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).