“Family and business are not separate. We have a finite number of hours and amount of energy in our lives - how we spend them is a series of choices we must consider with intention”
- Leonora Zilkha Williamson
We bring out the best in people
and teams.
Leonora Zilkha Williamson has been in and around family enterprise her entire life.
In 2019 she founded her own business, Platinum Rule Advisors, that serves families, their offices and their companies through best-in-class executive coaching, facilitation, and training. Leonora also teaches Family Business, Negotiation and Corporate Social Responsibility at Vanderbilt University, and is a frequent speaker on topics including Negotiation, Legacy and her signature topic, “Succession Planning for Love”. She created the business because she believes in the power of strong families.
Leonora’s story
Leonora’s paternal grandfather was a banking entrepreneur in the Middle East and Europe and her maternal grandfather was a trust and estates lawyer in New York City. Her father was born in Cairo, Egypt, to an Iraqi father and an Israeli mother. He first came to the US at age 19 to attend college. Her mother was born in New York City to a southern father and a mother from Maine. Despite major differences in religious, geographic and cultural upbringing, Leonora’s parents fell in love and enjoyed loving support from both sides of their family. With numerous cousins on both sides, Leonora considers her large, warm, loving extended family on both sides - today scattered around the world - her greatest gift. In fact, family is Leonora’s primary personal value.
When Leonora was three, her parents moved from London, UK (where she was born), to New York City to found the magazine Art&Auction, which they built from scratch and sold. The family then moved to Maine, where with other family investors, her parents bought Sabre Yachts, which they still own today. Leonora, along with father and brother, serve on the board.
Leonora’s own career has spanned a variety of businesses. After graduating from Princeton University with a degree in Russian Language and Literature, she joined Brown Brothers Harriman in New York. She then moved across the street to JP Morgan, where she spent a year in New York working in Latin America M&A, and 2 years in Santiago, Chile, where she worked on all investment banking products. These foundational years provided a strong background in corporate finance and capital markets.
But, as Leonora likes to say, when she looked at the women senior to her in banking, she liked their purses and shoes but not their lifestyle. She attended Harvard Business School for her MBA, and joined the Boston Consulting Group (BCG) after graduation, spending 2 years in their Boston office. A lifelong “girlie girl” and lover of all things beauty and fashion, Leonora joined Estee Lauder in New York, where she spent 8 joyous years. Her roles included launching MAC Cosmetics first e-commerce site outside North America in London, and serving as Executive Director of MAC International with a purview of over 60 countries. She played these roles in the context of a company that is publicly-traded and family-controlled, so the family enterprise flavor was strong.
Leonora likes to say that up until that point in her life, she had had fantastic luck with career and terrible luck with dating. Those fates changed when she met a man who was living and working in Portland, Maine, the home of her maternal extended family and where her parents still live. They rapidly fell in love within twelve months, Leonora had moved to Maine, gotten married and was expecting her first child. She was looking forward to raising her children three blocks from her parents, but - as the saying goes - “we plan and God laughs”. Her husband received a promotion that sent the young family to Chattanooga, Tennessee, and they moved when their first daughter, Louise, was 8 weeks old. Second child Annie followed 15 months later, and Leonora focused her time and energy primarily on them.
During the years of raising small children, Leonora acquired her first governance experiences. On the non-profit side, she was Board Chair of Chattanooga’s Creative Discover Museum and Causeway. She also joined the board of her family’s business, Sabre Yachts. And, along with 5 other women, co-founded the JumpFund, an angel investment group funding female-led companies in the southeast, a role that included board service on numerous startups. In these roles, Leonora developed a deep appreciation for governance, not only how it works, but also why it is so critically important.
In 2015, Leonora’s marriage ended, and she moved to Nashville with her two children in 2017 for a job back in the beauty industry. Despite detecting some “red flags” about her fit to the role, Leonora proceeded anyway, and was fired four months later. As with so many of life’s pivotal moments, her initial reaction to being fired was despair - she was in a new city with two young children, no job and very few contacts. At the same time, she had seen in her family many examples of powerful resilience, and had a deep-seeded sense that she would be ok. Rather than updating a resume and seeking the next job, Leonora spent a year talking to anyone who would talk to her about one question that obsessed her: Do you love your work? If so, how did you figure out what that work was?
Leonora has hundreds of pages of notes from these lunches, walks and coffee meetings, and perhaps one day they will become a book. But through these conversations, she affirmed the widely held wisdom that people who love their work are operating from their natural gifts. She was equally struck by how difficult it is to discern for ourselves what our natural gifts are. So she asked some people who knew her from many different life chapters and was astounded to hear them speak with a unanimous voice: Leonora, you are a teacher and mentor.
This message landed as deeply true from the first time she heard it. Reflecting on her time in other professional roles, Leonora realized that she had always gravitated toward both receiving mentorship, and teaching and mentoring others, The insight was bittersweet - on the one hand, she was grateful for the clarity. On the other, she had no training as an educator, and the idea of starting anew in her mid-forties felt daunting. But when she created the Venn Diagram of what she knew how to do - business, marketing, governance, especially for family and founder-owned businesses - with what was in her heart - teaching and educating - the overlap was executive coaching. She completed her coaching certificate from Newfield Network in 2019, and today holds the designation of PCC (Professional Certified Coach).
Platinum Rule Advisors was founded in 2019 by Leonora Zilkha Williamson.
She began her career in investment banking and management consulting.
In those environments, personal life and professional life were, for the most part, not to be mixed. She found this phenomenon curious – people walked into work each day with their whole stories, and her most productive working relationships were those where she formed personal connection. Her passion for focusing on a whole person was born.
Her role as Executive Director, International at M⋅A⋅C Cosmetics (Estée Lauder subsidiary) was the perfect way to put this passion to work. Leonora’s team was responsible for delivering a P&L generated in over 60 countries, yet the brand managers in each country reported to their Estée Lauder country head, not their M⋅A⋅C head. This dotted line relationship meant Leonora could manage only with “carrots” and no “sticks.” She traveled around the world listening to concerns unique to each market. Which products work well in Asia? How do we ensure our visual branding is appropriate in deeply religious countries? How do we navigate complex regulatory environments that delay launch timing for new products in some of our most prominent countries? These are the types of problems Leonora solved by working through others in cultures not her own. It was a challenging task and she loved every minute of it.
In all these roles, Leonora grew through relationship.
As a junior banker and consultant, she sought mentors. As she advanced, she continued to rely on mentors and began mentoring others herself. Her favorite conversations were ones where someone left feeling better, empowered, more confident. She sometimes wished that she could do that all day.
Then Leonora entered a new career phase.
Caring for her two daughters became her primary focus and professional projects assumed a new form. Among the most fulfilling of these was co-founding with five other women an angel fund investing in female-led startups across the Southeast. With tiny revenue bases and constantly changing business models, startup investing is 99% betting on teams – right up Leonora’s alley. And serving on boards? A deeply satisfying experience in helping others reach potential.
She had moved her family to Nashville for a job back in the beauty industry. She recognized that she wasn’t a perfect fit with the brand’s positioning, but took the job anyway. After four months she was terminated. That experience threw Leonora into despair. She spent almost a year in discernment, trying to figure out where to go next.
Then Leonora got fired from a job.
She had hundreds of coffee dates. Spent hours in downward dog. Walked miles with her golden retriever. Got back into bed after dropping off her kids some mornings and just cried. But most importantly, Leonora - who loves to write and often takes online creative writing classes - realized that if her life were a book, she could identify the plot and the characters, but had lost touch with the narrative themes. She promised herself that she would not seek a new venture until she understood the "why" that tied her life together. And after almost a year, that "why" became clear. Leonora's true calling is helping other people reach their potential.
She named her company Platinum Rule Advisors because if the Golden Rule is treating others as you want to be treated...
the Platinum Rule demands treating others the way they need to be treated, the philosophy at the heart of the company.
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