Category: The Most Admired Women Leaders in Business 2022_Vol2_Profile

A path-breaking leader, Lexis Serot is driven by a passion for transforming lives and providing life-changing experiences. She is spearheading the motto of Collaborating, Empowering, Supporting, and Protecting others through her organization, LittleWins.

She is the Founder and a model leader at a young, rapidly growing organization. Her vision of leadership is about setting an example and leading a unique path to achieve desired purposes and goals.

“The reason I started LittleWins is a huge part of who I am today. I wanted to tell my daughter that when life presented an “at-bat” I swung like hell. With my daughter, I saw firsthand how difficult it was to access the proper care and equipment that could enable her to reach her fullest potential. Every detail of LittleWins has been carefully designed, with compassion, respect, and love for this community.”

A Ground-Breaking Leader

Lexis is well versed in the care, therapies, and equipment that help her daughter – and people with a range of abilities. She has navigated a frustratingly complex system that leaves people with disabilities and their families feeling isolated and alone. Understanding the need of the hour and being shocked by the disparities that, limit many people’s access to durable medical equipment, she decided to address this problem by founding her company.

Based on her experiences, interactions, and an “unrelenting desire to make a change,” Lexis began laying the groundwork for LittleWins in 2018. The name is personal and relatable to her community because every progress milestone for a person with disabilities is a little win for them and their family.

All About LittleWins

One in six children and one in four adults in the U.S. have a physical, developmental, behavioral, or sensory impairment. Most can’t afford the durable medical equipment they need or wait months for insurance companies to approve it.

Lexis believes that access to equipment and supplies should be simple. The mom of four, including a daughter who has cerebral palsy, founded LittleWins.com to connect and support people with disabilities and individuals who actively work to provide a better quality of life for others.

LittleWins.com harnesses the power of the community to help its members buy, sell or donate medical equipment, get information, and connect with others. Members list and browse equipment by category and location on the company’s website. They connect directly with buyers and sellers through the site’s app. They share tips, experiences, and advice on LittleWins’ social pages.

“People with disabilities deserve to say, ‘there is nothing I’m not worthy of.’ LittleWins goes to bat for every one of them,” says Lexis.

Since 2018, Lexis has continually adapted the LittleWins.com website with web and e-commerce developers. She directs a marketing assistant and marketing communications agency. She works closely with her legal and financial advisors. She collaborates with regional and national organizations that support people with disabilities. She partners with other entrepreneurs, who offer products and services to her community. She created and posts regularly on LittleWins’ online support forum, receiving and providing feedback to help people with disabilities and the families that support them live their best lives.

Coming Together for fulfilling a Bigger Purpose

Lexis is a passionate advocate and cheerleader of the work of national and local organizations that serve people with disabilities. She works with durable medical equipment suppliers such as NuMotion to identify used equipment that can fulfill the needs of LittleWins community members. She connects regularly with other entrepreneurs – such as Communikind founder Cimeran Kapur– and promotes their services on LittleWins.

She joined forces with another woman entrepreneur, Hotsy Totsy Haus CEO Christi Leonardi, a deaf single mother, to create LittleWins-branded, natural ingredient bath bombs, that are now being sold, on the LittleWins website.

Lexis regularly works with NuMotion, National Seating & Mobility, the Cerebral Palsy Foundation, and Clearbrook.org, which empowers adults and children with intellectual and developmental disabilities to live their fullest lives possible.

Building a Resourceful Community  

Lexis’s relentless efforts to build an online community of people with disabilities have paid huge dividends. More than 6,000 followers now visit LittleWins.Facebook and Instagram pages; and 800+ visitors go to the LittleWins website every week. To date, LittleWins.com’s 7,500 + community members have donated, purchased, or exchanged more than 200 pieces of equipment. They also exchange experiences and advice daily on the site’s secure messaging app.

The Team LittleWins “Empowering Communities and Smashing Stereotypes” Private Facebook Group. Now 400 members strong, the Group, led by Lexis, is a platform for families and people with disabilities to share their stories, provide advice and experiences on products and services and provide mutual encouragement.

After launching LittleWins.com in 2019, Lexis began to explore how the site could serve her community’s needs beyond durable medical equipment. To build the LittleWins brand, she launched a line of LittleWins apparel – beanies, trucker hats, and t-shirts.

The LittleWins blog and podcast feature educational posts, stories about her clients, inspirational leaders in the disability movement, interviews with durable medical equipment and adaptive technology experts, and more.

Lexis continually mines feedback from the company’s surveys and emails that can inform how it can create (or support) solutions to common challenges for people with disabilities. She is preparing to launch a medical supply subscription box program that will provide people with disabilities and their families exactly the right supplies they need, when and how they need them.

Combined, these initiatives are raising awareness of LittleWins’ mutually-supportive community, and the used durable medical equipment items that are available on LittleWins.com

The Big Wins of LittleWins 

During the past year, Lexis launched two new projects, with a third about to launch. LittleWins teamed up with Dine-It-4ward to raise money for the Cerebral Palsy Foundation.

LittleWins sponsors events that, support services for people with disabilities, such as the abilities Expo, Virtual Run/Walk of Clearbrook, a leader in creating innovative opportunities, services, and support for people with disabilities; Farm Fresh Food Bank, The Kids Equipment Network, and front line responders. She also put together the first-ever music festival to accommodate people with disabilities this past summer.

She’s donated hospital beds to people who needed them during the start of stay-at-home orders. For this effort, Lexis Serot took out an ad to reach people who had hospital beds but no longer needed them. She picked the beds up from each donor’s home, disinfected them, and delivered them to people who needed them.

Lexis Serot gives virtual shout-outs to companies that actively support people with disabilities through their product marketing and hiring practices. She shares stories of LittleWins community members and their loved ones.

In 2021, Lexis Serot was named a Top 100 Healthcare Visionaries by the International Forum on Advancements in Healthcare, previously known as the Smart Health Conference. She has been asked to be a keynote speaker at this year’s conference, to be held in Dubai. LittleWins was also awarded honorable mentions, by Fast Company’s 2021 World-Changing Ideas.

Lexis’s Ultimate Vision

In addition to her day-to-day leadership of LittleWins.com and full-time care of her four young children, Lexis’s entrepreneurial spirit, drive, and relentless pursuit of growth for LittleWins.com are rooted in her desire to help others. Her deep belief in the unique service she’s created, her ability to tell her personal story, and her talent for connecting with people who share her vision and journey.

She believes that community-based models – supportive online villages like LittleWins – can re-unite everyone to solve shared challenges, reach common goals, and make sure everyone has an equal shot at success. Through the COVID-19 pandemic, she has used the power of online communication to tell the stories of her customers and her community.

The Road Ahead

Lexis Serot envisions a world that values people of all abilities – a world that actively supports their right to the help, equipment, and services that help them achieve their full potential. She reckons that everyone’s attitudes toward people with disabilities are improving, she believes – pointing to companies whose policies and practices support workplace equality. “But we still have a long way to go,” she notes. “We must celebrate and tap into our differences on a much broader level.”

Lexis Serot exemplifies leadership in 2022 – an entrepreneur in evolution who derives satisfaction from helping others – and continually finds new ways to serve them a better and brighter future. She has even launched version 3 of the LittleWins website at the beginning of this year. This version update was spearheaded by the community and what they wanted to see from LittleWins and how it could be better. The latest update includes a premium membership which allows members a fixed shipping rate through FedEx and the ability to print their labels at home.

Meet Yoana Boyanova, a Senior Member of Technical Staff at VMware Bulgaria, VMware’s largest R&D office in Bulgaria.

VMware is a leading provider of multi-cloud services for all apps, enabling digital innovation with enterprise control. At the heart of everything it does lie the responsibility and the opportunity to build a sustainable, equitable, and more secure future for all.

VMware streamlines the journey for its clients to become digital businesses that deliver a better experience to its customers and empowers employees to do their best work. Since its foundation in 1998, VMware’s employees and ecosystem of over 30,000 partners have stood behind the technology innovations transforming entire industries—from banking, healthcare, and government to retail, telecommunications, manufacturing, and transportation.

Every day, VMware’s employees work to solve its customers’ toughest challenges through disruptive technologies like edge computing, artificial intelligence, blockchain, machine learning, Kubernetes, and more–to define the digital foundation that will accelerate the next wave of innovation.

With almost six years of experience as a Front-End Developer, Yoana is currently moving into a managerial role. Prior to joining VMware, Yoana worked in EPMA Systems. She completed her bachelor’s degree from Sofia University St. Kliment Ohridski and her master’s degree from the New Bulgarian University. Yoana is also a part of a non-profit group named ‘Women who code”, which focuses completely on supporting women in technology.

Currently, Yoana works on a leading Cloud-Service Delivery Platform which is part of VMware’s Multi-Cloud Program. The organization has a variety of clients who are mainly service providers, and its product is critical to their business. For Yoana’s team, clients’ needs are always with high priority.

The Journey towards Leadership

While at school, Yoana was very good at maths, and the most perspective career then was to be a software developer. That’s how she moved to Sofia from her hometown to study Information technologies. It was hard at first and Yoana studied a lot, but only a year and a half later she got my first job as a junior UI developer. Meanwhile, she was studying Project Management at the university and soon realized that management is what she wanted to do. Later Yoana started working for VMware, joined Women Who Code, spoke at several conferences, and she served as a mentor in an academy and mentor to a girl intern. Yoana was performing well as a technical team lead for a small team, which helped her to get recognized, and now she is moving to a manager position. She hopes this will eventually help her try something new, which can help her gain a lot of experience.

Yoana feels the need to align her team goals to the company’s objective and, key results. She says, “We live in a very dynamic time, and I need to be very agile and at the same time to step in very fast in my new role.”

Creating a Balanced Industry

Yoana suggests that it is important to show that everything is possible and the only thing matters are who you are as a person and what are your skills. She believes, companies can make more events for diversity inclusion, take part in various initiatives, organize internal programs, and more.

She strongly believes, VMware can win the Multi-Cloud world as the company has the right portfolio and right people to do that. She is quite excited that she is a part of a one really big initiative which can bring a lot of changes to the world right now and she can do a lot with her work to support it.

Suggestions for Upcoming Entrepreneurs

When we asked Yoana to give some advice to upcoming leaders/entrepreneurs, which will help them, she says, “Don’t be afraid that you can fail and that it seems it’s a “men’s world”. We live in a modern world and anyone can achieve anything.” She also adds, “If you need some inspiration or source of strength, you can contact an already successful woman which can help you to grow. And yes, there are a lot of successful great women out there!”

Satisfied Clients

“VMware is the glue that holds our multi-cloud strategy together. It allows us to share resources, tools, and data between Amazon, Google, and our own private cloud environments.”- Salvatore Cassara, CIO, SGB-SMIT Group

“We deployed VMware SD-WAN Edge devices to extend the same level of user experience to the home as if our employees were working onsite.”– Emil Patel, University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center.

“Hyundai AutoEver has been focused on application modernization with VMware Tanzu and heavily invested in internalized capabilities like DevSecOps and microservices.”– Jung Sik Suh, CEO, Hyundai AutoEver

Quote

 “Never give up – everything is possible.”

Meet Dr. Manisha Karmarkar, COO, Ruby Hall Clinic. Having joined the hospital as an anesthetist, she rose to the ranks and held a number of key positions. While she continued to be enjoy clinical work, the leadership team quickly noticed her intellect and emotional ability to get tangible results. Although she leads the hospital from the front, she hasn’t forgotten her roots. She is a practicing anesthetist and even continues her education in the form of degrees from esteemed educational institutions across the globe.

Since Manisha never planned her role as COO, she considers herself as an ‘accidental COO’. The first time she got attracted to healthcare leadership was when she was offered to head the Anaesthesiology Department and OT services at the hospital. Although she had theoretical knowledge due to her MBA in Healthcare Management, its practical knowledge and the belief senior management had in her that propelled Manisha forward. She also says, “I believe that nothing substitutes for hard work and talent. You can’t skate your way to the top and break glass ceilings.”

Achieving Excellence in Hospital Care

Manisha says, “Ruby Hall Clinic has a history of keeping at the heart of its operations. As an 850-bedded multidisciplinary institute with three hospitals in Pune, we have constantly moved towards a true culture of achieving excellence in-hospital care.” The hospital’s nine NABH and NABL quality accreditations and certifications in medicine as well as its cGreen OT certifications are proof of this very notion. As one of the forerunners in being bestowed with such accreditations, Manisha and her team’s focus on high-quality patient care speaks volumes in itself.

Additionally, Ruby Hall’s super-specialist doctors have a proven track record of excellence. Going beyond reputation and word of mouth, the hospital’s tertiary care services are known to have an excellent rate of results. When it comes to investing in the latest technology or even promoting organ donation in the country, Ruby Hall Clinic has the first-mover advantage further strengthening its position in the healthcare market. Take for instance the fact that it has been the first to perform pioneering robotic surgeries in the city and this number has now crossed more than 300. Or even the fact that Ruby Hall has a cutting-edge cancer care facility and an all-women managed breast care clinic among many other initiatives.

The Pandemic Changed Many Things

Manisha took the reins in the capacity of the COO at Ruby Hall Clinic right in the middle of the Covid-19 pandemic. Although she feels it was a big challenge, she was willing to tackle it head-on. Manisha believes that coronavirus upended life for one and all and as a leader, she continued to do everything in her capability to keep her patients and employees safe while quickly adapting to changes in the industry. Be it technologically advanced equipment, adopting AI and machine learning, or pivoting tactics and strategies – the pandemic brought about changes she never imagined. As a leader, Manisha had to display business acumen, healthcare expertise, and forward-thinking all at once. Sure, there may have been challenging days but what mattered is that she took it all in her stride and worked to make a difference when it mattered the most.

Providing Unparalleled Healthcare Experience is the Target

Professionally, Manisha’s goals at the hospital focus on providing unsurpassed quality, unique technology, and an unparalleled healthcare experience. She and her team are working hard to build a more integrated system to achieve better health, better care, and more joy for those providing care as well. By harnessing technology, the entire team of Ruby Hall Clinic is looking to create the kind of experience around accessible healthcare that is valuable for people, allows them to achieve health goals they set for themselves, and to do it in a way that is affordable to them. And that is what Manisha Karmarkar is most excited about.

As a hospital, Ruby Hall Clinic has begun to expedite its expansion strategy by focusing on the rapidly growing demand for innovative and comprehensive solutions to support the digital transformation of the healthcare ecosystem, be it automation, artificial intelligence (AI), or the Internet of Things (IoT).“To be specific, the hospital has already incorporated a new EMR system, a successful Lab App actively uses robotics in surgeries, invested in world-class advanced equipment such as the Varian Ethos for cancer care, a hybridcath lab, and a neuronavigation system amongst others,” she says. Ruby Hall Clinic’s purpose is simple: to build a digitally enabled healthcare ecosystem where it actively collaborates across the continuum of care to improve each patient’s health outcomes.

Suggestions for Young Entrepreneurs

When asked for suggestions, Manisha Karmarkar says, “Be authentic, be genuine and be fearless. Not everyone will like your true colors, but people will appreciate your honesty anyway. But showing your true colors means showing your vulnerabilities, too. Let people know what gives you strength, what are your weaknesses, but make sure to turn them into strengths later on.” 

She also adds, “No woman has risen to a leadership position without taking a few risks. It’s normal to feel hesitant about what you don’t know and what isn’t familiar. But don’t let that fear restrict you from pursuing a great idea or goal. Be fearless in the attempt of doing something new or challenging!”

Company Name: Ruby Hall Clinic

Management: Dr. Manisha Karmarkar, COO

Quote:“Passion is energy. Feel the power that comes from focusing on what excites you.”

URL : rubyhall.com