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Announcing Keynote Speaker #2: Hannah Davis

The next Women Entrepreneurship Retreat, happening May 24-26 in Monterey Bay, will feature three successful female entrepreneurs as keynote speakers.  We already revealed keynote speaker #1, Maren Kate, in this blog post.  Now we're excited to announce Hannah Davis, founder of Bangs shoe company will also be speaking.

Hannah had no business training and no prior experience as an entrepreneur when she boldly decided to found a company that would both make money and make good happen.

Bangs is a shoe company that improves on the utilitarian standard-issue shoes that millions of Chinese laborers wear.  Hannah was living in China, searching for a way to make a big impact on the world, when her inspiration hit.  Her friend bought a pair of the simple canvas shoes because he thought they were cool.  Maybe there was a way to connect the cool fashion statement to lasting good.

Proceeds from Bangs sales go to grassroots non-profit organizations that focus on sustainable structural improvements developed by the local residents of a developing community, instead of the traditional failed model of philanthropy that simply gives funds/material goods.

 Hannah will be talking about how you keep yourself going when you're in the trenches of growing something whose outcome is uncertain (every new business!). She'll talk about the importance of good benchmarking, measurement, and other left-brain tools to keep your right-brain excited about the journey.

Maren Kate, founder of Zirtual

You've been curious about who will be speaking at the Women Entrepreneurship Retreat this year.  I'm ready to start announcing speakers, starting with:

Closing Keynote Speaker, Maren Kate

Meet a successful entrepreneur like you. Maren is the founder of Zirtual, providing US-based dedicated virtual assistants with college degrees.

She'll be talking about the magic of the 80/20 rule, the fine art of delegation, and how to identify what you are truly good at and ruthlessly delegate everything else.

Growing up in Las Vegas, Maren gained a passion for customer service and the world of high-end personal assistance from an early age. She started Zirtual in late 2011 to save people's time so they could focus on what's important and to provide purposeful employment to smart people who enjoy the freedom of working remotely. Maren has a background that includes biker bars, Chaucer, and has a penchant for science fiction—she's also never met a cat she doesn't like.

  I’m thrilled to report on how the first annual Women’s Entrepreneurship Retreat went last weekend. 

Wait, I haven’t been paying attention. What is this? 

It’s a retreat for entrepreneurial women, hosted by Boiled Architecture.  We get away for the weekend to learn from each other.  Some topics are “practical,” like how to understand financial statements or how to use psychographic profiling in marketing, and some are more “holistic,” like assessing your emotional relationship with money.

We also pair you up with a small group of other women to have a support group that helps each other even after the event is over.

That doesn’t sound like it has much to do with architecture.  Why’d you do that?

Great question.  It’s true that we at Boiled Architecture have a passion for making construction projects more collaborative and more successful.

We’re also passionate about collaboration in general, giving back to our communities, doing business in an ethical way, and standing up for gender equality (actually, more broadly gender equality is about respect for every person).

And startups are hard.  Like all entrepreneurs, we don’t know everything we should know, and we get confused and scared sometimes and need some advice.  So I figured we should band together.

 Geez, aren’t you busy enough?

I need another project like I need a hole in my head.  But when I couldn’t find anything exactly like I needed, I decided it would be worth it to just start it myself.  

I could find lots of entrepreneurial organizations, but either I didn’t like the format or they were all about venture capital-funded high-growth models. 

I could find lots of women’s organizations, but they weren’t about entrepreneurship; they were about women’s leadership in general.

So how did it go?  Boil it down.

We had 47 women and 1 brave man attend.  (We also had three men who were part of the labor crew working for us.)

The keynote speakers were good.  They spoke on:

How to grow and leverage your professional network

More effective sales conversations

Market segment analysis

We had lots of break-out workshops to attend.  In fact, too many.  It forced people to make tough decisions and miss out on stuff they wanted to see.

The attendees were inspiring, kind, generous, and sharp.  They were game for being the guinea pigs at the first event (except for one women who was actually kind of mean--it’s cool; my self esteem is pretty healthy).

The venue was gorgeous.  It was at Asilomar, a resort in Pacific Grove, Ca.

The professional event production people we hired were all over it, which allowed me to kick back with a glass of wine instead of running around like a crazy person in the hours leading up to the event.

Awesome, I’ll have to go next year.  What will change for next year?

Next year, we’ll do a number of tweaks: 

The schedule will have more breathing room in it so the workshops can be longer and therefore more effective.

The workshops will be vetted more, to ensure the quality is top notch.

The presentations will be selected to cover all the major areas of entrepreneurship.

We’ll have some deliverable that you walk away with at the end of the weekend (probably a mini business plan)

The schedule will be strictly adhered to, and the master of ceremonies will be carefully selected.

The welcome packet will include a description of all workshops and contact information for all the women.

There will be less “selling” at the end of the presentations.

What won’t change?

The venue

The basic idea of combining keynotes + workshops + genius circles

The price (give or take a few bux)

The big idea

Offering a few scholarships to deserving women

How do I get a piece of this action?

To keep the intimate feeling and the great venue, I think we’re going to limit the attendance to about 60.  For next year’s tickets, we’ll do a 3-tiered registration process:

First, the women who attended this year will have the opportunity to buy their tickets for next year

Second, anyone who has pre-registered will get the opportunity to purchase their tickets (first come, first served at this point).  We will put up a pre-registration link very soon.

Lastly, if there are any tickets left to buy we will blast it publicly