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Photograph: Splitshire
Women: The Builders Behind Alli Webb, Codie Sanchez, Melanie Perkins and Rita Case
A stay-at-home mom whose $40 house calls became Drybar. A founder who started over with $300 and the rent due. Thirteen women who built salons, software, dealerships, factories and fortunes — often after losing nearly everything first.
Produced and Edited by The Bourgeois Society Staff
Our Women list: thirteen founders and owners — in beauty, addiction recovery, media, investing, auto retail, funeral service, construction, manufacturing and design technology — whose companies carry whole communities with them.
Selected on the obstacle climbed, the thing built, and the good given back — and fact-checked line by line, with sources linked under every profile.
Co-founder, Drybar — Los Angeles, CA
Official links: Website · LinkedIn · Facebook · Instagram
Image: So Money with Farnoosh Torabi
Why We're Inspired
Alli Webb spent fifteen years as a professional hairstylist, then stepped away to be a stay-at-home mom — and found she could not stay away from the work she loved. She began offering $40 blowouts in other mothers' homes, a mobile side hustle for busy moms that worked so well her clients needed a place to come to her.
In 2010 she opened the first Drybar in Brentwood, California, built on a cheerful promise — “No Cuts. No Color. Just Blowouts!” — and grew it into a beloved national chain of more than 150 locations.
It is the kind of rise business magazines celebrate. What they cannot see is what it cost her to stand at the top of it.
“People think you sell your company and your life's great and you go live on a beach. It's just not that simple.”
The Story
In 2020 Drybar's product line sold to Helen of Troy for $255 million — and at that very peak, Webb's private life was coming apart: a marriage ending, one of her sons struggling with addiction, and her mother gone within three months of a lung cancer diagnosis.
Behind the success she fell into what she calls a deep depression. Instead of hiding it, she wrote it down.
Her memoir and business guide, The Messy Truth, became a USA Today bestseller, and she has kept building in the open ever since — co-founding the massage brand Squeeze and returning to hair with Messy, a line made for undone, air-dried hair.
Her message to other founders is the one she had to learn herself: the messy part is not the opposite of the success story. It is part of it.
Sources
SUCCESS — “Alli Webb on Selling Drybar for $255M and Losing Herself”
Listen Notes / Gratitudeology Podcast — “Rewind: Alli Webb — ‘The Messy Truth’ from Founding Drybar to Finding Myself” (bio)
Glossy — “Drybar founder Alli Webb on her new anti-blowout product line, Messy”
More from The Bourgeois Society: The full list · Tato Corcoran · Cali Estes
Founder, Sober on Demand and The Addictions Academy
Official links: Website · LinkedIn · Facebook · Instagram · X
Image: Sober on Demand
Why We're Inspired
Dr. Cali Estes knows rock bottom from the inside — twice. In her late twenties she built an eight-figure fitness company, lost it in the economic downturn, and ended up homeless, at one point losing her belongings in a fire.
She rebuilt a career working in addiction treatment, until the day she walked out of a toxic rehab job with $300 in her bank account and rent due. Her husband asked what the plan was. Her answer was to start the company she wished had existed when she needed help.
She printed cheap business cards, handed them out at gyms and coffee shops, and within forty-eight hours had her first paying client — enough to cover the rent and the car payment.
“I built The Addictions Academy with $300 in my bank account, a laptop, and a vision to professionalize an unregulated field.”
The Story
That $300 start became a global recovery enterprise. The Addictions Academy, the training school Estes built, now offers more than forty-five courses — from recovery coaching to trauma specialism — and has certified more than 60,000 addiction professionals in forty countries.
Alongside it, her Sober on Demand service brings concierge addiction and mental-health support directly to clients in their own homes, including the celebrities, athletes and executives who look invincible from the outside. Estes is blunt about why the work matters to her: she is building, for strangers, the real-time help she once needed and could not find.
Sources
Founder's Story (Listen Notes) — “Dr. Cali Estes: The Untold Truth About Addiction, Fame, and Why Rehab Is Broken” (Ep. 273)
ENSPIRE Magazine — “Dr. Cali Estes: Founder of Sober On Demand Coaching & Recovery Services Worldwide”
CanvasRebel — “Meet Dr. Cali Estes”
More from The Bourgeois Society: The full list · Alli Webb · Chelle Neff
Founder & CEO, Urban Betty — Austin, TX
Official links: Website · LinkedIn · Facebook · Instagram · X
Image: Chelle Neff official website
Why We're Inspired
At sixteen, Chelle Neff was not dreaming about building a company — she was thinking about survival. Raised in poverty in a home shaped by addiction, with no roadmap and no safety net, she enrolled in cosmetology school through her high school because it was practical, immediate and could support her.
Licensed at eighteen, she worked her way from a Supercuts chair to higher-end salons and then to a small suite of her own.
When she opened Urban Betty in Austin in 2005, she was the whole business: for the first months her own styling income had to cover both the salon's expenses and her household, and it was years before she could hire employees or secure the loans to grow.
“I didn't have a safety net. So I built one.”
The Story
The salon she kept afloat by hand is now one of Austin's largest independently owned salon companies — multiple locations, nearly 100 team members and more than $6 million in annual revenue, with a place on the Inc. 5000 list of fastest-growing private companies four years running and her own product line launched in 2021.
Just as notable is what she built inside it: level-based career paths, training and transparency about how the business works, so stylists can build real careers instead of renting a chair and hoping. These days Neff spends more of her time speaking and mentoring other business owners — handing the next woman the roadmap she never had.
Sources
LevelDo — “From Lone Hairstylist to $6.5 Million Dollar Salon Owner: Interview with Chelle Neff, Founder of Urban Betty”
Austin Woman — “Summer of She: Chelle Neff”
Salon Today — “Building Careers, Not Chairs: The Systems Behind Sustainable Growth”
More from The Bourgeois Society: The full list · Cali Estes · Codie Sanchez
Founder, Contrarian Thinking — Austin, TX
Official links: Website · LinkedIn · Facebook · Instagram · X
Image: Foundr
Why We're Inspired
Codie Sanchez grew up a public-school kid in Phoenix, the daughter of a small-business owner and a special-education teacher, and climbed into a Wall Street career where she was often the only Latina in the private-equity room. The rooms never quite stopped underestimating her — so she left them.
Instead of chasing glamorous startups, she started buying the businesses nobody makes movies about: laundromats, car washes and other cash-flowing Main Street companies whose owners were ready to retire.
Her first boring business was a laundromat, and it taught her the lesson her whole career now teaches: ownership of ordinary businesses is a road to freedom that is open to ordinary people.
“She who holds the money holds the power.”
The Story
Today Sanchez runs Contrarian Thinking, the media and education company she founded to teach that playbook at scale, and her book Main Street Millionaire became a New York Times bestseller. She owns a portfolio of more than two dozen Main Street businesses, and Inc. reported that her companies did more than $31 million in revenue in a single recent year.
The mission underneath the numbers is the point she returns to again and again: putting ownership of real, local businesses into the hands of people the finance world overlooked — especially women and Latinos who were never invited into the rooms where she started.
Sources
Inc. — “Codie Sanchez Turned Boring Businesses Into a $31 Million Company. Now She's Teaching Others the Playbook”
YesPress — “Codie Sanchez — The Boring Biz Empire Builder”
Everything-PR — “Codie Sanchez Businesses: Contrarian Thinking and BizScout”
More from The Bourgeois Society: The full list · Chelle Neff · Emily Marlow Beck
President, Marlow Auto Group — Winchester, VA
Official links: Website · LinkedIn
Image: Virginia Automobile Dealers Association
Why We're Inspired
Emily Marlow Beck never planned to sell cars. She earned her bachelor's degree from the University of Virginia and a law degree from American University, then built a legal career in Washington focused on auto-dealer compliance — learning the family business from the lawyer's chair.
In 2010 she came home to the Shenandoah Valley to join Marlow Motor Company, the dealership group her family founded in 1947.
The handover she expected to ease into arrived all at once: just months after her return, her father suffered a heart attack and quintuple bypass surgery, and the third generation had to lead — immediately, and in the open.
The Story
Lead she did.
Beck is now president of the group, which runs three franchised stores in Front Royal, Winchester and Luray, and she has built its reputation as much on community as on cars: she created a Cares Committee to unite her teams around causes from animal-shelter adoption events to food drives, and championed Degrees@Work, which gives employees and their families no-cost college degree pathways and tuition support.
The industry has noticed — Beck was named Virginia's nominee for the TIME Dealer of the Year award, the first woman to hold that nomination for the Commonwealth since 1998, honored for exactly the combination she leads with: business success and long-standing community service.
Sources
Virginia Automobile Dealers Association — “Emily Beck: Time 2026 Dealer of the Year for Virginia”
Virginia House Joint Resolution 169 (via LegiScan) — “Commending Emily Marlow Beck”
Inside Automotive (Listen Notes) — “Emily Marlow Beck on Leading a Third-Generation Dealership”
More from The Bourgeois Society: The full list · Codie Sanchez · Leila Hormozi
Co-founder, Acquisition.com — Las Vegas, NV
Official links: Website · LinkedIn · Facebook · Instagram · X
Image: Goss Media
Why We're Inspired
Leila Hormozi's childhood asked her to grow up fast: a first-generation Iranian-American, she spent much of it looking after a household while her mother struggled with addiction. Her teenage years spiraled — by her own candid account she was arrested six times in eighteen months, mostly for underage drinking.
The turn came when her father told her, plainly, that he was afraid she was going to die. Hormozi rebuilt her life the way she would later rebuild companies: deliberately, measurably, and all in.
She lost some eighty-five pounds, trained as a personal trainer and became a top seller in her region — learning, in the gym, how much of success is simply behavior, repeated.
The Story
With her husband and partner Alex Hormozi, she went on to co-found and scale a string of fitness and software companies before co-founding Acquisition.com, the holding company that invests in and scales service businesses.
The portfolio she helped build generates more than $250 million in annual revenue, and Hormozi's own route to running it — arrests and rock bottom to the head of a nine-figure portfolio by around thirty — is one she tells without varnish.
That honesty is the point: she speaks about her past precisely so that people who feel underestimated, or written off, can see a worked example of the way up.
Sources
Foundr Podcast (Listen Notes) — “637: How One Decision Separates a $1 Million Business From a $250 Million One — Leila Hormozi”
Young and Profiting — “Leila Hormozi: The Leadership Mindset That Changes How You Operate in Business and Life”
CEO.wiki — “Leila Hormozi: CEO, Acquisition.com” (biography)
More from The Bourgeois Society: The full list · Emily Marlow Beck · Lisa Baue
Founder, Funeral Women Lead — St. Charles, MO
Official links: Website · X
Image: FuneralVision
Why We're Inspired
Lisa Baue was thirty, and a third-generation funeral director, when her father's sudden death put the family business in her hands overnight.
What she did with it, over thirty-eight years of ownership, was transform a single funeral home in St. Charles, Missouri into one of the Midwest's leading deathcare companies: four funeral homes, a flower and gift shop, an eighty-acre memorial gardens and mausoleum, a centralized care and cremation center, a cremation society and even a pet cremation business — a company serving thousands of grieving families every year, in a profession where trust is the entire product.
“My mission and my heart have always been in funeral service, and I wanted to give back.”
The Story
In 2019 Baue and her son sold the company to the publicly traded Park Lawn Corporation — and instead of retiring to the golf course, she went back to work for the women coming up behind her.
She founded Funeral Women Lead, dedicated to advancing women's leadership in funeral service through mentorship, coaching and leadership training, and coaches deathcare professionals through her practice as Your Funeral Coach.
Her memoir, Wake-Up Calls, shares the hard-won lessons of a career spent leading through loss — her own included — with its proceeds directed to scholarships and leadership opportunities for women in the profession.
Sources
BoldJourney — “Meet Lisa Baue”
Funeral Women Lead — “About” (Lisa A. Baue, Founder/CEO)
FuneralVision — “Lisa Baue, the Founder and CEO of Funeral Women Lead, Is Dreaming Big”
More from The Bourgeois Society: The full list · Leila Hormozi · Lisa Bilyeu
Co-founder, Quest Nutrition; President, Impact Theory Studios — Beverly Hills, CA
Official links: Website · LinkedIn · Facebook · Instagram · X
Image: Cathy Heller
Why We're Inspired
Lisa Bilyeu was raised in a traditional Greek family in London, where the script for a woman's life was written early: marry, keep the home, support your husband's dreams.
She followed it faithfully — film school behind her, she spent eight years as a housewife, cooking, cleaning and cheering on her husband Tom's ambitions while her own went quietly unfulfilled. The ache for more would not leave her alone.
With no business background and no roadmap, she co-founded Quest Nutrition with Tom in 2010 and helped build a protein-bar startup into a billion-dollar company — rewriting, order by order, the story that had been written for her.
“I want more!”
The Story
Bilyeu's second act is devoted to other women's turning points. As president of Impact Theory Studios, the media company she co-founded, she hosts Women of Impact, a show spotlighting women who have faced down adversity and built meaningful lives — a programme whose conversations have been viewed hundreds of millions of times.
Her bestselling book Radical Confidence turns her own method into a manual: confidence, she teaches, is not something you wait to feel but something you build by showing up, especially on the days self-doubt is loudest. It is the lesson of her own eight lost years, offered to anyone standing where she once stood.
Sources
Leap Academy (Listen Notes) — “Lisa Bilyeu: From Housewife to Billion-Dollar Boss, My No-BS Guide to Radical Confidence”
Women of Impact (Listen Notes) — podcast presented by Lisa Bilyeu (presenter's own biography)
BusinessABC — “Lisa Bilyeu” (profile)
More from The Bourgeois Society: The full list · Lisa Baue · Melanie Perkins
Co-founder and CEO, Canva — Sydney, Australia
Official links: Website · LinkedIn · Instagram · X
Image: Gold House
Why We're Inspired
Melanie Perkins was nineteen, teaching design software to fellow students at the University of Western Australia, when the frustration that built Canva first took hold: the professional tools took a whole semester just to learn.
She left university and started small — Fusion Books, an online school-yearbook tool run from her mother's living room in Perth with her partner Cliff Obrecht, which grew into Australia's largest yearbook platform. The bigger idea, a design tool anyone could use, proved far harder to fund.
Investors rejected her more than a hundred times across three years — wrong country, no technical background, a couple for founders. When she learned that the investor she most needed to reach, Bill Tai, networked at kitesurfing gatherings, she did the obvious thing. She learned to kitesurf.
“Failure was never an option. Being rejected a lot just meant I had to try harder.”
The Story
Canva launched in 2013, and the tool the gatekeepers passed on now serves more than 240 million people a month, with annual revenue in the billions and an employee share sale valuing the company at roughly $42 billion.
Perkins, still its CEO, has signed the Giving Pledge alongside Obrecht, committing the bulk of their wealth to giving — with a particular focus on fighting extreme poverty. Her two-step plan for the fortune, as she tells it, is disarmingly plain: build one of the world's most valuable companies, then maximise the good it can do.
For every founder still collecting rejections, her file of a hundred no's is the exhibit that matters: the no's were never the verdict. They were the tuition.
Sources
Lenny's Podcast (Listen Notes) — “The Woman Behind Canva: Melanie Perkins”
Leaders — “Melanie Perkins and the Rise of the $40B Unicorn, Canva”
Surface Magazine — “How Tenacity and Rejection Fueled Canva's Colossal Growth”
More from The Bourgeois Society: The full list · Lisa Bilyeu · Sara Blakely
Founder, Spanx — Atlanta, GA
Official links: Website · LinkedIn · Facebook · Instagram · X
Image: Wikimedia Commons
Why We’re Inspired
We’re inspired because Sara Blakely heard “no” from every hosiery mill, wrote her own patent at her kitchen table to save the legal fees, and still became the youngest self-made female billionaire of her era. And when she sold a majority stake, she handed every Spanx employee $10,000 and two first-class tickets — because the win was theirs too.
“Don’t be intimidated by what you don’t know. That can be your greatest strength and ensure that you do things differently from everyone else.”
The Story
Blakely failed the LSAT twice and spent years selling fax machines before she cut the feet off her pantyhose and invented a category. She launched Spanx with $5,000 of those fax-machine earnings, wrote her own patent, and built the shapewear brand mill by mill and store by store.
A majority-stake sale valued Spanx at $1.2 billion; Forbes estimates her net worth above $1 billion, and she remains a significant owner and board member — and has since founded Sneex.
Through the Sara Blakely Foundation and The Red Backpack Foundation she funds and mentors female founders, and she was the first female billionaire to sign the Giving Pledge, committing the majority of her wealth to causes that lift women up.
Sources
Inc. — “Sara Blakely: 19 Inspiring Power Quotes for Success”
Forbes — Sara Blakely profile
LinkedIn — Sara Blakely, Founder and Inventor of Spanx & Sneex
More from The Bourgeois Society: The full list · Melanie Perkins · Rita Case
President, CEO and Owner, Rick Case Automotive Group — Sunrise, FL
Official links: Website
Image: Rick Case Automotive Group
Why We're Inspired
Rita Case built her company the long way: alongside her late husband Rick, from the business he founded with a single dealership in 1962.
When the couple moved to Fort Lauderdale in 1985 they opened the first Hyundai and Acura dealerships in the United States — both of which became the top-selling dealerships in America — and kept building from there.
After Rick's death, Rita carried the group forward as its president, CEO and owner, and today the Rick Case Automotive Group stands as the nation's largest female-owned and operated dealer group: twelve dealerships across South Florida and Georgia, and a team of more than 1,450 associates serving customers the Case way — like best friends.
“I'm proud to be proof to the next generation that the auto industry is a great business and provides support to their community.”
The Story
In 2024 Case received one of the industry's highest honours, the TIME Dealer of the Year award — only the fifth woman in fifty-five years to earn it.
The community record behind the award is its own empire of goodwill: Rick Case Bikes for Kids, launched by the couple in 1982, has given more than 120,000 bicycles to children in need; together Rita and Rick created fundraising initiatives that raised more than $120 million for South Florida organisations; and the Rick Case Habitat Community she launched with Habitat for Humanity of Broward is set to become the largest affordable homeownership community in the county's history.
Scale and story, in one person.
Sources
F&I and Showroom — “Rita Case Makes Her Mark”
Rick Case Automotive Group — “About Rick Case Automotive Group” (official site)
citybiz — “Rita Case Wins Prestigious TIME Dealer Of The Year Award”
More from The Bourgeois Society: The full list · Sara Blakely · Sharon Gillenwater
Founder, Boardroom Insiders — San Francisco, CA
Official links: Website · LinkedIn · Instagram
Image: Sharon K. Gillenwater official website
Why We're Inspired
Sharon Gillenwater came from working-class roots, and she built her company the working way: by hand.
A writer and journalist drawn into San Francisco's startup scene, she founded Boardroom Insiders to do the job nobody else wanted — painstakingly researching the work styles, initiatives and habits of Fortune 500 executives, one profile at a time, so enterprise sales teams could finally get a meeting with the C-suite.
There was no venture-capital cavalry: she bootstrapped the company for more than a decade, consulting on the side to make payroll, and raised just $275,000 in total, from three people she knew personally. The first business she had tried years earlier had not survived; this one was built to need no one's permission.
The Story
The patience compounded. Boardroom Insiders grew to around $5 million in annual recurring revenue on the strength of customers who loved the product enough to follow it from company to company — and when buyers came calling, Gillenwater ran a competitive process and sold the company to Euromoney in 2022 for $25 million, all cash at closing, no earn-out.
As majority shareholder she has since done something almost no founder does: published the whole anatomy of the deal, dollar by dollar, in her book Scaling with Soul and on her own site — where the fees went, what the shareholders received, and what she walked away with — so the next bootstrapped founder can negotiate with her eyes open.
Sources
Built to Sell Radio — “Why This $5M Business Sold for $25M Cash” (Ep. 537)
KC Apex — “Case Study #100: Doing the Work That Brought $25M”
Sharon K. Gillenwater (official site) — “Dealmaking 101: How Much Money I Walked Away With After I Sold My Business For $25 Million”
More from The Bourgeois Society: The full list · Rita Case · Tato Corcoran
Owner, Brandt Molded Marble — Milwaukee, WI
Official links: Website · LinkedIn · X
Image: Acquiring Minds
Why We're Inspired
Tato Corcoran was born and raised in the San Francisco Bay Area and spent the first decade of her career in Silicon Valley tech, at Salesforce. During the pandemic she began flipping homes and building a small portfolio of rental units in Milwaukee — and then made the leap that defines her story.
In June 2022 she bought Brandt Molded Marble, a sleepy Milwaukee manufacturer of moulded-marble sinks for bathroom vanities: roughly $400,000 in revenue, three employees, equipment unmaintained and prices unraised in close to a decade. She knew nothing about manufacturing.
By her own telling, the seller had not really built a business — he had built himself a job — and for the first four months of ownership she cried on her kitchen floor every day.
The Story
She kept the keys and did the work: reconfiguring the factory with new equipment, writing the company's first employee handbook, installing Profit First accounting and learning the trade from the floor up.
Eighteen months in, revenue had more than doubled; 2023 closed above $1 million in sales, and by 2025 the company reached $1.6 million in revenue — four times the business she bought — while she started a family and kept growing her rental portfolio on the side.
Corcoran talks about all of it, the tears included, with unusual openness, including what it means to be a woman running a factory. It is exactly that honesty that makes her story useful: not a highlight reel, but a worked example of buying something small, unglamorous and nearly extinct — and bringing it back to life.
Sources
Acquiring Minds — “How to 4x a Small Manufacturer” (update interview)
Acquiring Minds — “When You Buy a Glorified Job, Not a Business” (first interview)
MFG Broadcast — “Reviving a Sleepy Manufacturing Business, with Tato Corcoran” (Ep. 35)
From the People in This Story
The Messy Truth — Alli Webb
Wake-Up Calls — Lisa Baue
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More from The Bourgeois Society: The full list · Sharon Gillenwater · Alli Webb