helped curate and design, and again, what the product did is it allowed us to speak to our consumer, our reader, both online and offline, right? So, so she’d be in a store, and she’d see our product with our hang tag on it, and it just, it felt very cohesive, and I loved that. Yes, we were a hub of a resource online of education and inspiration, and all these things, but then we were actually adding to her big day in a, in a physical way as well.

Heather Bennett  14:51  

So, like, what advice would you give to a business owner when they are approached with a line licensing opportunity like. Because that’s a big, that’s a big step from this is the product services I, you know, this is what I give, and now moving on to licensing. How, what would you recommend?

Maggie Lord  15:09  

I think for a lot of companies it’s a very exciting moment, because it can be fantastic from like a revenue standpoint, but you do need to make sure that you are getting the best deal out of it, right? Like, you do need to make sure that if you’re putting your name on a product, like, and be careful, like, how much do you want to be involved, right? Because there’s licensing where they can just take your company name and logo and put it on a bunch of product, and you never have a say in what the creative is, right? And I was very intentional in that, the contracts that I signed, it was very well, you know, laid out what say I did have, what I felt I didn’t need to kind of be involved in, but I think for anybody who’s thinking about licensing, yes, it can be a great revenue producer, it opens a lot of doors, but you do want to make sure that you partner with the right person on that experience, because you want to say to like what what retailers that you want to be in and what you don’t, where you don’t want to be, right? Like, there’s important, there’s big discussions to be had. So I would not go into it unless you’ve had an opportunity to really kind of know what the values are that you want in that experience, and because it affects your consumer.

Heather Bennett  16:20  

Absolutely, I completely agree that, and having a very good contract lawyer, yes, it’s important. Intellectual property needs to be protected in so many ways. So, in the wedding area, now you’ve been in this industry for a while, and I can imagine you probably haven’t stopped thinking about it, even though you’ve had an exit. Where do you see the wedding industry going in the future?

Maggie Lord  16:47  

Um, I’m very happy that I was involved back in, like, you know, 2008 when I started. It was way less.. there’s so.. there’s just so much information that I actually, I feel bad for current couples who are trying to plan, like there’s a million apps that you can plan with, there’s a million choices for how to send out invitations and wedding websites and all the things, whereas it was a little bit more streamlined into that, there was there was major players, but there was only like a handful in each, you know, division, I think, you know the wedding industry is an amazing force of nature, and you know it’s in the billions every year, right? And it’s, and it’s an important one. It’s a huge life stage moment in people’s lives that should be celebrated how they choose to celebrate it. But I do think there is kind of.. there’s consumer, like fatigue, I think a little bit, as in there’s so much available of how to plan and where to get the information. Where, when I started in 2008 there was really a handful of places to find that information, so I think I actually think it will kind of swing back a little bit to a little bit more simpler planning and not as many tools and resources out there, but I’m also, I think, couples are choosing right now to plan events that look and feel exactly like who they are, and it reflects them, and there’s the cookie cutter wedding is no longer, and I think that that to me is a big win.

Heather Bennett  18:20  

That’s amazing, and I would like to think that what you did with your company was part of that trend, is like the idea that you didn’t have to have the wedding that everyone thought you were going to have.

Maggie Lord  18:31  

Yes, it was that perfect moment in time when I was launching Rustic Wedding Chic, that there was this movement away from a traditional ballroom wedding, right, and while there’s always a section of couples who, that’s what they’re going to want, and that’s fantastic, go plan that ballroom wedding. There just was a kind of a freedom moment of, like, we can get married on a rooftop in Brooklyn and have it look this way, we can get married on the side of a mountain, and the amazing thing is when we studied our analytics, which I was obsessed with, while running Rustic Wedding Chic, people would say, “Oh, your number one readership is probably like Aspen, and I was like, “It’s New York City, it was Manhattan. I was like, “No. I said, “They may eventually plan their wedding in Aspen, but I was like, “No, it’s.. it was really city, more city brides who were desperate for this look.

Heather Bennett  19:18  

That’s amazing. I have been to many weddings with that look, so you did a good job. Um, so let’s talk about the exit process. What, what was leading up to the moment where you’re like, when you decided maybe, maybe I should sell this company? What was the lead up, the build up to that

Maggie Lord  19:39  

we had had over the 12 or 13 years that I ran the company, we had had interest before from some of the major wedding players that you would think, right, who would like, oh, you’re doing this, let’s bring you under our umbrella, right, and we had had some kind of nice conversations, but there was, it was either the wrong time or I. Didn’t feel like it was the right home, or like there was just, you know, there was a couple of conversations that just didn’t move forward, but what it did do is it allowed me to think, in the fall of 2019 we did have a deal in the works with a large media company who had a lot of life stage moments, you know, kid and baby money retirement, all these things, and they didn’t have the wedding vertical, and I was in love with their leadership. I thought it was just going to be the best deal ever, and it ultimately did not go through for a variety of reasons, and I was genuinely heartbroken, but that fell apart in November. But what it allowed me to do was it I acknowledged that I was ready to sell the company, and that it was a sellable asset. Those were the two things I got to, and so I took my time in that December, and I said, “Okay, I’m going to really think about who I think is the right home for us, and I’m going to start January of 2020 with some outreach, obviously not having any idea that COVID would be on the horizon, but that it was, I knew two things, that I was personally ready, the company was transferable and sellable and a good asset, and I also felt very clearly like this was the company, the company was like a child who’s ready to go to college, but like, decides to live in your basement instead, right? Like, I was like, I am actually the one stifling this, like it needs to go on to its next adventure, its next life stage, and it needs to be in a, in a bigger, a bigger machine, right, with more resources. Like, I’ve taken it for 12 years, that’s a long time now, it’s ready to go on to its next stage, so I did take that time to think about who was going to be the right home, and I really felt that a bridal retailer who didn’t have as strong of a media arm, whereas the other companies I had been talking to were all media focused, would be the right home, and I emailed the CEO of David’s Bridal, in February of that year, we got a meeting scheduled for Manhattan in like march 6 of 2020 like a week before the world shut down and schools were closed and everything else, and ultimately that they were the right place, and we were able to make it work, and it was done by July and announced in October of 2020

Heather Bennett  22:26  

Phenomenal, phenomenal. What, what surprised you about that process? I mean, it’s unusual for a founder to specifically go after who they want to be bought. A strategic, yeah, it’s a good idea if you know, if you know who you want to be with, it’s a great idea, but not a lot of founders get that opportunity. What surprised you about that process?

Maggie Lord  22:49  

I had previously interviewed a bunch of brokers in Manhattan, and I didn’t love the conversations I was having for a variety of reasons. One, some of them said you’re too small, where if they’re not going to make x millions off the deal, they’re not going to take you on as a client. Another broker told me that I was in a very traditional feminine industry, and they didn’t know how to market that, and I was like, well, that’s crazy. So I literally just did what every good founder or mom, like, duh, it’s fine, guys, I’ll do it, I’ll just take charge and get it done. I think what surprised me is that there’s a lot of strategic acquisitions that happen every day, right, at that sort of level of, you know, whether it’s founder or connection or, you know, a board member, because I was not the first acquisition that David’s had done, they had acquired other wedding brands before me, I didn’t know that, but I was surprised that there’s a lot of these strategic opportunities that happen every day. I think as founders we are like, who are we to go to a big company and say, I’m going to be, you know, I’d love to be acquired by you, but I knew my company’s worth, I knew what we did well, and I knew how I could explain it to them of why it would be of value to them, and that was the superpower in the experience that when I first sat across that table, you know, their job is to sell great wedding dresses and make, you know, the bride and bridesmaids look, feel special, and they do that very well, and they knew how to run their stores, I knew the media side, and I knew the bride’s journey, and I knew that we spoke to her at 12 to 14 months before her wedding day, and David’s bridal does not – they usually interact with that bride right at when she buys her wedding dress, and I was like, well, you just got to talk to her in a variety of different ways through a different timeline, and so that was, I think, what surprised me the most was that one, these strategics happen a lot, and two, your company has value to this strategic acquirer, and it’s your job to paint the picture.

Heather Bennett  24:51  

That’s so true. And I think that one of the great things about founders is that they are entrepreneurs, and they know how to pitch, and I think a lot of times getting a. To this process, they forget that it’s like, no, no, you, you pitch to get your company off the ground, just use those skills

Maggie Lord  25:06  

again. Yeah, you have to come in. I’ve told so many women that I work with, like, okay, you’re telling me you’re burnt out, that’s fine, but when you get into that room, you need to come in with the most amount of energy and passion for your company, and then they’re not going to be able to resist it, and you know, I say a tired entrepreneur is not an attractive acquisition, right? And so you cannot come in looking like this company is hard to run, you’re burnt out, right? You need to have such passion that they can’t help but be obsessed with you and your vision and the company that you built,

Heather Bennett  25:42  

that’s such great advice, excellent. So, in the process of selling your company, you had to go through due diligence. I’m always interested to hear, because most people only go through this once. Most business owners only go through the exit process once, and that due diligence, it’s like a full-time job. So, what, what was that experience like for you?

Maggie Lord  26:04  

It was not as I think I had psyched myself up for that it was going to be absolute torture. A couple of things were going, were working with us. One, it was Covid, and so everybody was working virtually, right? And so, like, I didn’t have to go meet with my accountant in-person like, we were, you know, we were emailing documents, and so I was collecting things in an easier way than trying to get people in a room. However, I also, because David’s had done prior acquisitions, they were very intentional about what they needed, and they were an organized acquirer. I have lived through watching other women that I work with not work with a seasoned acquirer, and that can be what’s really hard in due diligence, or they’re requesting things that have nothing to do with this sale, right? So I was lucky that they had acquired other companies, and there was a little bit of a process for it, I will say it’s, it is the most vulnerable and toughest patch within an acquisition is getting through due diligence, because your nerves are really just shaking, of are they going to uncover some something that’s going to, they’re going to question the acquisition, right, because most, most acquisitions fail in the due diligence process, right. So, yeah, it’s overwhelming. I do try to, when I work with women, I’m like, you’re in the hardest spot right now, and you’re going to get through it, and you will eventually get on the other side, but it is the hardest part. It is very much like childbirth, if you remember what it’s like, you would never do it again. And so I tell women, I’m like, you’re gonna get through it, and then on the other side of it, you’re gonna forget that this was so hard, and you know you’ll, you’ll get the end result that you wanted.

Heather Bennett  27:54  

That’s awesome. So, what do you wish you had known before the process even started?

Maggie Lord  28:00  

I wish that I had been, I think, very clear. I was very clear with what I wanted from an acquisition, from the company standpoint. I was a little vague on what my next steps would be, and I wish I had planned a little bit more carefully, for, like, I would like the company to be fully acquired, you know. I want cash up front, end of deal. And now I want to go do this, and I didn’t have that. And so when, after in the negotiations, they kind of said, What are you going to do? And I said, I don’t know, because if you buy my company, I’m out of a job. And they were like, “Would you come join the David’s team? And I was like, “Well, it’s COVID, and I don’t have to move to Pennsylvania, I guess, right? And so I took a very, very high-level corporate job, which I learned a lot, and the people were lovely, but it didn’t feed my soul in any way. I just had been a lifetime entrepreneur, and now I’m in corporate America, and while I would not go back and change the experience at all, because it was, it was great the way it all worked out. I think I would have done a little bit more personal work, as in, what does post exit mean for me as an entrepreneur? Because I was not prepared to wake up, I was prepared to sell the company, I was prepared to cash the check, I was not prepared for, like, oh, wait a minute, that I’m just obsessed and thought about that passion for the last 12 years every day, and now it’s gone. Like, what’s what am I filling that void with? And that work I didn’t do, and that’s where very intentional at The Whisper Group of knowing that part of it as you plan for your exit.

Heather Bennett  29:40  

Absolutely, really good advice, and very easy, you know. A lot of times, like, you, you were very young when you exited. A lot of times, the people we’re working with tend to be in their 70s and 80s. Yeah, and they’ve never known anything but this business. Yep, so that is very much a unique experience. Experience, yeah, we

Maggie Lord  30:01  

find that a lot of women that we work with, they’re they’re ready for exit, and it’s based on a life stage, right? If they’re younger and they’re like, well, I’ve just had my third kid and now I’m over capacity and I can’t do both, or it’s a very classic, we get someone who’s like, I’m going to be 60 in three years and I want to exit at 60, so what do I do now, right? So life stage definitely plays a role in the exit,

Heather Bennett  30:25  

that’s so true, so true. So, did you have a workout, or did you afterward? It was a clean break,

Maggie Lord  30:32  

it was a very, very clean asset sale, and I mean, I was avail, I was available to them no matter what, for transit time of transition, but then I became a David’s employee, so yeah, it was no, I was became an employee for after signing papers, and I had had in my head over the years I was like, I’m going to sell my company, and maybe it will be to the nod or somebody big like that, and then I’ll go meet with my, you know, attorney in Manhattan, and we’ll sign papers, and my husband, I will go have lunch, and it was COVID, and I signed the papers in my basement by myself. You know what I mean? Like, there was no celebration, there was no hoopla, but yeah, it was, it was, it was a, it was a good, it was a good place for the company to end, and it was a great place for me to be for a couple of years,

Heather Bennett  31:22  

awesome. So, okay, so let’s talk about that transition. You’re at David’s Bridal, you’re in corporate, experiencing and learning from that stage. How did The Whisper Group come about? What, what did that.. what was the story behind that?

Maggie Lord  31:37  

I had originally said to my husband, why don’t I’ll take the David’s gig. I’ll give it a year. I’ll see if I like it. If I don’t, what’s the big deal, right? I ended up staying for two and a half years, and it was great. I wore several different hats at David’s as things the company was transitioning and changing, and so it was. It was great to be part of the senior leadership, but all along the way, in time, my entire entrepreneurial journey, I have done outside consulting, especially for female founders, right, who have said, “You build something huge, can you help me? How do you do this? And so there would be times that I was at capacity, and I couldn’t do a lot of consulting, and I had said, “I know I’m not going to be at Davis for the next five years or 10 years, so I want to know what I want to do next. And I had had so many women reach out to me after it was public, they’re like, wait a minute, not only did you sell, but you didn’t do it in a traditional way with a broker, like you masterminded this whole thing. Can you help me? Can you help me prepare my business? Can you help me think about who I should sell to, and so after I left David’s, I started doing a little bit of that work, and I had been asked to join a couple of boards of some companies, which I find to be very fulfilling. I enjoy that experience, and then through a mutual person, they said, okay, so this woman, Carrie Kerpen, is doing the exact same thing that you are doing, and you’re both equally passionate about it. You two need to get in a room and talk, and we did, and from there it became this: I’m building this, and I was building parts of something else that morphed into The Whisper Group, and so it just – the two of us came together, and we knew that we would be bigger and stronger by working together.

Heather Bennett  33:21  

That’s awesome, so So, did you guys do that at least over lunch, or was we still in

Maggie Lord  33:26  

COVID? No, no, no. Definitely, there was. There was more in-person now, because this was so.. yeah, it was definitely in-person and it was great to be able to get back to more of a normal working experience, and it’s actually really wonderful now, because having a business partner is something that I never had before, and so it’s impossible, right? When you’re a founder and CEO on your own, while you have employees or other things, you’re still the person pushing the boulder every day up that hill, right, to grow and scale, and so by having a business partner, you know it’s very much like a marriage, where on your bad days they help you, and vice versa, and you know, and you’re in it together, and two minds are better than one, and four hands work better than two, and so it’s really nice to be in a partnership,

Heather Bennett  34:13  

that’s awesome. So, tell me about some of your proudest moments.

Maggie Lord  34:18  

So, well, we’ve helped a lot of women in just the short time that The Whisper Group has been around, which has been amazing. We had a client, Marina, close last week, who is the founder and CEO of Huggables, which is a lovely toy brand, and we helped her mastermind and work through her entire exit. And this past year, Carrie and I were both named to the Ink Female Founder 500 list, which was very amazing and wonderful, but I think the what really makes us the proudest is when we get a woman over that finish line and she exits, she joins our The Whisper Group has the largest community of exit female founders, we have our communities called Acquire. Not retired, and it means something different to everybody. You’re acquired, and you go sit on a beach if you want, or you’re starting over again. But to me, to watch a woman come in and be our client, and we work with them and help them, and then eventually they exit, and then they join our collective of exited female founders. It’s the most amazing, I guess, whole transition to watch,

Heather Bennett  35:23  

yeah, certainly that pay it forward mindset is is absolutely necessary, because when you do realize what a gift it is to have an organization like the, you know, The Whisper Group help you through something, of course you’re going to want to give back,

Maggie Lord  35:38  

yeah, and that’s and then all of our advisors for The Whisper Group come from our collective of this ex of these exit female founders, because the whole point is we’ve stood in your shoes, we’ve been through it, and it’s the one piece that Carrie and I both going through our exit separately, we’re like, we had great deal teams and lawyers and accountants and tax strategists and all right, but we, I remember thinking, like, where’s my like exited female founder friend that I can call and say, can you help me through this? Can you strategize with me? Like, who just wants the best for me, right? Wasn’t incentivized because they’re taking a big percentage of exit, right? They’re just want the best, and Carrie felt the same thing, that that’s what was missing in her exit as well. And so that’s what we’re hoping to achieve

Heather Bennett  36:22  

it’s amazing, and I want to make sure we mentioned the book, The Whisper Way, that Carrie wrote, which is one of the most enjoyable business books I’ve read in the last few months. It’s written in a story format, but very hardcore, clear stated lists of what you need to be thinking about, incredibly useful for anyone who’s thinking of exiting their businesses. I found that book was, or even considering growing their businesses. There’s just so much out of that book that I found was phenomenal, and yet in a really wonderful way to read, as opposed to feeling like you’re reading a textbook. So I know it is

Maggie Lord  37:00  

very enjoyable. It’s a story setting, and the storytelling, and it does make it feel like half novel, half business book,

Heather Bennett  37:08  

exactly. So, what are you working on next? What are you passionate about?

Maggie Lord  37:12  

So, you know, The Whisper Group is growing. It’s, you know, we have so many advisors who are working with us, we have so many clients that are we’re working with that energizes us and keeps Carrie and I both busy, but also passionate that this is something needed. We are going to be hosting our first retreat for our acquired, not retired community this coming fall, which is really amazing, and we’re really going to look at that, the deep questions of, like, after you sell, right? Like, what is next? If you know what’s next, great. If you don’t, what is some of that work that you need to do look like? And then you know we really love the educational side of The Whisper Group to be able to produce content and media that helps women feel empowered that they, they have the information they need in order to get to their exit,

Heather Bennett  38:04  

that’s awesome. Definitely, definitely worth doing, especially to strengthen that community. Great idea, really, really, really good idea. So, to have all the energy to do all these amazing things. What are a few of your daily rituals that help you to stay ready to go with what I’m guessing every day is probably different given the time. Yes, you do. Well,

Maggie Lord  38:25  

I will say I just gave up coffee in the morning, which has been a little bit of torture, but I have really dedicated myself the last couple of months to making sure I’m eating healthier and more intentional about what I’m eating as we get to in your 40s and everything starts to change a little bit, I’m looking at things a little differently, so definitely prioritizing. I used to just get out coffee, start behind the computer, right, and then I’d look up and it was noon and I haven’t eaten anything, and I am working really hard to make sure that that’s not the case, and so I’m doing a lot of that. I do not get as much exercise as I should, but hopefully that will change in summer, and I’m very, very good at closing my computer around five, 530 at the end of the day, and you know, sometimes you got to open it back up, but it’s I’m really intentional about trying to create a space of separation, because I find that when I stop and I, my brain just starts to think, right, I get all the great business ideas of what we could do or build or grow, but you have to have that space away from the work,

Heather Bennett  39:40  

no, and that’s something I’ve found consistent in the time that you know we’ve had this podcast going in. The leaders that I’ve talked to, the most successful ones, tend to very intentionally set aside time, whether it’s on a long commute, whether it’s, you know, a certain, like the morning, they don’t, they don’t start calls until a certain time, or they make sure one. A month, they have a day that is completely blocked off for that, so really, really good advice. I have so many more questions I want to ask you, but we’re running out of time. I have one last question to ask, but before I ask it, I want to point people to your website at wearethewhispergroup.com or, of course, to reach out to you on LinkedIn, so the last question, what is a hard lesson you learned while starting and growing your business that you’d like other entrepreneurs to avoid if they

Maggie Lord  40:34  

can, overthinking and then not taking action steps, right? So, while I think there’s a healthy balance between, like, you can’t think of an idea and, like, put it into practice, and two seconds later, after not either modeling it out from a financial standpoint or seeing if the market wants it or your consumer wants it, I often found that I was taking a very long time to decide if I wanted to do things, and I intentionally, halfway through running Rustic Wedding Chic was like, no, I’m going to make a decision on this in 48 hours, and by doing that, it was either okay, if it was a no onward, right, like I needed to move on to the next business thing, and if it was, I had decided, and what if it was a failure, it was going to be a failure, if it was a success, it was a success, but I wasn’t going to sit in the middle for too long and be like, well, we could do this or we could do that, and I find a lot of founders do that because a lot like me, I was very siloed, right? I didn’t have a C suite around me to all kind of say yes, we should do this or no, we should not, so if you, especially being a solo entrepreneur, you need to be able to make decisions and move the company forward.

Heather Bennett  41:46  

That’s excellent advice. I’ve been talking with Maggie Lord, the founder of Rustic Wedding Chic and co-founder of The Whisper Group. Maggie, thank you so much for sharing your story and your experience and your advice. This has been wonderful. Thank you. I’ve really enjoyed my time.

Intro  42:10  

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