Responsible for both internal and external communications as well as strategic planning and ops support.

Impact Stars connects businesses to capital and customer success using the P4 Positive Method.- Raised millions of dollars in funding. - Developed and implemented strategic marketing plans. - Mentored founders and C-Suite executives.

FUNDRAISING: Collaborated with the technical team to win multi-million dollar National Institutes of Health (NIH) Small Business Innovation Research grants that paid the entire R&D cost of a breakthrough technology without giving up equity. BRANDING OVERHAUL: Developed a professional content-rich website, trade show booth design, and published white papers in industry publications - this helped them become visible and punch above their weight class with a tiny budget.

- Provided business and marketing counsel to clients in b-to-b SaaS, automotive, non-profit, international development, and hyper-local services. Worked with clients as diverse as the University of North Carolina to a company helping tobacco farmers transition to new crops. - Applied and won several SBIR grants from the Department of Agriculture, Department of Education, and the National Institutes of Health. References: https://reeis.usda.gov/web/crisprojectpages/0203022-packaging-and-marketing-of-domestic-vegetable-soybean.html

Responsible for providing management consulting services and business development leadership to the media, entertainment, and telecommunication industry groups.- Co-authored a proposal to beat out McKinsey, and other management consulting companies and became a finalist for the AT&T Business account. Instead of trying to be like our competitors, we showed how IBM was different, and therefore better. We had all the technical know-how, data center capabilities, and implementation capabilities to put our recommendations into practice in addition to the best strategic minds in the world. - Worked with the CMO of IBM on a Virtual Showroom concept I invented to expand IBM's relationship with major brands. My experience at IBM was the catalyst for the creating of HotSkillsPayBills almost 2 decades later.

- Ran customer acquisition and growth campaigns for telecommunications clients like Sprint, Pacific Bell, and others. - Built the corporate website with input from different stakeholders including department heads and industry subject-matter experts within the company. - Created an Interactive Solutions practice and won a $150,000 contract to run the agency's first-ever online marketing campaign. Used A/B testing to measure banner advertising, email marketing and direct mail against each other. - Developed a web personalization strategy for Chase Manhattan Bank based on current best practices. After Y&R acquired KBM, I moved into a new role as VP of Business Development, North America for Wunderman, a subsidiary of Y&R. My job was to oversee the lead generation pipeline for our direct marketing business and assist offices in preparing pitches. I was invited to help the C-Suite evaluate potential acquisitions in the Internet space, and advise them on all things Web.Highlight #1: Pitching thestreet.com with direct marketing legend, Lester Wunderman. He was so kind and gracious. At the time, Wunderman Cato Johnson (WCJ) was changing its name to Impiric Thankfully, the company has gone back to Wunderman. Highlight #2: Working with Peter Georgescu, Chairman and CEO of Young & Rubicam (Wunderman is a Y&R company) was a complete honor and privilege.

When I started an Interactive Solutions practice at KnowledgeBase Marketing, (formed by the merger of CMS with two Texas-based marketing companies), I was told I was committing career suicide. The Internet was new, and many saw it as a fad. I was obsessed. I worked on client engagements during the day, and built my practice nights and weekends. I sold my client, Renee Shelton at Sprint on doing our first ever banner ad and email marketing campaign. No one in our agency had ever done a direct marketing campaign online. After doing direct mail and telemarketing campaigns for over a year, I wasn't challenged anymore so this new-fangled Internet marketing made me feel excited about being a marketer again. I wish I could proudly say, I knew what I was doing, but it was 1997-98, and I was learning by doing. For the first six months, I felt a little like an oddball. Then, the dot com bubble happened. Overnight, what I was doing became real and important. The Internet was cool! As luck would have it, KBM was getting ready to court suitors for an outright sale, and my itty-bitty Internet Solutions practice became a key asset. I helped the leadership team pitch KBM to investment bankers, boards of multi-billion dollar agencies, and even the head honcho at Lycos (at an American Airlines Admirals Club lounge in Pittsburgh)! It was surreal because I was only 25-26 years old and yet, when it came to Internet marketing, I seemed to know a little more than most of the senior agency executives I presented to. I realized that the Internet took the traditional agencies by surprise. It was not in their comfort zone and they were resistant to change. Highlight: One of the investment bankers who put the KBM/Y&R deal together noticed the lack of equity assigned to me. She pulled me aside and whispered how much the Interactive Solutions practice had added to the $175 million valuation: a woman looking out for another woman in a man's world.

When I graduated from Northwestern University with my M.S. in Integrated Marketing Communications, I thought I was prepared for my first job. Boy, was I wrong. I was trained in strategy, and my first assignment was completely tactical. I was put in charge of a direct mail campaign of 150,000 pieces, and I had never managed a print project before. I sat in my office trying to piece together the list broker's instructions, the blue lines from the printer, and several 3-inch binders of notes from the previous account manager, Jennifer. I almost lost my mind. Janet Swerdlove, Janet Schwing, and Jilda Mathews rescued me. I would have been fired if it wasn't for their kindness. Later, I did get to leverage my strategic skills, and contribute to a team that generated $40 million in customer lifetime value on an investment of less than $1 million. I also conceived, executed and measured a lead generation campaign for an energy company, a customer retention marketing program for a telecommunications company, and served as an internal consultant to other clients ranging from start-ups to online retailers to banks. I worked a lot, but I didn't do it because I was forced to. I did it because I loved my work immensely. At one time, I was juggling so many things that I got chest pains. It was a wake up call. I had to prioritize. The one thing I loved most was Internet marketing, because everything was so measurable in real time. Eventually, I was able to focus on that exclusively as CMS merged with two other companies to form KBM. Highlight #1: I had so much fun creating CMS' first marketing website, curating content from stakeholders across the company (data warehousing, data mining, marketing and all industry verticals).Highlight #2: My colleague Mike, and I researched, wrote and presented to the senior leadership team at Pacific Bell. It was the first management consulting-type gig I ever did, and took me from developing marketing strategy to business strategy.

The Integrated Marketing Program at Northwestern insists on every student completing an 11-week internship during the summer. I interviewed at Leo Burnett Chicago (yes, red apples everywhere), and BBDO. I imagined myself eating a picnic lunch at Navy Pier, enjoying a Chicago summer. Instead, I was placed at Physicians Mutual Insurance Company in Omaha, Nebraska. I was disappointed, and a bit terrified. I'd done all advertising classes and the Physicians internship was for direct marketing specialists. My boss, Michael Harner, turned out to be a hoot, and the team was made up of some really experienced data-driven marketers. I discovered that I loved the analytical side as much as I loved the strategic/creative side. Rob Reed and I conducted a quantitative research study that uncovered $3.4 million worth of upsell and cross-sell potential within the customer base. Of course, the survey company we hired didn't get it right the first time so we drove half-way across the Midwest through corn fields and past a lot of cows to fix the problem. When it came time for IMC professor, Ted Spiegel (of Spiegel catalog fame) to visit, Michael, now a mentor and a friend, said good things about me. Even though I had never attended any of Ted's direct marketing classes thus far, he now knew me and when it came time to graduate, came up to me and said quietly, "A little bird told me you are moving to North Carolina. Look up this direct marketing agency in Chapel Hill." I interviewed, got the job, and the rest of my career started from Ted Spiegel's recommendation. Highlight #1: The chief strategy officer at Physicians was a woman. She pulled me aside after Rob and I presented our findings to the leadership team, and told me about being a woman in the corporate world. Later, I would often be the only woman in a boardroom, presenting to men twice my age, and it was her advice that kept me grounded.