We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Kim. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Kim below.

Kim, thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today Are you happier as a business owner? Do you sometimes think about what it would be like to just have a regular job?

Yes and no.
I spent years in a very regular job. Executive producer in German television, managing a news department, deadlines, hierarchy, structure. It was prestigious. It was also, at some point, quietly suffocating. My whole life was about the show, the newspaper, the next story. A lot of fun, genuinely. But at some point I needed to save myself and step away.
Life is funny that way. It not only gave me the chance to start my own business in Berlin, I fell in love and moved countries. Coming to the United States, starting over without a network or a title, two small kids, no roadmap. That was terrifying in a way a steady paycheck never prepares you for.

What built slowly, and then all at once, was a kind of panic I hadn’t expected. I had nothing to define my worth by. Being a mother to two little ones was everything, and somehow it still didn’t feel like enough of an answer when someone asked what I did. I had spent my entire adult life defining myself through my work, through output, through something I had built or produced or led. And suddenly there was none of that.

So I did what any resourceful German woman would do. I started selling the Thermomix.

It’s a kitchen appliance that is genuinely beloved in Germany. I was convinced it would be a hit in the Hamptons. What I didn’t anticipate was that when I started the conversation out here, people smiled politely and told me to speak to their chefs. That was the moment I understood I needed to find something that actually made sense in this world I had landed in.

What I found, eventually, is that building something is my way of filling space. And helping other women is my new happy place. That realization didn’t come from a plan. It came from the Thermomix rejection tour of the East End (I still very much love my machine, by the way! Their loss :).
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So yes, I’m happier. Not because entrepreneurship is easier. It’s not. But because the work finally matches who I am.

Kim, love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?

I’m Kim Lenar-Ehrhardt, a media coach, community builder, and founder based in Sag Harbor, New York.
My background is in television. I spent years as an executive producer in German media, running editorial at RTL Exklusiv and working at BILD, one of the largest media brands in Europe. I managed news departments, I produced content that reached millions of people, and I was very good at making other people’s stories visible.
What I didn’t know then was that I was quietly building the exact skill set I would eventually need to help other women do the same thing for themselves.
When I moved to the United States, everything reset. I had credentials that didn’t translate, no network, two young kids, and a deep familiarity with starting from zero. That rebuilding process, as uncomfortable as it was, taught me more about confidence, visibility, and what it actually takes to show up in a new room than any job title ever did. Eventually, I stopped trying to recreate what I had in Germany and started building what was missing here.

What was missing, at least in the Hamptons, was a real business community for women. Not a networking group where you show up, hand out cards, and leave feeling vaguely exhausted. An actual place where female founders could talk honestly about money, strategy, growth, the hard seasons, and the good ones. That’s what The Hyve Hamptons became.

The Hyve is a membership community for female entrepreneurs on the East End of Long Island. We gather twice a month, for a breakfast and a networking night, and we do the kind of work that actually moves businesses forward. Strategy conversations, speaker sessions, sponsor partnerships, introductions that mean something. It’s the only dedicated business membership for female founders in the Hamptons, and I’m proud of that. Not because we’re first, but because the women who show up keep showing up. That tells you something real about what a room can do when it’s built with intention.

Through TheKimCode, I work with founders individually and in groups on visibility and storytelling. Specifically, I help women who are doing genuinely good work but have convinced themselves that staying quiet is somehow more professional than being seen. A lot of that comes from a belief I spent years holding myself: that visibility is vanity. It isn’t. It’s leadership. And the women I work with, most of them high-functioning, over-responsible, carrying more than they should, often just need someone to reflect back how much they already have to say.

That work also includes helping women use AI practically. Not the tech-bro version of AI. The version that gives a solo founder back five hours a week. Content, email, systems, workflows. I translate tools into plain language and real application, because the women I work with don’t need another thing to feel behind on. They need leverage.

What I’m most proud of is the room itself. The Hyve has become a place where women who often feel alone in the Hamptons off-season, who are running businesses in a seasonal economy with all the pressure that comes with that, show up and exhale. I’ve watched women form real business partnerships inside that room. I’ve watched women pitch for the first time, ask for help for the first time, say out loud what they actually want for the first time. That’s not small.

What I want people to know is that everything I build comes from a central belief: capable women stop themselves more than circumstances stop them. My job, in every format, is to interrupt that pattern. Not with motivation. With structure, community, skills, and a room where playing small is simply not the vibe.

If you’re a female founder in the Hamptons, The Hyve is for you. If you’re a founder anywhere who wants to learn how to show up more powerfully, on camera, on stage, online, that’s TheKimCode. Either way, the work is the same. Helping women take up the space they’ve already earned.

What’s a lesson you had to unlearn and what’s the backstory?

That visibility is vanity.
This one ran deep, and it came from two directions at once.
The first was cultural. I grew up German, and I built my career in German media. In that world, you let the work speak for itself. You didn’t talk about what you’d built, you just built it. Self-promotion was seen as a kind of weakness, or worse, a sign that the work couldn’t stand on its own. Quiet competence was the gold standard. I absorbed that completely.
The second direction was professional. I spent years behind the camera, behind the editorial desk, behind the decisions. I was the one making other people visible. Guests, anchors, stories, brands. I was very comfortable being the person who shaped the spotlight. Standing in it myself felt almost embarrassing.
So when I moved to the United States and started building my own businesses, I kept doing what I knew. I focused on the work. I built The Hyve, I gathered the women, I created the programming, I showed up every month without fail. And I assumed, in the way you assume things that have never been tested, that the quality of what I was building would travel on its own.

It doesn’t work that way. Not here, and honestly not anywhere.
What I slowly came to understand is that staying invisible wasn’t modesty. It was self-protection dressed up as professionalism. If I didn’t put myself out there, I couldn’t be judged. If I didn’t claim authority publicly, I couldn’t be questioned. It felt like restraint. It was actually fear.

The moment it really clicked was when I started coaching women on visibility and found myself saying things to them that I hadn’t yet figured out how to do myself. I would sit across from a woman who had built something genuinely impressive and watch her minimize it in real time, in the middle of a sentence, almost reflexively. And I recognized it immediately because I did the exact same thing.

That recognition was uncomfortable in the best way.

Visibility is not vanity. It is how the work finds the people who need it. It is how a community grows. It is how a woman with something real to say actually gets heard. And none of that happens by staying quiet and hoping someone notices.
I still have to remind myself of this regularly. The lesson isn’t fully learned, it’s ongoing. But I’ve stopped calling the resistance discipline. Now I call it what it is.

Any stories or insights that might help us understand how you’ve built such a strong reputation?

Honestly, showing up consistently in a place where most people are only here part of the time.
The Hamptons is a seasonal market. People arrive in May, leave in September, and the rest of the year is quieter than most outsiders imagine. A lot of businesses here operate on that same rhythm. They’re visible in summer and essentially disappear in the off-season. I did the opposite. I kept going. I kept gathering women, kept hosting breakfasts, kept building the community through the quiet months when it would have been easy to pause.
That consistency, more than anything else, is what built trust.

The second thing is that I never tried to make The Hyve something it wasn’t. I didn’t position it as an elite networking club or a polished corporate event series. I built it as a real room for real women running real businesses, with all the messiness and seasonal pressure and loneliness that comes with that. Women could feel the difference. And when something feels real, people talk about it.

I also think my background helped in ways I didn’t expect. Coming from media, I understood instinctively that how you tell your story matters as much as the story itself. I brought that into how The Hyve shows up publicly, how I write, how I communicate with members. It never felt like marketing to me. It felt like producing something worth watching.
Reputation in a small market like this one is almost entirely word of mouth. Every woman who walked into a Hyve breakfast and felt genuinely seen became someone who told another woman about it. That’s still the engine.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://community.thehyvehamptons.com/homepage
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/thehyve_hamptons/
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kimlenar/?skipRedirect=true
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@HamptonsHustleHeart
• Other: Substack: https://stingbythehyve.substack.com/

Image Credits

Ana Gambuto