Inc. magazine - Inc Feb 2017

made it hard for her to breathe.

Williams had hit a wall, as so many entrepreneurs do. She’d worked hard to get established, and to get distribution and sales, and then, not only does the economy crash, but her body goes haywire as well, interfering with her livelihood. True to the jock cliché, Williams wasn’t about to quit. She went to work with doctors and changed her diet to recover physically.

For help in recharging her business,
she called on some high-powered
friends. Sallie Krawcheck, former CEO
of Smith Barney and now the head of
Ellevest, a fntech startup aimed at wom-
en, became an unofcial adviser after a
mutual friend got them together. “She’s a
serious businessperson and has an in-
quisitive business mind,” says Kraw-
check. “I’ve given her advice when she’s
asked for it, mostly along connections
that I could make for her: experts to
become part of her team or advisers.”
And Williams has supported her
friend as well. She’s an investor in Elle-
vest, which is focused on the gender
gap that women face not only in pay but
also in investing, and how resolving those
gaps demands diferent investing phi-
losophies and strategies for women.

That gender pay gap issue is one that falls right into Williams’s court. After rising to the Top 10 on the W TA Tour, she emerged as a leader, an outspoken advocate for women. She was ultimately an unstoppable force in closing the prize-money disparities that existed between men and women in Grand Slam tournaments. She even faced down the tofs at the All England Lawn Tennis & Croquet Club (where the Wimbledon tournament is held) the day before she played the

2005 fnal. She was 25. Her willingness to lead was perhaps a precursor to her role as a business owner. Their shared experience of gender issues made Williams a natural investment partner for Krawcheck and Ellevest. She took a piece of the startup’s second fnancing round.

Last spring, Krawcheck organized an
informal meeting in San Francisco so
Williams could meet with “awesome”
women entrepreneurs and VCs.

By 2015, she began to reboot EleVen,
realizing that the brand wasn’t in a posi-
tion to grow. She decided to buy out her
manufacturing partner and assumed sole
ownership. The need for a top-shelf
operating manager led her to Rosen, a
former partner at the retail strategy and
management consulting frm Parker
Avery Group who has worked at major
retailers and boutique investment outfts.

Rosen spent a couple of months as a consultant to Williams to help her develop a three-year strategic road map for EleVen. The experience convinced Rosen to go all in. “After spending a short period of time working side by side with Vee, and seeing her vision and goals coming to fruition, my passion and love for the brand grew,” she says.

In an industry where brand cachet
comes and goes—think of Ellesse, Tensor,
or Fila—Williams’s challenge is to create
a brand that won’t lose its power when
her backhand inevitably does. She’s more
than aware of the issue: “A lot of celebri-
ties put their name on something like a
clothing line and suddenly they come out
with 500 SKUs, and no one understands
how that could happen, because there
was no culture, no message—they just
suddenly appeared.”
Running an apparel company and
being a tennis star don’t seem to have
much in common. Tennis is the selfsh
pursuit of perfection. Your team (agent,
coach, hitting partner, physio, cook, etc.)
is dedicated to your winning. In business,
the owner has to put the team in position
to win. “On the tennis court, it’s just me,”
says Williams. “I’m very hard on myself,
because I have to get the whole job done.
In tennis, I believe in one winner. That’s
a great thing about business. There isn’t
just one winner. There’s room for every-
one to win if they deserve it. I love that.”
And unlike on the court, in business a
do-over is possible if something doesn’t
go according to plan. After months of
work, Williams decided to completely
scrap her frst collection. “When you’re
frst starting,” she says, “and you’re trying
to understand what your voice is and
what you want to say, sometimes it can
be easy to be unoriginal and easy to think
about what everyone else is doing. I
wasn’t pushing myself enough.”
Likewise, she had to make a tough
call on dumping her manufacturing
partner. It’s a classic make-or-buy deci-
sion, especially for young companies, and
she had got it wrong. “We should have
been more hands-on and kept production
in-house,” she admits. “Perhaps I’m not a
production expert, but since then I’ve
learned a ton.”
The company still does most of its
manufacturing in L.A., in part for mar-
keting reasons and also because it allows
for faster manufacturing. “Made in
the U.S. is important to us,” says Rosen.
EleVen is headquartered near
Williams’s home in Palm Beach
Gardens, Florida. Here she has central-
ized the once-disparate parts of her
business. When she’s in Palm Beach

“They know your name, and they
respect what you’ve done in athletics.
But they don’t automatically
think you can transfer that focus
to a business.”

• GRADUATE

In 2015, Williams earned a business degree from Indiana University East without taking a break from tennis. Still on the tour, she’s now getting a master’s in interior architecture.