Luminary Global CEO Valerie Ellis Lavin Featured in OrlandoVoyager Interview

Valerie Lavin's father, was a business owner before she was. When Saigon fell in 1975, the money from one of his earliest businesses was what got the family out of the country and into the United States.

Valerie didn't set out to repeat that pattern. But when she retired from the Army in 2014 after 21 years leading in Intelligence and Operations, and founded Luminary Global two years later, she was doing the same thing her father had: building something that gives people options when the ground shifts under them. Today Luminary is a national emergency gear integrator built by her and her husband, Jeremy.

Valerie recently sat down with OrlandoVoyager to talk about that path: what military leadership did and didn't prepare her for, the mistakes along the way, and what it's meant to keep learning a decade in.

Read the full conversation on OrlandoVoyager for the story behind Luminary Global, from the family history that shaped how Valerie approaches building a business to what she's learned building a national company from a two-person start.