Business Growth Architect Show: Founders of the Future

Ep #188: How Laura Gisborne Built 9 Companies and a Legacy That Outlasts Her

• Beate Chelette • Episode 188

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What does it really mean to live and lead without limits? For Laura Gisborne, it’s not a catchphrase — it’s her guiding principle and her life’s work. Having built nine companies and sold six, Laura could have stopped there. But a near-fatal car accident and a lifetime of overcoming trauma pushed her to step into a bigger calling: helping leaders turn their businesses into vehicles for legacy.

In this episode of Business Growth Architect Show: Founders of the Future, Laura reveals the mindset shifts and practices that keep her grounded in both business and purpose.

She takes us behind the curtain of what it means to lead with both masculine drive and feminine flow. She speaks candidly about how her early years were defined by push, grit, and survival — and how she discovered the true strength of collaboration, vulnerability, and spiritual connection. Along the way, her Limitless Women community has collectively raised more than $750,000 for global causes, proving that when entrepreneurs align their work with impact, the results go far beyond profit.

This is more than a conversation about business. It’s a blueprint for turning hardship into healing, ambition into impact, and leadership into legacy. And while this says Limitless Women, take it as a guide for Limitless You. If you’re ready to build success that lasts — not just for you, but for the lives you touch — this episode is your invitation. 🌍 limitlesswomen.com


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Laura Gisborne:

This is my ninth company. After building nine different companies, selling six of them, we're a very spiritually connected community of leaders here to use their businesses as vehicles for legacy. Our organization has collectively raised over$750,000 for causes they don't know that I was sexually molested from the time I was two till the time I was seven. Instead of push. It can be collaboration, it can be cooperation, it can be a listening. Leaders are smart, they're savvy, and their willingness to be vulnerable is actually one of the greatest tenets of success.

BEATE CHELETTE:

Hello and welcome back. BEATE CHELETTE here today with Laura Gisborne from limitless women, and even if you're a man, I want you to listen to this episode fully today, because we will talk about some things, about conscious leadership, about stepping into who you are meant to be, your limiting or limitless belief systems on whether you are a man or a woman. And one of great topics we've never talked about on the show masculinity and femininity and how it plays out, and how to use both really successfully. Laura, welcome to the show.

Laura Gisborne:

Thank you. Thanks for having me. I'm thrilled to be with you.

BEATE CHELETTE:

Thank you so much for being here. So for somebody who is not familiar with your work, will you please share with us who you are and what problem do you solve for your clients?

Laura Gisborne:

So I'm Laura Gisborne, and I'm the founder of Limitless Women. This is my ninth company. I started my first business. I kind of married into a family business. I have to give credit where credit is due in my early 20s. And fast forward now, after building nine different companies, selling six of them, the problem I solve is help entrepreneurs move from being self employed to being business owners by helping them build, I think, a little bit like you do business architecture, building foundations, building structures and systems so that the business can operate in an owner independent fashion, so that the founder can be free to do whatever it is that turns them on.

BEATE CHELETTE:

Well, I mean, that is the goal. Always. Is the goal. One of the things that I really liked about what you said when we first started talking about you coming on the show is intricately connected to the name of your business, limitless. Tell us. What does this mean for anybody? Because I think limitless is sort of this big term that people throw around and then they say, I can do anything, you can do anything, and then they need to start doing it, and then somehow it's not happening and they're hitting barriers. So what is the definition of limitless in your world?

Laura Gisborne:

I think the reality is that when we look at what we're capable of, it's often so much greater than what we think is possible right now, if you've done a lot of personal development work, and I talked about Maslow's hierarchy and growing in personal development, then you start to see more and more potential and more and more possibility. We moved this brand to limitless women, really, back in 2015 started out with different names and different iterations, but that's really what it is. I feel like there is a whole wave of people, male and female, who are doing extraordinary things, but we don't always know about them, right? I mean, our work is philanthropy first. So we're a very spiritually connected community of leaders who are here to use their businesses as vehicles for legacy. And why I feel like that's limitless is that when the body leaves, when the founder is no longer with us, the business still has an opportunity to continue to support others and carry on the mission of the work. So who knows where that goes? I don't see any limits in that work,

BEATE CHELETTE:

and you have a compelling story to tell about that when you came face to face, literally, with your own mortality. Do you want to tell us a little bit about a bit about this pivotal moment in your life when you really shifted more and more into this legacy component of your work?

Laura Gisborne:

I'm probably, like a lot of people at my age. I'm almost 60 years old, so if you've been around for a while and you've had a pretty robust experience, it's probably not, it's not one time that I would say, I would say there was a car accident that I was in four years ago. That might be what you and I talked about in our pre work, that you might be referencing. I think that the piece, but I had already had the business in motion, and it was doing what it was doing. I would say that the big catalyst for me in the car accident was really recognizing the capacity that I have to really create impact in the world. I did this work because I was asked to, I was asked to, can you help us with this? Can you help us with that? And what I didn't realize that what I was doing is what was unusual when I was building multiple companies and raising a family, and, you know, living my life, it just seemed like I was just doing. Thing, right? I couldn't see my own eyebrows, as my friend Tracy says. So looking back now that our organization has collectively raised over$750,000 for causes since we decided to do this work around philanthropy first, I'm excited to see where we're going with it, God willing. I'm well, I just had my fifth surgery after, you know, four years, but I'm feeling great. And I think again, the the business model is not about me. The business is about leaders who want to create impact with their companies, actually incorporating philanthropy and giving back and seeing themselves as catalysts for change. Not somebody else's job, not someday when I get there, but what can I do now and collectively when we come together like that, the possibilities are pretty

BEATE CHELETTE:

infinite. Well, I mean, the highest form is through me and the spiritual teachings. So when you say, through me, can you explain that so that we can give our audience a framework for that? What that means? Because, I think when we start a business, we start a business because it's an extension of our idea, and then we want to achieve certain things. And that's not what I'm hearing from you, that this is about you at all. I'm hearing something completely different. Do you mind going into that a little bit deeper?

Laura Gisborne:

Well, I think, you know, probably my training ground as an entrepreneur, might be different. I don't know what industries that you're serving in your audience, in your community, probably all types of different industries, right? I think about one of my clients I was just speaking with, who's in London, and she's a physician, so when she's gone through school, she's the healer, she's the person who's lays hands on she's the person who's responsible to partner with her patients. Right? When I look back at our our experience of having restaurants and retail stores and real estate operations, it wasn't really about me, right? It was about what was happening for the client, what was happening for the customer, and how could we serve them, but How could our company serve them? Not? How could Laura Gisborne serve them? So when I started being asked to speak and lead, and I wasn't a speaker, and I wasn't an author at the time, I kept saying, I kept praying to be shown. What is this? What is it that you guys want from me? It was my journey, like a lot of founders, trying to discover what would be in the highest and best use of my time. How could I create the greatest impact with the least amount of effort? And you know, so I went on a journey trying to figure these things out. And it's my personal belief system that everything that happens now with this work is really in the our desire is for it to be in the hands of God, for it to be something that's in the the divine service of something greater than any one individual. So it's not about me. Laura Gisborne is the founder. It's about limitless women as a community, but a community of women, and we have a few really cool men that show up now and again who support the work. We so appreciate them. But those of us who see legacy as something that's happening that we get to be a part of, I mean, it's a very privileged conversation to even be thinking about legacy versus trying to be in survival mode, you know. So it kind of puts us in a different conversation than most of the people in the world, fortunately or unfortunately, that's what it

BEATE CHELETTE:

is. Yeah, I relate to that very much. I didn't really think about legacy much until, literally, a couple months ago, people were asking me and say, Hey, can you give us all the materials that you've created over the last 20 years on how to run these strategy sessions and these processes and systems, and can we have them? So I'm going to ask you this question, because when you know it sounds great to say legacy, but I think the legacy part also means a vulnerability and a opening up and a giving things to other people that you worked so hard to create for. How do you reconcile that is that, was that ever an issue, or was it just clear that this was going to happen through you and you were willing to share it with the world? Yeah, are you

Laura Gisborne:

asking? Did I ever have an ego? Yes, I did have one, and I still have one today. Absolutely, absolutely, I'm still a mere mortal in a human body and doing the best I can each day. What I know is that there's nothing that I teach that wasn't taught to me first, right? What I know is that money is not my money, that money comes to me and through me in service to my service to others. And what I know is that it's all very, very temporary anyway. So if I can use the little bit of time that I have on the planet to create a better, easier journey for someone else, it's my pleasure to do that, because there were people who did that. For me, it's easy for someone to look at life from the outside of someone else in social media and say, Oh, it looks like this person has it all together. None of us really know what someone else has gone through. People see me today. They don't know about my childhood. They don't know that I was sexually molested from the time I was two till the time I was seven. They don't know about those scars and how they impacted my relationship with myself as a woman. They don't know about me traveling around for decades, really being a man trapped in a woman's body. Reality. And what I mean by that is that all of my business in my early years, it was like push and drive. And you and I talked about that, right? What I would consider are the masculine components that are really positive, that I love, around focus and willingness to really stay on track. I think those are beautiful masculine attributes. I think that masculine attributes sometimes a push is not so good. It's not so good for women. So finding my way in my own dance and being a whole human and doing the best I can with what I have, nothing gives me greater opportunity for expansion than to stop thinking about myself.

BEATE CHELETTE:

I find this a powerful piece, because there's so many teaching students, I want to unpack a couple of this. So you talked about masculinity and femininity, I think specifically being a woman and a woman in business and society being what society is, and the business systems, having been set up by men, for men, had to work for men. They don't really work for men so much anyway, either, but they really don't work for the most part for women. So to talk to us about, how do you recognize if you're in masculine or feminine energy, and is that a good thing or a bad thing?

Laura Gisborne:

Well, there's a lot of conversation today about the patriarchy and this and that, and here's the reality, we don't move forward together as a species when we're trying to be just the women doing something or just the men doing something, it's when men and women come together. At this current point in time, it takes an egg and a sperm to create a human being, right? So there's actually a divine dance of masculine and feminine, and we're gonna refer to the power, the value of that. I think, as we as women are finding our voices and finding our way and creating our own systems, right, not judging or criticizing or putting somebody else's system down. But in this conversation is where the conversation of entrepreneurship, it is a privilege to have that conversation. It is a luxury. When I am working with a woman on the continent of Africa and we're doing some funding to help her get started. She's really looking at how can she feed her family, and she's looking at entrepreneurship as this opportunity to be a mother, to take care of her children, to provide education for them that they wouldn't have otherwise, because education is not free in much of most of Africa. So I will say this piece for me, around the evolution of being a human, I believe that my male counterparts, my husband, my sons, my business partners, who are men, are also in an evolution. How are we finding a dance of how to be more human, how to be more kind, and to look at that strength can be seen in a different way, instead of push, it can be collaboration, it can be cooperation, it can be a listening. I lead leaders, so my business is a little different than leading followers. I can tell you that leaders are smart, they're savvy, and their willingness to be vulnerable is actually one of the greatest tenets of success. Instead of trying to be the lone wolf, and I'll just do it myself. The more they realize that the capacity to allow yourself to be supported, whether you happen to be in a male body or a few female body, your willingness to organize humans around you that complement your own strengths and weaknesses, will create a more thriving organization.

BEATE CHELETTE:

Are you finding that this consciousness is really changing right now? Is it increasing? Is is it something that you see become more popular than when you first started doing this?

Laura Gisborne:

I think it depends on what playground you hang out in, right? You live in Los Angeles, if I remember that correctly, yeah. Okay, so we lived in Sedona, Arizona for 17 years, and it's an interesting thing, because Sedona is one of those places where people come from all over the world, because they're feeling spiritually called to be there. They're feeling inspired to be there. I feel like I was called to be there to raise my children. I wasn't nearly as new agey or far out, whoo, probably, as I am today. I mean, today I pray to lead a lead life. Almost everything I do is is on intuition and guidance, because I have the systems and structure around me to support my freedom. And again, I don't take that lightly. I think that that's a really blessing and a gift in my life. I don't know that people are more conscious or less conscious, because I think that there's lots of ways to check out, as we all know, we can use drugs, alcohol, work, social media, sex, whatever it turns you on, right? There's lots of ways to check out, but those of us who feel who are spiritual seekers, who feel called to have a conversation about something greater than ourselves, which is in the work of legacy, that's where we play all the time. I just hang out with cool people, really. It's, it's not difficult for me to to be in these conversations because of the people I choose to surround myself with. Again, I'm very aware of what a luxury that is.

BEATE CHELETTE:

All right, I love that, Laura. What stands out in the conversation so far, for me is that you seem to have this trust in you. Uh, the guidance system that you've created. So you shared a little bit of information about your intuition and how you stepped into that. So if we have this, the spiritual part of you and the consciousness that you develop, but then you talk about the ecosystem. So I want people to visually see that, on how you built that, and how you move between the two.

Laura Gisborne:

So when I refer to the ecosystem of limitless women as a community that's really connected to our legacy, our mature, well established businesses that are mentoring and nurturing the next generation of emerging leaders into legacy, right? So hopefully the whole thing works well then as the emerging younger leaders grow into being mature legacy leaders, they will reach back and support future generations. Should they still be here in some kind of form or fashion? Right? That's the ecosystem of limitless women, my own personal ecosystem. I what I think you're kind of asking me, if I'm hearing it correctly, is, how does it work to to to marry and to partner, the inner game and the outer game, like, what is it to be in the world of success and systems and structure and support and financial freedom and time freedom, and then also be in a conversation with God on a regular basis? I think that that piece for me is that we are, as humans, multifaceted. We're not just a physical being. And I think that a lot of pain, a lot of disconnection, a lot of mental anguish, is caused by people not being connected to themselves as spiritual beings. I feel like there's more to us than just our physical selves. That's just my own belief system. I'm a person who walks with a lot of faith. I believe that all traditions deserve reverence and appreciation. There's so many ways for someone to find themselves listening to that still small voice, listening to their inner guidance, and it is a practice, building businesses, building systems, building success. And I'm going to say this to take it lightly, because, again, it's easy for me to say this, now that I'm almost 60, is not the hard work, in my opinion, in my experience. In my opinion, the hard work is the inner work. It's the places that we take. It's the conditioning in our brain, if we want to go, from a neuroscience perspective, it's the conditioning of our experiences, the conditioning of our childhoods. How do we re pattern those things and choose a new reality, and if so, how do we validate that and have it become stronger? How do we create new neuropaths and have those become smoother and freer for us, if we want to live in a place that's very different than where we came from?

BEATE CHELETTE:

How did you how did you recognize your own limits? I think that's a very, actually challenging question for most people. I mean, we've heard you don't know what you don't know in blind spots, yada yada yada, but when you're in it, I don't think most people even in know, know of the existence. I mean, it's like a hunch, right? But, but you want to defend what you know, because you want to be knowledgeable and you want to be the authority and you want to look good, right? How did you even get to this point to say I'm good, but I'm missing something and actually be okay with that? Yeah?

Laura Gisborne:

So I don't know what I missed today. I can tell you what I've been aware of missing in the past. And I talk about this in my first book, about, like, kind of the Wake Up Calls, right? So, death, divorce, disease, we had covid, disaster, these things that happen, right? So in the in the day, as my own evolution was going, I had expectations. I set things up. I thought things were gonna go a certain way, and when it fell apart. I'll just use divorce as an example of my first marriage. It shook everything. Shook everything that I thought I was doing right. Shook everything that I thought I had done well, and it wasn't, it wasn't the case. So I had to really look at myself and say, Where was I personally responsible for that? To get some help, to get a lot of counseling, did some personal development trainings, and I just think, if we're alive and breathing, God's not done with us yet. There's more to learn. There's more to grow. It's one of the great gifts of life to be a student, right? To be able to grow and learn, and looking around, because I have this is so cute. We just stayed at this great hotel at Alabama called the graduate hotel, and on the back of this, it says, We are all students. Yeah, how cool was it? Really cool hotel, yeah. So I don't, I don't have the fallacy in my brain that I know everything I think as I get older, I'm aware of how little I know. I also know that every lifetime has a cycle, right? I mean, I think I've never felt stronger. I had my spine fused. Man, went through a lot of stuff, physically and somehow, For the grace of God, had a lot of great medicine and and help. Here I am today, standing here, being able to stand here and speak with you. I mean, what a luxury. It's pretty cool stuff. So I'd say I am wildly humble and humbled by opportunity. I. I am fascinated by what's happening in the world for the next generation. I'm hopeful most days. Some days I'm pessimistic. Most days I'm really hopeful and I'm just I just really work on remaining curious. What would

BEATE CHELETTE:

you say to somebody who who says to you, that's all nice and good, but look, I've been doing this for many, many, many years. I just want to, I just want to take a break. I just want to sit here, and I just want to be okay with where I'm at right now.

Laura Gisborne:

I say, take a break. Sounds like you already know what you want to do. You know, have a friend who is a as a mama of a little boy who's, I think he's eight now, and she and I met, and she's had a hugely successful company for many, many years, and she said, I'm tired and I feel like I'm missing out. I said, don't do it like just stop now. I think it's easy again to say, here's a person who's got support. She's done well financially. But what about all the people that don't have that, right? What about the times that somebody just needs a break and they don't feel like they can because they don't feel financially that they can. You know, I invite you to figure out, what can you let go of? What's eating up your time, what's in the way of you having a break and taking care of yourself if we don't care for our bodies, our bodies can't carry our souls. So it's really important that we stay focused on our sleep and our movement and letting go of the things that don't serve us, you know, which is as easy that kind of goes back to that there's lots of things we like to do that may feel good in the moment, but will they really feel good for the long term results we want? I'm a big advocate of prayer, meditation, yoga. These are the practices that work really well for me, and when I'm in my daily practice, not a once a week practice, remember my daily practice. My body is stronger, my mind is stronger, my heart is larger, right? There's I have more generosity. I have more to give when I take care of myself first. So it doesn't have to take a lot of time. But if somebody's tired, they need a break, I encourage them to take a break, take some time off

BEATE CHELETTE:

on Maslow's hierarchy in poverty consciousness or poverty thinking. So a lot of people are struggling right now. You know, I've heard quite a few stories of people closing their businesses, giving up, having issues with the external factors that we are seeing in the world that are concerning for for most of us. How do I how do I have that humbleness, the mindset and the gratitude, if I'm insecure about my basic needs, what do I do?

Laura Gisborne:

Yeah, I think that the piece that I would say that was a big game changer for me personally, because I was born in the United States, right? I was born white. I was born with access to things like free education. It's easy to be where you are and to feel your problems and feel that no one understands or that your problems are the worst. It doesn't take much to look outside yourself and try to see what's going on. Now, I've had the luxury of traveling and being in having my work take me all over the world, where I see people who don't have access to fresh water, they don't have access to a roof over their heads, they don't have access to education. So right off the bat, that puts me in a totally different state of mind when I can see the luxury of my life. And it's not about needing millions of dollars to do this. It's often walking down the street and seeing somebody who is homeless, seeing someone who is really struggling, and what they have is the shirt on the back or what they have in their little shopping cart. Right? Perspective is a big teacher. I think that's the thing to say, is that when we feel like we don't have enough. I did this with my kids when they were little. I we would take them and I would say, Okay, this week, we're going to go figure out what we can do for someone else. We're going to go work as a food kitchen. We're going to do something that's different than what you're doing your day to day operations. You can remember, how could you have it? The thing I'll tell you is, and I think is so many entrepreneurs, just by the nature that you're an entrepreneur, let's say you have a business that isn't thriving. People always hear that I've had nine companies and sold six of them, and then I currently have two companies. Nobody ever asked me about the company that didn't work out. I get it and the ones that did work didn't always work. For big exponential numbers, it might have been small businesses, small retail operations. Sometimes things have a season, right? You may be in a business. It may have served its season. It may be time to close it or pay it forward. We gifted one of our companies to one of our employees. We're like, we're moving. You're in it, take it and be free. Go have fun. She worked for us for years. Was a pleasure to be able to do that, right? I think that this place around you take yourself wherever you go. So if you're a person who remembers how far you've come, you don't even have to play the comparison game with someone else. You can compare, I don't have the money of the Kardashians. Or you can compare, I got more money than the guy who's living out of a shopping cart. You can play the game however you want to. But. In your own experience, go look back and see how far you've come. If you start doing that, you start comparing backwards to how far you've come. What you'll remember is how you overcame adversity when it looked like it couldn't be done, how you actually found resources when you thought you were broke or broken, how somehow someone came through and took care of you when you didn't know how to take care of yourself. You know, these are the lessons to remember in life, to be aware of. These are the blessings of life that are sometimes easy to take for granted. But if you look back at that, all of that's still with you. Now, what are you going to do with it? You know, if you shut down a business, great, go and do something else, get a job. There's all kinds of opportunities in the world. I don't think it's the same everywhere, but I do feel like in this country, it's a great country to live in. There's a lot to be offered. It doesn't mean it's perfect.

BEATE CHELETTE:

Yeah, and we have it yeah and much to be grateful for Laura, for somebody who now would like to find out a little bit more about how to be limitless, especially if they are a limitless woman. Where should we send them?

Laura Gisborne:

Thank you. You can send them to our website. Limitlesswomen.com through easy peasy. We've got we do free gifts on Fridays. We've been joining since 2016 so there's eight years of trainings on different business development, modalities, inner game, outer game, systems, hiring operations, all the sexy stuff that you love. We do that in addition to all this beautiful, spiritual work, yes, exactly. I think sexy that was the first thing I did. People said, How do you do it? I'm like, I started at McDonald's. Got out a plan, right? So, sexy systems, I love it.

BEATE CHELETTE:

Yeah. Sexy systems, that's it, Laura, thank you so much for being here. It's been a pleasure to have connected with you today. Thank you for asking me, and that's it for us, for today. There you have. It limitless. Is really an inside game, and be grateful for what you have. I don't really like the notion of saying it could be worse, because it always could be worse, but to really look at what you have and recognize all the things that you had to activate to get here, because that gives you the tool to go to the next step and to go in further. And with that, I say goodbye until next time. That's it for this episode of the Business Growth Architect Show, founders of the future. If you're done playing small and ready to build the future on your terms, subscribe, share and help us reach more Trailblazers like you. And if you're serious about creating, growing and scaling a business that's aligned with who you are, schedule your uncovery session at uncoverysession.com. Lead with vision. Move with purpose. Create your future.

People on this episode

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Beate Chelette

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Laura Gisborne

Guest