Freedom Found

By Lisa Duncan

Few people embody reinvention quite like Jamie Kern Lima.

The Montecito entrepreneur transformed her personal struggle with rosacea into IT Cosmetics, later selling the company to L’Oréal for $1.2 billion. Last week, she welcomed friend and fellow business builder Natalie Ellis to Godmothers in Summerland for a conversation about Ellis’s new book, The Freedom-Based Business Method.

The two have become frequent collaborators, helping women entrepreneurs build successful businesses without burnout.

If ever there were a fitting setting, it was Godmothers. Tucked inside a beautifully restored barn just a tiara’s toss from the sparkling Pacific, the literary haven created by Jennifer Rudolph Walsh and Victoria Jackson has become one of California’s most enchanting gathering places for readers, dreamers, and doers.

The intimate downstairs stage – where Oprah Winfrey and friends have also appeared – was packed with women entrepreneurs, founders, and members of the BossBabe community, many eagerly taking notes.

For Ellis, the evening proved emotional.

“To even think about one woman reading this book and choosing to go after her dreams in a way that feels really good, I could cry over it,” she shared.

During the discussion, Kern Lima asked the audience if they had ever experienced burnout while simultaneously feeling they weren’t doing enough. Nearly every hand shot up.

The question struck at the heart of Ellis’s story.

Growing up in a low-income household and leaving home at 13, she said she came to see entrepreneurship as a path to a different life.

“I equated entrepreneurship to freedom and a different life for myself,” she explained.

Years later, after building an eight-figure company and becoming a mother, Ellis experienced a profound shift.

“I realized I actually did have enough. I was good enough. What I had built was good enough.”

Guests lingered afterward for signed books, photographs, and the sort of thoughtful conversations that seem to flourish at Godmothers.

Jamie and Natalie both built extraordinary businesses, but on this evening their most powerful message was surprisingly simple: being enough and believing you are worthy may be the greatest freedom of all.

Looking around the room, one sensed that many had come searching for precisely that.