Schedule

Start your day by connecting with fellow attendees. Fuel up, make introductions, and get ready for an inspiring day of learning and resource exchange.

Welcome and introduction to the event. Overview of the day's agenda and key goals.

- Kai Fuentes, CEO, Ebony Marketing Systems
- Kerry Edelstein, President & Founder, Research Narrative
- Jill Kushner Bishop, Founder & CEO, Multilingual Connections
- Katrina Noelle, Founder, KNow Research
- David Rothstein, CEO, RTi Research

A high-functioning team is considered the Holy Grail of successful businesses. Research shows synergistic teams result in higher employee engagement and satisfaction, more innovation, and higher profitability. Yet most teams struggle, particularly when facing difficult changes, when an unhealthy team can implode, making adapting chaotic and unsuccessful. Effective leadership teams must be nimble, with the skills required to assess, decide, and act quickly. Their communication must be candid and effective. Most critically, team members must trust and respect each other to succeed. This session is based on the neuroscience of effective team dynamics and the skills required to adapt and survive a turbulent business environment.

You will learn how to: 
- Understand what a successful high-functioning team looks like 
- Set the right expectations and tone  
- Navigate difficult change and resistance  
- Recognize why behaviors are crucial and the hardest thing to manage 
- Practice self-awareness - it all starts with you, the leader

Presented by: Susan Vogel, Founder of SB Vogel Consulting

Take a short break to stretch, grab a coffee, and chat with fellow participants. Use this time to exchange ideas, meet new colleagues, and build connections that can spark future collaboration.

Most small business owners are focused on the day-to-day—serving clients, managing cash flow, and driving growth. But one of the most important strategic decisions you’ll ever make is also one of the easiest to postpone: what happens to your business when you step away? This session reframes succession planning as more than an “end-of-career” task. Even if an exit is years—or decades—away, the process of planning now can immediately strengthen your business. You’ll learn how thinking about succession today can sharpen your operations, clarify your value proposition, reduce risk, and make your company more attractive to future buyers, partners, or even the next generation of leadership. We’ll explore practical, right-sized approaches tailored for small businesses—no complex corporate playbooks required. Topics include identifying potential successors (internal or external), building systems that reduce owner dependency, understanding valuation drivers, and creating a roadmap that evolves with your business. Whether you plan to sell, transfer ownership, or simply want more flexibility and freedom, this session will help you shift your mindset from “someday” to “starting now”—and show how that shift can create immediate and lasting value.

Presented by Jabbar Abdi, Sidereal Capital

Recharge for the final sessions and continue to forge valuable connections.

Most small business owners are brilliant at what they do and invisible to the clients who need them most. Not because they lack talent, skill, or hustle. Because they're leading with ego instead of empathy. In this session, Junior Nyemb — Chief Empathy Officer and founder of Grio — makes the case that the small businesses winning long-term aren't the loudest or the most aggressive. They're the most fluent in the people they serve. And that fluency isn't a personality trait. It's a system you can build. Drawing on a decade of brand strategy work — from helping Wingate University become one of the fastest-growing universities in North Carolina to building empathy-led brands for companies across industries — Junior introduces The Empathy Engine: a five-dimensional marketing framework that turns human understanding into competitive advantage. This isn't a talk about being nicer. It's a talk about being smarter and building a business that creates so much genuine value for customers that growth becomes the inevitable outcome.

Key Attendee Learnings
1. Why making revenue your goal is the single most common mistake small business owners make — and what to focus on instead.
2. How to close the gap between how you see your business and how the market actually perceives it.
3. A practical framework for engineering customer value and why reducing costs creates as much value as adding benefits.
4. How to build a demand system that works for the 90% of potential customers who aren't actively looking for what you sell right now.
5. A five-point self-assessment to identify exactly where your marketing engine is leaking and what to fix first.

Wrap up the day's sessions with a relaxed networking reception. Enjoy light refreshments and drinks as you continue conversations, make new connections, and reflect on key takeaways with peers and speakers.

Wrap up the day's sessions with a relaxed networking reception. Enjoy light refreshments and drinks as you continue conversations, make new connections, and reflect on key takeaways with peers and speakers.