About Us

Vellamo Founder & Chief Mentor

Molly Gimmel

A voice for women entrepreneurs, a builder of bold businesses,

and a leader who gets results.

Molly is an award-winning entrepreneur, author, advocate, and speaker. She has founded or co-founded several companies in a variety of industries. Her first business, that she co-founded in 2001, Design To Delivery Inc, is a multi-million dollar government contracting firm that has appeared four times on the Inc5000 list of fastest growing privately held companies. She founded Vellamo in 2021 when she was getting ready to publish her book (see below), to offer leadership training, coaching, and consulting to corporate and individual clients.

Molly is also a fierce advocate for small businesses, and has served in numerous leadership roles for several non-profit organizations, including serving as Chair of the National Board of Directors for the National Association of Women Business Owners (NAWBO) and on the Advisory Board for Enterprising Women magazine. She is currently a Delegate for the US on the W20, the G20 engagement group focused on women's empowerment, serving on the Entrepreneurship task force. She is also the President of SETS, a non-profit community service fraternal organization.

Connect with Molly on LinkedIn

In 2022, Molly published “Master Your Mindset: How Women Leaders Step Up” in which she shared many of her own leadership experiences, as well as insights from over two dozen accomplished women leaders that she interviewed, to reveal the mental attitudes that define effective leadership. Filled with personal stories, humor, and profound insights from the trenches, "Master Your Mindset" shows you step by step how to connect with yourself and with those around you in authenticity, confidence, and integrity—to become the best leader you can be.

Buy the Book

About Our Name

There’s a story in leadership circles that goes like this:

One night, there was a really big storm and the next morning, a man went to the beach, and as far as the eye could see in both directions, there were thousands and thousands of starfish that had washed up onto the beach. He started walking down the beach, and in the distance, he saw what looked like someone dancing. As he got closer, he realized it was a young woman, and she wasn’t dancing, she was picking up starfish and throwing them into the ocean. When he got to her, he asked, “Why are you throwing starfish into the ocean? There’s so many, you can’t possibly make a difference.” She looked at him, stooped down, picked up a starfish, threw it into the ocean, and responded, “I just made a difference for that one.”

This story was the inspiration for naming the company. We want the people we serve to be like the starfish – we make a difference for each one. We researched names of mythological water deities, and discovered Vellamo, the ancient Finnish goddess of the sea. The Vellamo Leadership Institute is named after her and the starfish is our spirit animal.

Helping Good Leaders Become Great Leaders