“Often we fall in love with our own ideas,” noted Swoogo founder Leonora Valvo. “We need to spend the time to make others fall in love with our ideas.”
Over her decades of starting technology companies, she’s done just that – succeeding in raising funds and building teams, inspiring others to pursue their dreams of entrepreneurship along the way.
Raised in Bedford, N.Y., Valvo has lived in San Francisco, Chicago and Boston. But it was in New York that she started out in the travel industry and has since built a name for herself, finding ways technology can help companies plan travel and events.
“I am not a product person but a businessperson,” Valvo said. “I know how to find a market and position to sell into that market.”
Valvo founded travel consultancy Options in 1992 and was founder and CEO of Global Executive, an event-management services company, from 1992 to 2007. Valvo started etouches (now Aventri) in 1998, a cloud-based, event-management platform that she grew before leaving the company in 2013; and InsightXM, which makes a data-analytics tool tailored to the event-planning industry.
She founded Swoogo in 2015.
Valvo’s path into the world of software innovation began when she was 17, working as a KLM Airlines reservation agent in New York. She would speak with General Foods’ corporate travel department often, and was eventually recruited there, she said.
‘I know how to find a market and position to sell into that market.’
LEONORA VALVO, Swoogo founder
Back then, Valvo saw what she calls a pocket of opportunity for companies to save on travel. The travel-agency model was based on commission for things such as hotels and car rentals, she said. “We weren’t really thinking about companies holistically and the buying power they could have with those kinds of travel providers. It wasn’t helping to get costs down.”
Valvo left General Foods after about a year and launched Options, which created a new travel-agency bid process whereby they were mandated to use certain car-rental vendors, for example.
Seeing the value to companies of such an intermediary role, she became a travel consultant, developed a course in travel management and began working for herself, helping companies leverage their strengths and lower costs. “They were creating this function, seeing opportunity to get better bang for their buck when it came to corporate travel,” she said.
When she moved to Connecticut with her children, she reengineered Global Executive. “That’s when we developed software” that would allow planners to run global events, find sponsors and other functions, Valvo said.
Global Executive would grow to $5 million in revenue.
These days, Valvo is founder and director of Warren-based Swoogo, which has devised a software tool for event planners called Registration Wizard, referred to on the Swoogo website as “an eerily smart tool for setting up your event.”
A virtual company with 21 employees, Swoogo has become profitable in three years without any external funding, said Valvo. “I attribute our success to innovating our business model, attracting customers and talent through a respected reputation for quality, integrity and vision.”
Valvo’s history is illustrative of a person who has not followed the beaten path through life. Having left home as a teenager, Valvo didn’t attend college. She still hasn’t.
“I also feel the world is changing,” regarding the notion that a college degree is a necessity, she said. “There are other ways to move forward. For instance, I have great interest in teaching manufacturing skills. There are awesome things in manufacturing for those who can’t afford [college] – awesome careers.”
She was a single mother of four. With her youngest now in college, Valvo moved from Connecticut to Rhode Island just over a year ago.
“I love the water,” she said, “that’s what drove me here. I no longer had a company based in Connecticut [having sold etouches and InsightXM] and my last child was leaving for college.
Her willingness to jump in continues to be evident with her creation of Women in Event Tech, a group that hosts global events for members of the industry; Event Tech Tribe, a collaboration of event-technology professionals that puts tools for event planners in one place; and various entrepreneurial volunteer roles.
She remembers when she was hooked by the idea of creating her own career.
“I worked with three other women [at General Foods],” said Valvo. “One day they cornered me and said I was causing them great harm as I was doing other work [finding better solutions]. That’s when I decided to become an entrepreneur.”