As a consultant who helps small businesses grow and as a teacher of entrepreneurship (Kauffman FastTrac facilitator and former adjunct professor at The New School), I get asked all the time if entrepreneurs are born, made or accidental. Ruta Aidis, project director of The Gender Global Entrepreneurship and Development Index (Gender-GEDI) and I are discussing whether U.S. high-growth women entrepreneurs are born, made or come apart through happenstance as part of the research she is doing. I’m helping her flesh out her quantitative research in 30 countries with case studies about how U.S. women lead their companies to greatness.

If lessons learned by Elisabete Miranda, president of CQ fluency, are any indication, high-growth women entrepreneurs are made through unyielding focus, hard work and powerful networking. Miranda isn’t part of the research I mentioned, but her story is illustrative of how some women morph into high-growth entrepreneur. She shares this trait with Nina Vaca, of Pinnacle, whom I’ve written about and is part of the research project. Both started as lifestyle entrepreneurs who, at a certain point, decided to go for the brass ring.