A woman sits in a conference room. She has prepared a pitch deck. The numbers are solid: market opportunity, user acquisition costs, retention rates, engagement metrics. Everything a streaming platform needs to survive.
But as she walks through the slides, she keeps pausing on the same image. It’s not a graph. It’s a screenshot from one of her shows. A woman in the audience, mid-conversation, leaning forward. Not performing. Not watching. Connecting.
She closes the deck. She looks at the investors across the table and says something they didn’t expect: “This isn’t about streaming. This is about what happens when women stop waiting for someone else to give them permission to be seen.”
The room goes quiet.
That woman is Cheldin Barlatt Rumer, and what she has built over the past sixteen years is not a media company. It’s a system. A living, breathing ecosystem where visibility, confidence, and community are inseparable from each other. And she has done it by refusing to accept the idea that any of those things can exist alone.
Meet Cheldin Barlatt Rumer
At 50, Cheldin is the CEO and Executive Producer of THIS IS IT NETWORK™, a global streaming platform with over 250,000 women engaging monthly. She hosts a live daily show from a studio audience. She teaches personal branding and social media marketing as an adjunct professor at both Drexel and Temple Universities. She published a book, SCREAM YOUR DREAM™: 66 Lessons to Building a Personal Brand, which debuted at #1 on Amazon’s Hot New Release list. She is also, somehow, still standing. Still building. Still showing up on live television five days a week at 9 a.m.
What defines her is not what she does. It is how she thinks about why women matter in spaces they have never fully occupied.
The Years of Watching
Cheldin grew up in Galloway Township, New Jersey, in a house where words mattered. Her father was a presence. Her mother modeled what it meant to move through the world with purpose. She played Division I field hockey at La Salle University. She was captain. She led. Then she graduated with a degree in mass communications and stepped into a career that would teach her something no classroom could: how to make other people visible.
For twenty years, Cheldin built marketing campaigns. She built brands. She built visibility for employers, for clients, for organizations that needed their story told. She was excellent at it. The kind of excellent that makes you valuable to everyone except yourself.
“I was helping brands find their voice,” she remembers, “but the women behind those brands were still struggling to find theirs.”
It’s a simple observation. It’s also the kind that doesn’t leave you alone once you see it.
She watched accomplished women—executives, entrepreneurs, professionals—who could articulate a brand strategy but couldn’t articulate themselves. They had confidence in their work. They didn’t have confidence in their right to take up space. The gap between their actual capability and their perceived visibility was not a marketing problem. It was a belief problem. A systems problem. A permission problem.
And there was no platform built specifically to close that gap at scale.
In 2009, Cheldin made a choice that most people in her position would have called a risk. She walked away from the behind-the-scenes role. She started THIS IS IT NETWORK™. She put herself in front of the camera. She made herself the story.
“I didn’t just want to help people behind the scenes,” she says. “I wanted to build a platform where women could be seen, heard, and celebrated in real time.”
That decision changed everything. Not because it made her famous. Because it made her useful in a completely different way.
What She Sees That Others Don’t
Walk into the THIS IS IT NETWORK™ studio on the Camden Waterfront on any given morning, and you will see something rare in media: a live audience. Five days a week. Nine to ten a.m. A room full of people who showed up to watch someone tell stories about remarkable women, to hear from experts, to be part of something that feels less like a broadcast and more like a conversation happening to be filmed.
The demographics are 70% female, ages 25 to 55. They are hyper-local: Pennsylvania, New Jersey, New York, Delaware. They work in business. They work in media. They work in schools. They came because they heard something was different here.
Cheldin understands what most media executives are still trying to figure out: the product is not the screen. The product is the room. Or rather, the feeling of being in a room with other people who are trying to build something, speak up, or find themselves.
“The biggest shift is that proximity has replaced perfection,” she explains, “and content has evolved into community.”
She has watched this change ripple through the entire digital landscape. Audiences no longer want polish alone. They want relatability. They want consistency. They want to know that the person speaking to them is real enough to be fallible, clear enough to be trusted, and present enough to care.
Most brands respond to this by trying harder. They post more. They optimize more. They measure more. Cheldin did something different. She asked a harder question: What if the audience wasn’t the product? What if the audience was the point?
“The brands that are leading today are not just broadcasting. They’re engaging. They’re listening. They’re building ecosystems where their audience feels seen, heard, and celebrated,” she says. “In a crowded digital landscape, clarity is your competitive advantage. But community is your sustainability. And when you align both, your voice doesn’t just stand out. It delivers impact.”
This is not abstract. She has built THIS IS IT NETWORK™ on exactly this principle. Every show is designed to do two things at once: deliver content and create belonging. The women who appear on the platform are not guests. They are co-creators of the experience. The audience is not watching. They are participating.
She expanded into SCREAM YOUR DREAM™, a personal branding training program. She built partnerships with Urban Outfitters, with corporations, with institutions that understand her framework. She is now raising funding for the THIS IS IT NETWORK™ Media and Innovation Center in Gloucester Township, a physical space where content creation, education, and community engagement converge.
But she has also stayed in the classroom. Every semester at Drexel and Temple, she teaches marketing and interactive media to students who have never known a world without social platforms. They are fluent in technology. They are often lost on the fundamentals.
“The classroom keeps me honest,” she says. “Working with students gives me a real-time understanding of how the next generation is thinking. What I bring in is clarity and application. What I take out is perspective. While platforms evolve, the fundamentals do not. You still need to know who you are, what you do, and how to communicate it effectively.”
She is not teaching them how to go viral. She is teaching them how to build something that lasts because it matters. That is the real lesson. And it has become the architecture of everything she builds.
The Rumer Playbook: 5 Lessons
Clarity creates confidence, not the other way around. Before visibility, strategy, or content, know who you are and what you deserve. Confidence comes from repetition and articulation, not from waiting to feel ready.
Community is not a feature; it is your competitive advantage. Build with your audience, not just for them. Create spaces where people feel seen, heard, and celebrated.
Proximity matters more than perfection. Authenticity and consistency will always outperform polish alone. Show up as a real person having a real conversation.
Your environment shapes your trajectory. Pay attention to what surrounds you and who surrounds you. The right room makes it easier to stay aligned, intentional, and consistent.
Visibility without voice is just noise. Before you build a platform, know what you actually stand for. Your perspective, not your reach, determines your impact.
The Room Where It Happens
Sixteen years into THIS IS IT NETWORK™, Cheldin still shows up five days a week at 9 a.m. The live audience is still there. The conversations are still happening. The women are still arriving because they know that somewhere in Philadelphia, someone has built a space where their voice matters.
She has watched her industry shift from broadcasting to streaming to something that doesn’t have a name yet. A thing that is part education, part community, part movement. A thing that only exists because one woman decided that helping brands find visibility was no longer enough. She needed to build a system where women could find themselves.
That original moment in the conference room—the one where she closed the deck and asked a different question—that moment is still alive in everything she does. Not because she is trying to change the world. Because she is trying to change the fundamental belief about who deserves to be seen in it.
The remarkable women she amplifies are not remarkable because she finds them. They are remarkable because she creates the space where being remarkable becomes visible. Where clarity is celebrated. Where community is recognized as the only sustainable architecture of real power.
In the crowded, infinite scroll of digital content, there are infinite platforms. But there is only one THIS IS IT NETWORK™. And there is only one Cheldin Barlatt Rumer, standing in front of a live audience every single day, proving that the business of belonging is not a nice add-on to media. It is the only business that actually lasts.
Cheldin Barlatt Rumer is the CEO and Executive Producer of THIS IS IT NETWORK™, a global streaming platform dedicated to amplifying women’s voices through educational entertainment and community-driven content. Based in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, Cheldin leads a movement that connects over 250,000 women leaders, executives, and entrepreneurs monthly while teaching personal branding at both Drexel and Temple Universities. To connect with Cheldin or learn more about SCREAM YOUR DREAM™ and THIS IS IT NETWORK™, visit thisisittv.com or @thisisittv.
