We were lucky to catch up with Lauren Howard recently and have shared our conversation below.

Hi Lauren, thanks for joining us today. Let’s start with a story that highlights an important way in which your brand diverges from the industry standard.

We don’t accept outside capital. We bootstrap everything. We invest when we can, and we make it work when we can’t.

Lauren, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?

This is from my website. Happy to add more if you need.

Yes, you can call me L2. Everyone does. It’s a thing.
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I was the second Lauren on a team, and it just stuck. My clients, colleagues and friends all use it, so go for it.
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My background is in behavioral health administration and digital health. I run a digital health consulting company where I talk telehealth all day.
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In March 2021, I left the job that I planned to retire at because something just wasn’t right. I wasn’t happy there despite thinking that I was making good money and working for someone who would bend over backward for me.
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What I learned is that I had a lot of work to do on myself to figure out what I was so miserable there. It was the job, yes, but it was a global issue with my own thought processes that let me accept less than what I deserved because someone else told me it was good for me.
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It wasn’t.
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I started to network during my transition because I realized that I had been in a vacuum for the previous 10 years while building my companies. The more women that I met, the more they identified with the story that I was telling. I wasn’t happy because something was missing, and I wasn’t sure what that was.
So many female professionals felt unsatisfied, unfulfilled and unappreciated in their roles. I wanted to dig into that more.
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Through my own writing, course creation, group creation and virtual coffees, I realized that what I was saying was only special in that other people were hesitant to say it. They, like me, thought the problem was them.
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The problem was that women are taught to take their worth from the opinions of others rather than inherently believing that they are worth all of it and more without external validation.
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I’m still a work in progress, and I will be forever, but I love to cheerlead other women into finding their power. I think a network of women who are on that journey together, all at different stages in the process, is an amazing concept that we haven’t seen before in the professional space.
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This is not about pumpkin spice lattes, farm house chic and infinity scarves, though you are totally allowed to love each of those things.

This is about showing up as a whole person, cracks and all, and working together until we don’t need a group about the experiences of women professionals.

We’re just professionals.

Can you tell us the story behind how you met your business partner?

My business partner in our health tech consulting company is a physician who is licensed in 50 states. I met him through an opportunity that we both got asked to consult on. I had no idea who he was, and he didn’t know me either. I listened to their business plan and realized that what they were doing was 100 percent not legal. I called him and told him not to do it because he would lose his licenses. Again, I was basically a stranger. He could have gotten mad or told me to pound sand because I was asking him to walk away from a lot of money, but he didn’t. He asked me to stick with him, and it’s been the best partnership I’ve ever had. Find people who are good at what you’re not, and trust them to do it.

Do you have any insights you can share related to maintaining high team morale?

Hire smart people and get out of the way. If you have to micromanage, you either have the wrong team or you’re not trusting the right team. Giving people autonomy with goals to achieve is the way to keep teams engaged and workloads balanced. Trust is almost as important as salary.

Contact Info:

• Website: elletwo.com
• Instagram: instagram.com/elle_two
• Facebook: Ask L2
• Linkedin: linkedin.com/in/elletwo
• Twitter: @callmeelletwo
• Youtube: NA
• Yelp: NA

Image Credits
I can have my Brand Manager send over some event shots. I don’t have them on hand. They’re all virtual events.