Today we’d like to introduce you to Nicole Provonchee.
Hi Nicole, it’s an honor to have you on the platform. Thanks for taking the time to share your story with us – to start maybe you can share some of your backstories with our readers?
Ever since elementary school, I’ve always had an interest in a passion for women’s issues and the unique challenges facing women in leadership positions. My mother loves to tell the story of 10-year-old Nicole writing a letter to the president of the “Erector Set” company asking why they were no girls on the boxes of Erector sets that were sold in local stores.
I spent the first 20 years of my career moving up the leadership ladder in marketing, communications, and strategy roles in startups, large corporations, and marketing agencies. However, over last few years of my corporate career, I found myself struggling to find a balance between my roles as a rising corporate athlete and an engaged mom to two young boys. I simply could not make it all work, so I decided to explore other options. In 2016, I became certified as an executive coach and launched Bright Blue Consulting in 2018. Bright Blue focuses on executive coaching for women leaders and women lead teams.
Working for myself has been a healthy mix of exciting, terrifying, and inspiring. I am so very lucky – I work with bright, talented, experienced, driven women who are already successful and strive to become even more successful. Through Bright Blue, I not only coach executive women and their teams, I also speak to groups about the challenges facing women professionals and how they can leverage their unique talents and strength to overcome them.
I often refer to myself as a pragmatic feminist. I help women – and men – figure out how they can reach their career goals in the world that does not offer a level playing field. We all have such powerful internal wisdom, but we are often moving too fast to hear it.
Leading Bright Blue has allowed me the flexibility to have a fulfilling career and be present with my family at a level that seemed impossible in a corporate world.
Alright, so let’s dig a little deeper into the story – has it been an easy path overall, and if not, what were the challenges you’ve had to overcome?
One of the most challenging obstacles I’ve encountered over the last decade is trying to find a way to “do it all.” I’m a big believer in the saying that “women can do it all, but they just can’t do it all at once. ” I’ve found that to be very, very true.
There have been times in my life when I’ve been able to hit the accelerator pedal on my career and grow rapidly up the corporate ladder, but it often meant I wasn’t able to spend as much time with my family as I would like. There’s been other times where I have needed to focus on my family, especially during the homeschooling years of Covid, and my career had to fall into second place.
I’m learning, as my children grow and evolve, that their needs and my needs also evolve. So, what may work for me now, may not work in a year or two. As someone who thrives under a certain amount of structure and routine, that’s too can be challenging. And I think it’s something to which many working parents can relate.
Alright, so let’s switch gears a bit and talk business. What should we know?
Bright Blue Consulting is an executive coaching company that works with a wide range of people and organizations, from executives at the nation’s largest healthcare company to leaders at a Fortune 50 manufacturing firm to Board members of local nonprofits. We work with talented people who are seeking to grow – professional and personally – and want a trusted guide to help them along their journey.
My team and I bring their real-world leadership experience and extensive coaching training to women professionals across the nation, supporting women as they create actionable plans they can implement, measure, and then celebrate their newfound success.
Past and current clients include AllianceBernstein, HCA, Navihealth, Bridgestone, Ascension, Nashville Cares, Center for NonProfit Management, and more.I also serve as an advisor at the Entrepreneur Center, Nashville, and a strategic planning consultant and coach at the Center for Nonprofit Management.
If we knew you growing up, how would we have described you?
I grew up in a suburb of Atlanta and had a pretty typical suburban childhood (think any 80’s movie that shows kids riding bikes through neighborhoods). My father was a college history teacher and then later moved into the field of photography and audiovisual management for a community college. My mother, a former journalist, and teacher, stayed home with us while we were young and then went back to work in marketing for a number of different companies in Atlanta. I have a younger brother that is a leader of at a major PR firm in Atlanta.
Marketing was a field I was immersed in from early childhood. With my father as a photographer and my mother developing marketing strategies for a number of different companies, I was well-versed in the field before I ever graduated from college.
After high school, I went to Birmingham Southern College where I studied English and political science, in hopes of going to law school. After my English professor encouraged me to do an internship in a law firm, I quickly realized that a legal career was not for me and pivoted back into marketing. I worked for a marketing agency and a nonprofit before going back to business school at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville in 1998.
Business school was quite a challenge for an English major who had avoided taking any advanced math or business classes in undergrad. It was also challenge because so few women enrolled in business school at the time – Women only made up 20% of my class. Graduate school was one of the first times I experienced discrimination and outright harassment because of my gender. Working with the women in my class, we founded the first women’s MBA Association at the University and worked to recruit more women into business school. To this day, I continue to advocate for women in business school and serve as an executive coach at the Owen School of Business at Vanderbilt.
Like all b-school grads in 2000, I joined a dot.com startup and moved to Nashville. (And, like most 2000 startups, it blew up). I continued my marketing and strategy career over the next 18 years, focusing primarily in the healthcare field. In 2009, I married my husband Zach Provonchee, a talented residential architect and we had our children Luca and Nico in 2011 and 2013, respectively. We live in Forest Hills with our sweet rescue dog Maggie and both operate our own companies which offers us a great deal of flexibility around how we structure our work and personal time.
Contact Info:
- Email: [email protected]
- Website: https://www.consultbrightblue.com
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/consultbrightblue/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/consultbrightblue/
Image Credits
Krista Lee Photography
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