The organization for executives with at least 15 years of professional experience has existed primarily in the digital sphere to date, but now wants to add more clubhouses to its locations in New York, Los Angeles and Chicago. The new space in Los Angeles, where 750 of Chief’s 5,000 members live, takes up two buildings and has six meeting rooms, lounges, a cocktail bar, a mother’s wellness room, phone booths and a center courtyard.
Chief, a private network for vice president and rising and C-level executives, has opened a Los Angeles location, the Los Angeles Business Journal reported.
Lindsay Kaplan and Carolyn Childers, who founded the company in New York in 2019, are expanding the private-club concept and have a worldwide waitlist, the Business Journal reported.
The Los Angeles location’s clubhouse in West Hollywood opened in April, but members had early online access to Chief starting in April 2020, the Business Journal reported.
“We were going through a huge pandemic, and Chief, while a lot of our services were originally in person, made the pivot to a virtual community,” Childers told the Business Journal.
The new clubhouse takes up two buildings and comes complete with six meeting rooms, lounges, a cocktail bar, a mother’s wellness room, phone booths and a center courtyard.
“Chief, unlike a lot of spaces out there, we are not a co-working space,” Kaplan told the Business Journal. “We were looking for something that gave us hotel-lobby vibes without hotel rooms. We wanted to develop a space where our members could meet one another and have cocktails and really congregate and also have meetings.”
Approximately 750 of Chief’s 5,000 members are in Los Angeles, the Business Journal reported.
To be a part of Chief, members must hold an executive role in an organization and have accumulated 15 years or more of professional experience, the Business Journal reported.
“These are people that are leaders,” Kaplan said.
Vice president-level members pay $5,900 a year in dues, while C-level executives pay $7,900 a year, the Business Journal reported. While that may seem steep, Childers said most members are sponsored by their employer.
“The majority of what we offer is really about being able to grow and extend within the community as leaders,” she said, adding that Chief is viewed by many companies as a way for their employees to learn new skills and make connections.
Childers and Kaplan founded Chief after rising through the ranks in their own careers, the Business Journal reported. They found they were spending a lot of time mentoring others, Childers said, but “didn’t really have a space for us to continue to grow as leaders.”
“They say that it’s lonely at the top, but it gets lonely for women a lot earlier, so we were inspired to launch Chief, a community focused on senior executive women,” she added.
But while Chief is designed specifically for women, men are welcome to join, the Business Journal noted.
The company now has flagship locations in New York, Chicago and L.A., but Kaplan said most of the growth up until now has been in the digital sphere, the Business Journal reported. Now that the economy is opening back up, Chief wants to open flagship locations where members can gather, and the goal is to open more clubhouses in areas where many of Chief’s members either live or visit.
“We view [the clubhouses] very much as an amenity as part of your membership, but the vast majority of what you get for your membership happens in a digital format,” Childers said.
“We’re excited to continue our expansion,” Kaplan added. “We have a network that is growing by word of mouth, and we are excited for women who read about Chief and see themselves as a leader in their organization to apply.”
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