Women-Owned Business Series: Christine from Lavin Advisory Group

Welcome back to our Women-Owned Business Series! Today we’re featuring Christine, founder of Lavin Advisory Group — an advisory practice helping growth-stage founders of service and creative businesses, earning between $500K and $3M in revenue, stop being the bottleneck in the business they built.

The inspiration behind Lavin Advisory comes from Christine’s own path: over two decades across corporate, startup, and nonprofit sectors, followed by seven years building and running Fit2Bmom, a maternity activewear brand that closed at 40% of her exit goal. She had the drive, the market, and the customers — what she didn’t have was the operational foundation or the right advisory support at the right time. That gap is why she built Lavin Advisory, starting every engagement with a Bottleneck Snapshot to help founders see that what feels like a hundred problems is usually just two or three. Read more about her story below!

First, tell us about your business and anything special we should know about it or you.

I am the founder of Lavin Advisory, and I work with growth-stage founders of service and creative businesses who have built something real and are now quietly drowning in it. We are talking about founders earning between $500K and $3M in revenue who are talented, driven, and completely buried under the weight of a business that was never built to run without them. That is the person I built this for.

My path here was not a straight line. I spent over two decades working across corporate, startup, and nonprofit sectors, which gave me something I did not fully appreciate until later: the ability to walk into almost any business and identify what is actually broken, regardless of the industry. Before Lavin Advisory, I ran my own product-based business called Fit2Bmom, a maternity activewear brand I built from scratch and ran for seven years. It closed at 40% of my exit goal. I had the drive, the market, and the customers. What I did not have was the operational foundation or the right advisory support at the right time. That experience is the reason Lavin Advisory exists.

What I do is help founders stop being the bottleneck in their own business. Every engagement starts with a Bottleneck Snapshot, a focused 60-minute diagnostic session where I listen, probe, and identify the three ranked operational blockers standing between where a founder is and where they want to go. Within 48 hours they receive a written Obstacle Brief and a Loom video walkthrough of my findings. It is structured, specific, and built to give founders clarity they can act on immediately, not a 40-page report that sits in a drawer. What makes this work exciting to me is the moment a founder realizes that what felt like a hundred different problems is actually two or three root issues. That reframe changes everything.

What I find most special about this work is that I am genuinely learning alongside every founder I sit across from. My superpower is not that I have seen your exact business before. It is that I have seen enough businesses across enough industries to recognize patterns that founders who are deep inside their own operations often cannot see. I bring the outside view and the diagnostic instinct. The founder brings the domain expertise and the vision. Together we figure out what is actually in the way.

I also just completed the pilot of something I am genuinely excited about: a mastermind series I call Borrowed Brains, which brings together a small group of founders to think through real operational challenges together. The pilot confirmed what I suspected. Founders at this stage are hungry for a room where they can be honest about what is hard without performing confidence for investors or employees. I will be launching Borrowed Brains as a monthly series this fall, and I would love for the right founders to find their way to it.

Why do you feel a connection to your work?

My experience building and closing my own business lit a fire because I knew I wasn’t alone. Too many founders hit the same wall, not because they lack passion or talent, but because they’re trying to grow without clear strategy, repeatable systems, or a sales approach that doesn’t burn them out. I started LAG to be the partner I wish I’d had, helping growth-stage founders get out from under the business they built and create something that can actually scale. Making an impact drives how I work with founders.

As a business owner, community is everything. In what ways do you serve your community, and how has your community served you?

In my first business, I went at it completely alone. It was very insular and not at all motivating. I knew that when I started Lavin and Advisory Group, community was going to be an essential pillar of the foundation from which I grow and operate. I’m currently in about five different communities, mainly female founders but all different types, who aim to share as much as they want to learn. That type of collective energy fuels the work I do.

What advice would you give to others who want to start a small business?

It’s incredibly essential to understand your why. Often, this part gets dismissed as mindset stuff that can be dealt with later, but once the business starts growing and moving at a rapid rate, it will easily consume the founder if they aren’t grounded in not only systems and strategy but understanding why they are working on this business. The only wrong answer to the question of why is one that is not true for the founder.

What women inspire you and why?

There are way too many to count. I could name off recognizable names, but the reality is that it’s all of the women I am building alongside within these communities . These women show up, day after day, share vulnerably what’s not going well/what they don’t know/where they need support, then do the hard work of taking steps forward, regardless of whether they feel ready.

What do you think are the most significant challenges for small business owners or women in leadership positions?

We’ve come a long way, but I think optics still govern a lot of how we view things, meaning women business owners feel like they need to project that they have everything under control. Social media obviously fuels this because everyone, both individuals and professionals, rarely puts anything but their most polished version out for everyone to see. Women in leadership positions often feel that they need to become someone other than their true self, aversion that fits a mold rather than who they really are as an individual.

Please plug any promotions, events, or recent milestones you have!

I’m coming up on completing my first year with Lavin Advisory Group. I’ve learned more in this past year than I think I have in the last decade – tech, tools, operations, marketing, biz dev, you name it. Add this to my 30 year career which spans corporate, startup, and non-profit, I’m feeling more empowered than ever. Just this summer alone, I closed a handful of new clients, was featured on three podcasts, and had digital magazine do a profile of me. This fall, I will be presenting at a Women of LinkedIn conference and running my Borrowed Brains Mastermind series every month until December in person at my local co-working community.