Mecca Gamble
- Jereshia Hawk is the founder of Leverage, an online coaching business for women of color.
- She quit her engineering job to pursue coaching full time and started by identifying her clientele.
- Then she created a vetting process and a video strategy to get people to buy into her services.
When Jereshia Hawk began coaching in 2016, she was selling low-cost educational PDFs and online courses while working full time as an engineer for Consumers Energy. She was on track for a leadership position, but she climbed down the corporate ladder to become a full-time entrepreneur.
Hawk was dissatisfied with the underrepresentation of women of color in engineering and wanted to pursue a business that would address the racial wealth gap. She started planning her exit in May 2016.