We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Teresa Sabatine. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Teresa below.
Teresa, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. What’s the backstory behind how you came up with the idea for your business?
Love, Lizzy wasn’t a sudden idea. It was something that grew in me over years, shaped by moments I didn’t even realize were connected at the time.
It started with my mom, Elizabeth, Lizzy. Growing up, our house always had an extra chair at the dinner table, friends staying when they needed somewhere safe, my girlfriends coming over just to talk to her and get her advice. She was a therapist and and advocate who believed in the liberation of women, and at her funeral, hundreds of people lined up to share how she’d changed their lives. For me, she was this steady force who was always there when I needed her most.
When we lost her at 22 to a ten-year battle with breast cancer, I experienced that generosity from the other side. Family and friends opened their homes when I needed space to heal and find my footing. I learned firsthand what a little space, time, love, rest and perspective can do for a person’s soul.
Years later, I was working in entertainment and started writing about my experiences on a blog. Young women in the industry began reaching out with questions about careers, heartbreak, navigating life as a woman. I loved getting on calls to help them figure out their next steps. Then, as I transitioned to coaching women and helping then build businesses, I kept seeing this same pattern. These incredible women were choosing between success and having a life. They were isolated, exhausted, trying to do everything alone. And I started thinking about what my mom had created: this community of women across races, religions, and beliefs who showed up for each other.
I recalled an art fair she once produced in our community. I remember as a little girl walking the narrow hallways of the schoolhouse where there were all of these women just setting up booths, displaying their art, and laughing and connecting. On the flip side of that, since I was a teenager I have also been confronted time and time again with heartbreaking stories of women navigating mistreatment, abuse, and lack of financial stability leading to them staying in situations of harm.
The vision crystallized when I asked myself: What if all women had a Lizzy? What if every woman had a sacred place to go or someone to call when they felt scared, alone, or weary? What if we could create spaces where women could prosper in every sense, financially, emotionally, spiritually, while knowing her success was also supporting the next woman coming up behind her?
That’s when Love, Lizzy was born. A movement that champions women’s safety, welfare, and economic security. Here you come for a class, stay for tea, and leave with flowers, knowing your time here was fruitful. It’s my mom’s legacy carrying onward.
We bought our first physical space; a sweet little citrus farm a few miles from the beaches of Amelia Island. We have hosted several retreats, launched the Love, Lizzy podcast—a wisdom hotline where women submit their query to Lizzy and she helps them process their feelings, think through what is possible, and take action on their dreams.
We have plans for a conference in 2026, are launching our flagship burnout recovery program as a digital offering on Patreon later this year, and growing our community every day. My dreams continue to expand and still our work is to deliver an excellent and meaningful experience to every woman who trusts us to help her on her journey and create a sacred space for her to prosper.
Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers.
We specialize in helping women entrepreneurs to build businesses that support their whole lives. We define prosperity as more than just financial success. It’s that feeling of having enough. Enough money, yes, but also enough joy, meaningful relationships, good health, laughter, and energy for what matters most.
We believe your business can be a path to a full, creative life rather than something that consumes it. Our retreats, programs, and community are designed to help you grow as a founder and leader while leaving room for everything else: being a mother, sister, daughter, friend, caregiver.
Together my clients and I have launched or scaled 22 (and counting!) women – owned businesses. I have experience with six-figure lifestyle businesses all the way to having the honor to help $100M enterprises through succession and change. My background in business comes from the entertainment industry where I started on the Late Show with David Letterman in New York, climbed the career ladder to Lionsgate, handled complex logistics for the Transformers Franchise and ultimately became the Film Commissioner of Indianapolis. That role was where I learned about building strong community and developing an economic ecosystem that helps everyone. I lean on my experience of holding my own in board rooms, pitch sessions with executives at Netflix, and business development and marketing to teach women the fundamentals of business and help them open doors and push through barriers in their beliefs of what is possible.
Additionally, I am certified coach and have a passion for mental health; utilizing nervous system regulation, changing and developing neural pathways, and mindset coaching to help others achieve homeostasis. We have achieved a very beautiful balance of business coaching and emotional coaching in our offerings and I think it is one of the key reasons why women love our programs.
When women are thriving, communities thrive. Small businesses are the backbone of our towns and cities. We depend on our farmers, artisans, healers, coffee shops, and service providers to keep our communities connected and prosperous. That’s why we focus on helping women entrepreneurs build businesses that provide financial security and stability, enabling them to show up fully in all their roles and give back to their community.
We trust women. We’ve seen what happens when a woman is in touch with her intuition, embraces her ideas, and feels safe to trust herself. Sometimes you need practical business support. Help with growth strategies, launching products, building teams, or raising capital. We provide education, resources, and connections through our community, programs, and retreats.
Sometimes you need to work on your story. To challenge the narratives holding you back or making you doubt your value and abilities. We create space for that work on our podcast, at retreats, and in our programs.
Sometimes you need encouragement. To be reminded of your strength and shown that what you want is possible. We meet you there with genuine excitement and surround you with community that believes in you.
Sometimes you need rest. A break from achieving to reconnect with your purpose. We boil the water, put on a pot of tea, and offer yoga and movement classes, reiki and sound baths, nature walks and meditations by the ocean.
We’re a collective of women who care, who show up for one another, who share our talents and resources to help each other succeed. Our community spans state and country lines. We have “Lizzies” all over the world, and we’re building toward a future where there’s always a Lizzy nearby to offer connection and support.
Whether you listen to our podcast, join our online community, work with us in an accelerator program, or come to a retreat, you’ll have someone in your corner. Always rooting for you, always here to remind you of your value to the world and assist you in making your dreams a reality.
Can you open up about a time when you had a really close call with the business?
After investing in the Love, Lizzy Farm, I learned what every entrepreneur discovers eventually: sometimes your business plan meets real life, and real life wins.
Two of my long-term coaching clients went through major transitions within months of each other. One decided to step back from active leadership to focus on growing her family, trusting the systems we’d built to run her business autonomously. Another realized she needed to separate from a co-founder whose values no longer aligned with hers, a difficult but necessary decision that would take time to resolve.
These weren’t business failures. They were life happening to real women with real priorities. But they meant I needed to restructure Love, Lizzy quickly. For the first time, I had to let team members go. I tried to handle it as generously as possible, but it was still heartbreaking.
Then my father had a serious health emergency. He spent a month in the ICU, and I became his primary caretaker. Suddenly, I couldn’t focus on sales or marketing. I could barely think about anything beyond keeping him alive.
I found myself rebuilding the Love, Lizzy website at 5AM from the farmhouse spare bedroom while my dad recovered in the next room. That’s when I realized I needed to do something I’d never been good at: ask for help.
What happened next shaped Love, Lizzy into what it is today. My web designer stepped up, bringing our vision to life while I answered her questions from hospital waiting rooms. A client reached out about partnering with her family business, forging what became our strongest collaboration to date. Women from our community offered their expertise: marketing strategists, event planners, podcast editors, farm managers, accountants.
Instead of trying to rebuild the same structure, I shifted to a partnership model, connecting with specialists who could support us in areas where we needed help. What emerged wasn’t just a business surviving a crisis; it was a new model built on collaboration.
This wasn’t the plan, but it turned out to be better than the plan. Today, Love, Lizzy operates with multiple revenue streams built on genuine relationships and shared expertise. We’re growing through referrals from women who believe in what we’re building. My father is healthy and living near family.
Most importantly, I now understand something I couldn’t have learned any other way: how to build a business that can bend without breaking. The most sustainable businesses aren’t built on isolation and overhead, but on community and collaboration. When I work with women entrepreneurs now, I can help them create structures that support their whole lives, not just their productivity, because I’ve walked that path myself.
The women who come to Love, Lizzy aren’t just getting business advice. They’re joining an ecosystem of support that understands that success looks different when you’re building a life, not just a business.
Any advice for managing a team?
I have an amazing mentor and client who always says, “You work for your people, they don’t work for you.” And that has stuck with me. They have been in business for 38 years and have people who have been with them since the beginning.
As a coach, my natural instinct is to foster growth in the teams I support. I try to understand what is important to them, what inspires them, how they think, and create clear expectations and accountability to help them achieve results.
Leadership is a dance with the ego and a continued challenge of self management. There is a necessity for steadiness in oneself. You find yourself holding the weight of keeping the business succeeding, while trying to get to a level of management where you let go of control and allow people to apply their talents to your mission. I think building the team is the most important aspect of leadership. Really identifying what the business needs, what skills will close the gaps or make a difference for your revenue and mission, and then hiring people who align with your values.
Most people want to be challenged; they want to learn and grow and know that their work is connected to something bigger, even if “bigger” just means they can see how they add value to the team. I have failed as a leader to not be specific enough in my direction, to change the direction or strategy too much and give my team whiplash. Leadership without an internal steadiness often creates chaos for your team.
Sometimes it is my job to identify people who are not a right fit for the company. When anyone on the team is not the right person for their job or a right fit to the values, it will cause distraction. There is conflict in human nature and working on a team requires a lot of compromise, collaboration, and harmonizing. When dealing with these distractions you are called to focus on identifying ideal outcomes, asking how to solve for the gap between where you are and that ideal outcome and then to make a list and go and take the action necessary to achieve the outcome.
I learned early on in film and television production that it takes input from everyone to get it right. We had a lot of collaborative meetings around the how of getting to the outcome. You have to set a clear direction, clear timelines; you have to let people know where you are going and give them the parameters. Then you put them in the room and you ask, “What is the best way to get there? What are we not seeing? Where are we stuck?” People often hold solutions to the obstacles you are facing. Majority of people want their job to be full of more creativity and execution. Your job is to help them execute. You make sure they know what you need from them. Then set the direction and inspire them and encourage them with direct feedback on how they can keep improving. Lean on critical conversations toward unified change, and lead with empathy and deep listening.
Sometimes the highest performer on your team is having a personal situation that is affecting her ability to show up. How are you going to embrace her and her situation with kindness while also ensuring the work gets done and you stay on track? That is the question I ask myself the most. How do I walk with this person who is having a real human experience and get the system to support her so she knows she can take care of what is important and will still have a job when she returns? I am constantly learning how to put my business and myself in a position to offer that kind of love and kindness to my team.
This requires a lot of self-reflection and a lot of self-management. It is okay to have a bad or hard day as a leader, but most of the time your job is to be the inspiration and hold the belief that it will all work out in the face of your team’s doubts, struggles, and insecurities. It is a big, beautiful job to be a leader.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.lovelizzy.co
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/lovelizzyco
- Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/teresasabatine/
- Youtube: http://www.youtube.com/@LoveLizzyCo
Image Credits
Pebbles Henry – Pictures by Pebbles Photography
Sara Elene Photography