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In June of 2003, Tera McHugh moved with her husband John and their two
sons, Michael and Sean, from her hometown in Chicago to the Santa
Clarita Valley in Southern California.
The transition was extremely difficult for Tera as she experienced
uncertainty, unconnectedness and a general lack of familiar places and
faces. Out of this experience grew Tera’s desire to help others set and
maintain healthy relationships within themselves and their community, so
she started a virtual Life Coaching business that focused on helping women
across the United States live a better daily life!
and rewards and was a great building block for launching her business within the local community.
Working locally brought new challenges as Tera would need to learn new skills and techniques for
networking, marketing and sales. She searched for an organization where she could learn from
experts and be surrounded with other like-minded business owners to learn from and collaborate
with. After an unsuccessful search, Tera realized she was going to have to create it for herself.
Through a client referral, Tera attended a women’s organization located in San Diego, CA. She met
the Founder and was very excited about the possibilities of working with this “National”
Organization. The organization claimed to be experienced with successful with chapters across
the United States. The website for the organization looked professional, complete with an Advisory
Team from locations across the United States; everything appeared to be great. Tera decided to
start an SCV chapter and overlooked many red flags that began to appear now and then.
In Spring of 2005, Tera launched her Chapter with 20 members! However, within the first couple of
months Tera realized this organization was not a “National” Organization as they had claimed and
certainly was not experienced in developing Chapters. She realized that this organization was a
sinking ship and she knew she needed to evacuate! Tera exemplary organizational skills were
tapped to create every form, system and process for the Chapter. The lack of systems, processes
and tools required excessive time and resulted in Tera putting her Life Coaching business on-hold
for a several months.
Tera had a deep desire to help local women entrepreneurs and felt an obligation to the 20 women
she had signed on to be Members. She decided to leave this failing “national” organization and
with the help of her amazing Leadership Team she started her own women’s business development
organization, Women Entrepreneurs of Santa Clarita Valley (WE of SCV).
In February of 2006, Tera McHugh, launched WE of SCV with 12 of the original members. Tera
was firm in her mission to connect women entrepreneurs dedicated to building relationships and
meeting regularly to focus on business growth & development. She developed a business model
that runs like a well oiled machine and WE of SCV had grown to over 120 members by the end of
2006!
WE of SCV continued to grow tremendously and in June of 2007 a 2nd Branch was developed on
the Canyon Country side of the Santa Clarita Valley.
It seemed like a natural progression for Tera to begin to expand WE of SCV and begin to develop
Branches outside of Santa Clarita Valley. This expansion, of course, requires a name change for
the organization to Association of Women Entrepreneurs. As Tera develops these Branches she
expects great success as she draws from her experiences as a Life Coach, Executive Director of
the SCV Chapter of the so-called “National” Organization and Founder of Women Entrepreneurs of
Santa Clarita Valley!
