Partner / Chairs

Richard Lavin

Richard Lavin is the Founding Partner/Chair of LEVERAGEDWISDOM, a peer-to-peer learning organization for entrepreneurs who want to increase the equity value of their business. As a serial entrepreneur with fifty years of business experience, Richard developed the LEVERAGEDWISDOM model of monthly peer group meetings and one to one coaching to help CEOs gain powerful insight into the distinctions between owning, leading or managing a business and how these important differences impact their decision making process, strategic plans and operating disciplines, all of which ultimately define the equity value of their business and the opportunity for a liquidity event.

For the last 18 years Richard has built and led small confidential peer-to-peer learning groups. First at VISTAGE (formerly The Executive Committee) where he led groups for CEOs who wanted to be better managers of their businesses then at TIGER 21 where the focus was on High Net Worth individuals who wanted to be better managers of their portfolios after having sold their businesses or exited their corporate careers. Richard was also the Co-Founder of TIGER 21.

In addition to his work at LEVERAGEDWISDOM, Richard is currently a Mentor/Advisor at DreamIt Ventures a new business incubator in New York City and is developing a peer-learning experience for the Founder participants in the NYU-Poly Incubator, also in New York City.

In the preceding decade and a half, Richard designed, built, owned and operated Lavin’s Restaurant and Wine Bar, Restaurant SoFi, Black Tie Box Lunch, Plums and various corporate dining rooms. His team created diverse and unique restaurants, as well as, private and corporate catering experiences. The restaurants were often pictured, written about and reviewed favorably in The New York Times, New York Magazine, Gourmet, Food and Wine, Forbes, Zagat, Gault Milleau and Town and Country. In addition, Richard contributed recipes and commented on the business of food and wine in many of the same publications. During that time he also founded Academie du Vin, USA, with Stephen Spurrier and Melissa Sere to promote the appreciation of fine wine and establish its cultural importance in the United States. Through a series of wine tastings, dinners, classes and seminars created exclusively for the Members of the Academie, both neophytes and oenophiles deepened their appreciation of fine wine. Members personally met with and tasted the wines of two hundred plus winemakers and vineyard owners. Among the Members were great collectors and wine writers. Richard wrote extensively on wine in several editions of The Great American Vineyard Datebook and was a contributor to the wine notes in the original Silver Palate Good Times Cookbook. In the 1970’s, Richard partnered with his wife Carole Galanaugh Lavin to build STUFF TO WEAR, a 6 store chain of women’s boutiques, located on Florida’s West Coast. STUFF To WEAR pioneered many retail trends, including merchandising women’s clothing stores as though it were the customer’s closet and mixing junior and missy styles within a fashion point of view. In prior years Richard was a real estate broker specializing in commercial transactions in the New York City Metro area.

Richard is a graduate of the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania.

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