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Daily Mail
07-08-2025
- Business
- Daily Mail
Kelly Grandmaison's Blueprint for Helping Women Entrepreneurs Break Barriers and Build Lasting Wealth
Kelly Grandmaison stands at the intersection of personal triumph and professional vision. As co-founder of Impact Ventures International (IVI), the Mexican-American entrepreneur embodies an example for women in business that rejects the false choice between profit and purpose, personal success and community impact. Her outlook on business consulting, born from her journey of resilience and transformation, has redefined business consulting and inspired women who aspire to claim their rightful place in boardrooms and balance sheets. Grandmaison, pictured above, mentions, 'We don't see success as just numbers on a balance sheet. It's in the stories we hear from clients who feel more aligned with their vision after working with us. It's in the nonprofit leaders who now have systems to scale their missions. It's in the people who've found new opportunities and stability because of our work.' These words are not just a mission statement—they are a call to action for a generation of women entrepreneurs whom others have too often told to wait their turn. The Path Through Pain Grandmaison's vision for women's economic empowerment stemmed from her personal adversity. In 2019, at just 26, she received a diagnosis that could have ended her professional journey before it truly began: Complex Regional Pain Syndrome (CRPS). This debilitating condition confined her to crutches and eventually a wheelchair, with a 50/50 prognosis. For many, this would have been the end of ambition. But for Grandmaison, it became the foundation of purpose. Her path to healing led her to Italy, where innovative medical treatment allowed her to walk three miles unassisted after just 10 days. This experience of confronting a system that failed to offer solutions and finding an alternative path mirrors the journey she now guides other women through in the business world. This sentiment reflects what she aspires for women entrepreneurs: not just business strategies, but liberation from personal struggles and confining paradigms about what success means and who achieves it. Wealth Beyond Balance Sheets Men who define success through narrow metrics have long dominated the consulting industry: revenue growth, market share, and exit valuations. Grandmaison's perspective, grounded in her CEPA (Certified Exit Planning Advisor) credentials and psychological training, expands this definition to incorporate holistic measures of wealth. The Los Angeles Business Journal recognized her as part of its ' Women of Influence: Finance 2025 ' feature. The publication describes her work as combining 'entrepreneurial innovation, strategic financial proficiency, and a passion for community impact.' For instance, IVI's signature program VentureMax360 represents a feminine slant on business growth—not because it is softer or less rigorous, but because it is comprehensive and refuses to separate the business from the person running it or its community. This integration of personal values, business strategy, and social responsibility allows women entrepreneurs to build enterprises that reflect their authentic vision rather than conform to masculine paradigms of success. She understands that for women entrepreneurs, particularly those whom traditional business spaces marginalize, business success must serve deeper purposes than status or accumulation. The 20% Revolution Perhaps most noteworthy in Grandmaison's blueprint is IVI's commitment to donate 20% of annual revenue to nonprofit causes. This is not corporate social responsibility as an afterthought or marketing strategy; it is a fundamental factor in the business model. In a capitalist system where institutions systematically deny women access to capital, this redistribution of resources represents a profound challenge to traditional power structures. Grandmaison's method acknowledges what many women entrepreneurs intuitively understand: that wealth creation apart from community well-being results in systems of inequity. By embedding philanthropy into the business model, she offers owners (especially women) a way to succeed financially without abandoning their values or communities. Grandmaison adds, 'When you build a business with strong values at its core, it's not about sacrificing one for the other—it's about creating a model where both can thrive. In this case, it is when profit and purpose give way to true success.' Beyond Gender Roles: Having One Goal Despite her well-known advocacy for women's entrepreneurship and commitment to helping women scale and build wealth, Kelly Grandmaison does not frame her work as a competition between genders. As co-founder of Impact Ventures International (IVI) alongside Joshua Kirshbaum, Grandmaison has consistently emphasized that the true measure of business success lies not in gender, but in whether partners and teams align around shared goals and a unified vision. It all comes down to the question: 'who is your team?'. In the competitive business world, she believes that collaboration and mutual respect transcend questions of gender, enabling diverse leaders to combine their strengths for greater impact. Grandmaison and Kirshbaum built IVI on the foundation that the ability to create meaningful, sustainable value best defines success, not by who claims credit or outperforms whom. Her vision suggests that the future of women's entrepreneurship lies in elevating ideas and voices of women in male-dominated models and in pioneering processes that honor wholeness, connection, and purpose alongside profit. This philosophy has allowed IVI to become a trusted partner for many businesses, resulting in successful partnerships with over 200 clients, including entrepreneurs, nonprofits, and high-net-worth individuals across multiple industries. It proves that true leadership is about unity of purpose rather than rivalry.
Int'l Business Times
01-05-2025
- Business
- Int'l Business Times
How Private Investment Strategist Timi Barabas Revolutionizes Private Equity by Connecting Capital with Opportunity
Private equity has long operated behind fortress-like walls of intermediaries, gatekeepers, and protocols that add months to transactions and millions to costs. Then came activist and entrepreneur Timi Barabas, whose journey from non-English speaker to dealmaking innovator represents a fundamental challenge to this entrenched system. As senior partner and program director at Impact Ventures International (IVI), Barabas has revolutionized capital access by drastically reducing deal timelines and redefining possibilities in a traditionally rigid industry. "Most firms would take six months to make introductions happen. I just saved everyone half a year of their lives," affirms Timi Barabas . Her outlook connects investors directly with off-market investment opportunities, bypassing the lengthy process private equity investors face when sourcing deals. From Budapest Markets to Billion-Dollar Deals Timi Barabas' journey to becoming one of private equity's most innovative connectors began half a world away in Budapest, Hungary. At age 15, she immigrated to New Zealand without speaking English. Where many would see insurmountable barriers, Barabas saw only problems to solve. Within two years of arrival, despite still developing her English skills, she launched her first formal business—a caregiving and cleaning service that acquired 25 long-term clients in its first two months of operation. This pattern of turning obstacles into opportunities became her signature. By her early twenties, she had co-founded multiple businesses spanning technology, caregiving, and event management while building an extensive portfolio of non-profit work addressing causes from climate change to peace diplomacy. In 2023, she represented New Zealand at the APEC Multistakeholder Forum in San Francisco, one of only three delegates under 30 selected for this honor. Her cross-cultural fluency and growing reputation for connecting disparate worlds earned her the selection—a skill she soon applied to revolutionize private equity transactions. The Gatekeeper Problem To understand Barabas's work at IVI, one must first understand the problem she's solving. An elaborate, multi-layered system—comprising investment bankers, business brokers, consultants, and lawyers—typically governs traditional private equity deals. Each layer adds time, cost, and complexity. In the U.S. alone, the average mid-market business acquisition takes 9-12 months from initial contact to closing, with typical transaction costs often exceeding 10% of deal value. This can be a significant struggle for businesses of any size as it means thousands to millions in fees, even before launching. Moreover, this traditional system creates information asymmetry. When most deals reach potential buyers, they've been widely shopped, driving up prices and reducing potential returns. "Most investors are stuck looking at the same deals as everyone else," Barabas explains. "They waste time, money, and energy chasing opportunities already overpriced or oversaturated." Direct Access: The Barabas Method When Barabas joined Impact Ventures International in 2024, she brought a radically different perspective to deal-making. By early 2025, she had become Senior Partner of IVI and Program Director of VentureMax360, the firm's flagship program for scaling and selling mid-market companies. Her method centers on what she calls "direct market access." It connects business owners with IVI's VentureMax360 program, which focuses on growing and scaling a business to prepare for selling within a two+ year timeline. Then, Barabas connects them with potential partners and investors to create a smooth and efficient transition. This process eliminates the need to shop deals around for months and reduces delays in decision-making, thus making it easy for investors to buy functional businesses in a timely manner. "Most private equity professionals wait for deals to surface—I create them," Barabas mentions. "Traditional firms navigate layers of brokers and gatekeepers—I eliminate those delays by providing direct access to decision-makers." Her technique leverages a global relationship network that spans five continents, carefully cultivated through years of cross-cultural business development. This extensive network allows her to identify opportunities long before they become visible to traditional market participants. IVI's technology integrates CEPA-certified exit planning, VM360's scaling strategies, and IVSS Digital Office automation to identify high-potential businesses before they hit the market. What sets Barabas' method apart is her relentless focus and emphasis on speed-based execution. She acts quickly when a potential match is found, arranging discussions within days. Using AI, automation, and direct market access, she accelerates transactions far beyond traditional private equity timelines. The results speak for themselves. Barabas has worked with dozens of high-value private equity clients in the past two years, supporting private equity deal flow and client strategies in the 8-9 figure range. The Global Expansion What makes Barabas' slant particularly powerful is its global reach. While traditional private equity remains siloed mainly by geography, IVI's direct access model operates across borders. The company maintains active deal flow across Singapore, Malaysia, Africa, Canada, and the U.S., with plans to expand into Monaco and the U.K. within 12 months. "Private equity professionals often create artificial geographical barriers," Barabas says. "Capital doesn't recognize borders, and neither should deal-making." This global outlook provides another competitive advantage: cultural translation. Having navigated her own cross-cultural journey, Barabas has developed an unusual facility for bridging communication gaps that often derail international deals. The Dealmaker's Future Her direct-access model democratizes opportunity by preserving proficiency while removing unnecessary barriers in a gatekeeper-driven global economy. For Barabas, the direct-access model represents only the beginning of a more significant transformation in how capital connects with opportunity globally. Barabas' long-term vision is to scale IVI's method into "a global force for private equity matchmaking" and make way for private equity's potential future: faster, more direct, and oriented around relationships rather than institutions. "How long would it take you to get a meeting with the owner of a multi-million-dollar company willing to sell? Months? Years? Never?" she asks. "At IVI, I make those connections happen quickly and efficiently, certifying that our clients get first access to the highest-value deals—before they ever go public." The young woman who could not speak English upon arriving in New Zealand has built her career by breaking down walls between investors, entrepreneurs, and opportunities. In doing so, she's demonstrating that sometimes, the most valuable innovation is not a technology or product but a reimagining of how we connect. Private equity has always been about connecting capital with opportunity. With Impact Ventures International, Timi Barabas is turning outdated systems on their head—empowering investors with direct access and entrepreneurs with real outcomes.
