Lea A. Ellermeier’s autobiography, Finding the Exit, may be her debut book, but she has already had many years of practice as a storyteller. In the early 2000s, Ellermeier made the gutsy move of founding Lingualcare, an orthodontic technology company. She struggled to build a narrative for the company that would sell the idea to customers, employees, and investors. “Being a CEO and starting a company is about storytelling,” Ellermeier says. “And I love a good story.”
A lifelong bookworm, Ellermeier has a long and varied list of favorite writers, ranging from Pat Conroy to J.R.R. Tolkien. (She can be “nerdy that way,” she says.) But, she most hoped to emulate memoirs with strong, forthright voices like those of Joyce Maynard or Mary Karr. To that end, Ellermeier decided her autobiography needed to address both her rise within the business world and her painful formative years. “I’ve had people tell me they don’t know anything about business but that they really enjoyed your book. And to me, that’s the highest compliment.”
With biting wit and a shrewd eye for detail, Ellermeier narrates two timelines: In the 2000s, she and co-founder Ruedger Rubbert scrambled between Dallas, Texas, and Berlin, Germany, to fund their new company. In 1970s Nebraska, a young Ellermeier endured one trauma after another. Her mother abused her, her father fell into terrible legal troubles, she was raped at the age of 15, and she developed an early drinking problem. “Figuring out how to drink just the right amount became my obsession,” she writes in the book, never losing her humor. “I wanted to drink enough to be funny, charming, and sexy, without blacking out or wrecking my car.” That balance eluded her until she got sober.
Originally, Ellermeier didn’t write about her childhood trauma. She intended to focus solely on how she and Ruedger built the business and eventually sold it to 3M, but at a certain point, she felt it would be insincere to elide the messier details of her background. “I realized so many of the choices that I made, so much of what led me to become who I became, it started in those early days,” Ellermeier says. “Those kinds of traumatic experiences can really hinder you as an adult in the choices that you make.”
The Kirkus review calls this delicate intertwining of the personal and professional “tender and smart.” The author shows how her difficult childhood sometimes influenced her business decisions. Early in their venture, for example, Ellermeier and Ruedger struggled with how to tell their third partner that they deserved more equity than him. “How would I tell this nice man that I valued him less than Ruedger?” she asked herself before giving in to an even split. Rather than walk readers through her decision process at the moment, she depicts a devastating scene from her childhood in which she realizes her father has invited her rapist back into their lives for his own financial gain. The young Ellermeier screams at her father, demanding to know “how many pieces of silver [she] was worth,” giving insight into why, as an adult, she found it so difficult to devalue others.
Ellermeier doesn’t downplay the grueling work of building a business. “There’s this idea that if it’s meant to be, it should be easier,” Ellermeier says. “And that’s just bullshit.” For her, she too often sees stories in the media of brilliant women who seem to sail through Harvard or Stanford, create a groundbreaking company, and go on to lead enviable lives. Ellermeier thinks the beginning stages are never pretty, and while pedigree helps, it’s not necessary to break through. (Ellermeier herself eventually graduated from The University of Texas at El Paso. “Hardly A-list,” as she says.)
“I didn’t want to write something prescriptive,” Ellermeier says. She hopes her book will speak to other female entrepreneurs. “Personally, I wouldn’t want to hear some privileged woman tell me how I need to lean in when I can’t even afford day care.” As Ellermeier began sharing her memoir’s first drafts with fellow female CEOs, she realized that others had experienced the exact same feelings of extreme self-doubt and also wished they’d had more realistic guidance. “I think women think, ‘Oh, it’s just me. I’m the only one feeling this,’ ” Ellermeier explains. “I wanted to say to them: ‘Hey it’s going to feel bad, and that’s OK. Just keep going.’ ”
Ellermeier still lives in Dallas. She’s currently working on new ventures and founding Millcamp Press, which will focus on publishing other independent, engaging, and humorous takes on entrepreneurship. Since selling Lingualcare, she and co-founder Ruedger have gotten married. (The romance does not develop in the book, but it will come as no surprise given their great dynamic as partners.) She also makes a point to mentor young female entrepreneurs, citing the statistic that only 5% of venture capital today goes to women. With the release of Finding the Exit, she hopes that even more young women will hear her main message: “You can’t necessarily control where you start, but you can control a lot of where you end up.”
Rhett Morgan is a writer and translator based in Paris.
