Women in Business Month 2026: Meet the Women Leaders Building Businesses Across Every Industry | Publicity for Good

Female founders, entrepreneurs, philanthropists, CEOs and executives share the paths that took them from dorm rooms, operating rooms and Fortune 500 offices to the top of their fields.

Women in Business Month is a good occasion to look closely at the women doing the work. The 26 women highlighted here lead credit unions and cat rescues, law firms and restaurant franchises, beverage brands, menopause training programs and an advanced manufacturing company.

Some built their businesses from a dorm room, a lunch break or a 23-foot Airstream. Others rose through Fortune 500 companies, operating rooms and national restaurant chains before taking on leadership roles of their own. Across very different fields, many of their stories begin with a problem they lived through firsthand, from a premature menopause to a family crisis that upended a thriving practice, and that experience now shapes how they serve other women.

Each profile covers who she is, what she has built and where to learn more about her work.

Colleen Joyce

CEO, Lawyer.com

Colleen Joyce is a lawyer and the CEO of Lawyer.com, the online legal marketplace she has helped build since 2010. A recognized leader in legal technology, marketplace innovation and law firm growth strategy, she has spent her career connecting consumers with trusted attorneys and giving law firms the tools to win new clients. Her insights have been featured on TV stations nationwide, including FOX 5, CBS’s KUTV 2News, ABC affiliate WTVM, WWAY TV3 and KFYR. She graduated with high honors from the University of Illinois.

Joyce started as an intern at World Media Group in 2007, built the entertainment site Popstar.com, where she interviewed everyone from Oprah Winfrey to the Kardashians before they were household names, and pivoted to legal tech in 2010. As CEO of Lawyer.com, she has grown the online legal marketplace into a profitable 8-figure company. The company serves more than 4,000 paying law firm clients and has surpassed 6 million lifetime legal inquiries, making legal help more accessible to consumers while giving attorneys the tools to grow, including LawyerLine, its AI-assisted, 24/7 client intake service.

She is also the founder of the Stevie® American Business Award-winning Lawyer Growth Summit, a community where attorneys, legal tech innovators and industry leaders share practical strategies for growth, and she writes the weekly Fast Five newsletter for law firm leaders, which reaches more than 20,000 subscribers. A New Jersey based working mom who travels often for work, she turned that experience into her children’s book, Mommy’s Love, released in August 2026, a story about the bond between mothers and children even when work keeps them apart. Her rise from intern to CEO backs up the line she lives by: “Where you start doesn’t determine where you finish.”

Dr. Natalya Borakowski

Author, Founder and Medical Director, Desert Bloom Skincare, Unveil You

Dr. Natalya Borakowski’s career has followed a single question: what is actually causing what we see on the surface? It took her from a Chanel makeup counter in 2003 into aesthetics, and in 2008 to founding Desert Bloom Skincare in Scottsdale, Arizona. In 2012 she returned to school to become a physician, and she was licensed as a naturopathic physician in 2019 while continuing to grow her practice.

Today Dr. Borakowski leads Desert Bloom Skincare as founder and medical director, having built it into a seven-figure women’s aesthetic clinic, and she brings more than 18 years of experience treating women. A self-described “former perfectionist turned rebel in a white coat,” she is known for addressing the emotional and psychological side of a changing face along with its anatomy. She created Emotional Aesthetics, a framework that asks practitioners and patients to weigh motivation, identity and emotional readiness alongside anatomy before any treatment is recommended. She also presents and trains within cosmetic dermatology and plastic surgery and takes part in physician complications management forums hosted by IMCAS and APTOS.

Her mission is one she repeats often: helping women age on their own terms. She also hosts the Unveiled Radiance podcast and shares her work through her Unveil You platform.

Kelly Roach

Founder and CEO, Kelly Roach International, Called2Lead

Kelly Roach was the youngest Senior Vice President at a Fortune 500 staffing firm, leading more than 100 people across 17 locations and breaking company records during the 2008 recession. Without quitting her job, she launched her own business on her lunch break and scaled it to seven figures before she ever left corporate.

Today she is the founder and CEO of Kelly Roach International and leads a portfolio of six companies built on one repeatable methodology: structured, relationship-first, systems-driven growth. Through The Business Advisory, her Legacy Leaders mastermind and the Virtual Business School, she has trained more than 100,000 entrepreneurs, and hundreds of her clients have scaled to seven and eight figures.

Roach is a business growth strategist known for relationship-driven sales and for building her companies around a “faith and family first” approach. She retired her husband, homeschools her daughter and teaches founders to build companies that grow without sacrificing their faith, family or freedom. Her philosophy fits in three words: systems create freedom. Her newest book, The Miracle Hour, released in May 2026, lays out a framework for generating predictable revenue through one focused hour of relationship-based selling each day. She hosts The Kelly Roach Show, ranked in the top 1% of marketing podcasts globally with more than 1,100 episodes, and co-founded Called to Lead, a women’s leadership and business growth event. Built “for the woman who has outgrown every other room,” Called to Lead sold 200 tickets before its speaker lineup was announced, held its 2026 event in Boca Raton, Florida, on October 1 with almost 600 attendees, and publishes its own Called to Lead Magazine.

A five-time bestselling author, Roach is a multiple Inc. 5000 honoree, a Stevie Award winner for Women in Business and Titan CEO of the Year, and her work has been featured in Forbes, Inc. and Business Insider.

Natalie Trzcinski

Chief Operating Officer, everbowl

Natalie Trzcinski has spent more than two decades in the part of the restaurant business most guests never see: the systems that make every location run, and taste, the same. Today she brings that experience to everbowl, the fast-growing superfood franchise, where as Chief Operating Officer she leads restaurant operations and execution strategy across more than 100 locations nationwide.

She joined everbowl after 12 years at Jack in the Box, most recently as Senior Director of Training & Development, where she led enterprise training and the integration of operations, menu and process nationwide. Her work there included a digital training platform, launched in about four months to replace a two-decade-old legacy system, that reached all 2,240 locations with 100% adoption and trained more than 60,000 team members.

At everbowl, an elevated fast-casual destination for açaí bowls, toasts, smoothies and other better-for-you options built on superfoods like açaí, pitaya and blue majic, Trzcinski focuses on turning operational strategy into scalable, field-ready execution so the brand can keep growing without losing consistency. She has shared her expertise with QSR Magazine and in a webinar for the Council of Hotel and Restaurant Trainers, and she speaks on training, onboarding that sticks and why great strategies so often stall once they reach the restaurant floor.

Anna Gabele

Brand President, everbowl

Anna Gabele has built a 25-year career on turning cultural trends into food people crave. Before joining everbowl, she spent nearly a decade at Jack in the Box leading product marketing, menu strategy and culinary innovation across more than 2,100 locations. There she led the record-breaking Smashed Jack launch, which sold about 70,000 on its first day, sold out in under two weeks with no paid media and delivered the chain’s most successful burger launch week in six years.

Today Gabele is Brand President of everbowl, the fast-growing craft superfood franchise with more than 100 locations nationwide. Drawing on experience that spans product development, entrepreneurship, marketing and brand strategy, she shapes how the elevated fast-casual brand innovates its menu of açaí bowls, toasts, smoothies and other better-for-you options, and how it connects with the guests who come through its doors.

She is drawn to what makes each community unique, and she channels that curiosity into food and experiences that feel true to the places they serve. Her insights have appeared in QSR Magazine, Restaurant Business and Nation’s Restaurant News.

Colleen Bute Bennett

Founder and Principal Designer, CBB Design Firm

Colleen Bute Bennett’s design career has spanned continents. Shortly after graduating from Wake Forest University, she became the youngest furniture representative hired by Drexel Heritage, and she later worked with Ralph Lauren Home on visual merchandising and account management across multiple continents. In 2006 she founded her first interior design studio, Caducus Folium, in Costa Rica, and grew it into six design centers across Ecuador, Colombia, Mexico, Nicaragua and Honduras, designing homes for presidents and dignitaries throughout the region.

In 2012 she returned home to North Carolina and launched CBB Design Firm in Morganton, a full-service luxury interior design firm working on residential and commercial projects and historic renovations. Bennett is involved in every step, from CAD plans and 3D renderings that let clients see their homes before construction begins to finish selections and final installation, and her work is known for balancing luxury with livability. The firm has earned an ASID Excellence in Design Award, and Bennett has become a national voice on warm, collected design, with expert commentary in Southern Living, Martha Stewart, Better Homes & Gardens and Real Simple.

Her latest venture carries her signature aesthetic beyond client homes: Mimosa Home, launched October 1, 2026, is her own line of furniture, table linens and custom bedding, designed by an interior designer and made in the USA. It builds on an entrepreneurial streak that also produced Bute Couture, the sustainable luxury handbag company she founded in 2020, which upcycles fabric and leather scraps from the furniture industry and donates 10% of handbag proceeds to local women’s charities.

Heather Holmes

Founder and CEO, Publicity For Good

Heather Holmes launched Publicity For Good in 2016 from a 23-foot Airstream, with her husband, Austin, a Wi-Fi connection and a conviction that purpose-driven brands deserved better than the bloated retainer model most agencies were selling.

A decade later, Publicity For Good is a multiple million dollar company based in Nashville, with more than 70 team members across seven countries serving more than 500 purpose-driven brands in CPG, health and wellness, fintech, professional services and impact organizations. Revenue grew 134.6% from 2024 to 2025 without a dollar of outside investment, and in 2025 alone the team generated nearly 11,000 media opportunities and secured more than 4,300 live links for its clients. 

As AI began reshaping how people discover brands, Holmes built Publicity For Good’s methodology for earning the media citations that lead AI tools to recommend a brand by name, and she published that approach in two books, The PR Playbook and Seen by AI, Found by Customers. She was named a PRNEWS Top Women in PR Entrepreneur and recognized by Marquis Who’s Who, and under her leadership Publicity For Good has earned honors including O’Dwyer’s Best PR Firm for CPG, Bronze for Large Agency of the Year at the 2026 Bulldog PR Awards and a 2026 Qwoted Agency Award for media excellence. She writes openly in outlets such as Forbes and Business Insider about what building a company really takes. A mom of four children under 5, she kept building Publicity For Good through all four pregnancies, running client strategy through deliveries and closing contracts in the same weeks she was recovering from birth.

Lauren Chiren

Founder and CEO, Women of a Certain Stage

Lauren Chiren spent years leading regulatory transformation programs in financial services, managing teams of up to 400 people across the UK, US and India. Then she resigned from a senior role convinced she had early onset dementia. Three doctor appointments later, she learned the real cause: a premature menopause that had begun at 37.

In 2014 she founded Women of a Certain Stage, a menopause education, training and consultancy business. The company has certified more than 2,100 professionals in 36 countries through its CPD certified Menopause Coach Diploma, Certified Menopause Trainer Program and Menopause Champion Training, and has supported more than 400 organizations, including Amazon, HSBC, Nike, KPMG and Mercedes F1.

Today Chiren is a workplace menopause strategist known for turning standards and legislation into plans employers can put into practice. She served on the committees behind BS 30416 and ISO 45010, the British and international standards on menstruation and menopause in the workplace, and she helps employers in the UK and US keep their most experienced women. A Freeman of the City of London, she hosts the Women of a Certain Stage podcast, with listeners in 103 countries, and her commentary has appeared on BBC News and in the Financial Times and The Guardian.

Her ambition is characteristically direct: “My goal is to train and certify 20,000 menopause coaches and trainers and champions before I retire (or die, whichever comes first!)”

Sandi Glandt

Founder and CEO, Slay Your Day, Called2Lead

Sandi Glandt began her career coaching women through nutrition and lifestyle transformation in Miami, and she kept seeing the same pattern: her clients had no structure for managing their time, energy or businesses.

That insight reshaped her coaching model and became the S3 Framework: Systems, Strategy and Support. Since launching Slay Your Day in 2017, Glandt has built a reputation in high-performance productivity for women, helping ambitious women, especially working moms, grow profitable businesses without sacrificing their marriage, motherhood or mission. Through the High Performance Accelerator Academy, which opens for enrollment once a month for just 48 hours, she teaches the CEO schedules, delegation frameworks and time multiplication strategies that let business growth and family life run on the same structure.

Glandt is the author of two international bestsellers, Slay Your Day and Slay Your Way, the latter released in January 2026. She is a TV host on the CW’s Connect Network, a top-rated podcaster and Mrs. International 2022 to 2023, a title she used to take the S3 Framework to international stages. In 2025 she co-founded Called to Lead with fellow entrepreneur Kelly Roach, a women’s leadership and business growth event for women building empires without compromising their values.

She lives in South Florida with her husband, entrepreneur Jarrod Glandt, and their two sons, and she runs it all on the same system she teaches. Her rallying cry to ambitious women is short and direct: structured women win.

Lauren Salaun

Founder, Life Coach and Transformational Facilitator

Lauren Salaun was a high achiever at work who kept attracting emotionally unavailable partners, and she realized she was operating almost entirely from what she calls masculine energy. She set out to change that pattern through somatic healing, neuroscience and subconscious reprogramming.

Today Salaun is a Los Angeles based entrepreneur, transformational facilitator and somatic coach. She helps high-achieving women step away from burnout-driven hustle culture, regulate their nervous systems and embody their feminine energy without giving up their ambition. 

As a neurodivergent entrepreneur herself, Salaun brings a perspective few in her field can offer. She specializes in supporting women with ADHD, autism or high sensitivity who have been made to feel “too much” in dating and business, helping them stop masking and embrace the very qualities that make them magnetic. A Westmont College graduate in communications and graphic design, she is certified in the Quantum Ripple Effect Coaching Method and is a graduate of Ascension Leadership Academy. She hosts the AMPLIFY podcast and works with women worldwide through online programs, workshops and one-on-one coaching.

Her core message to the women she serves is one she had to learn for herself: “You’re not too much, you’re exactly enough.”

Monica Sood, MD

Physician, Midlife Reinvention Mentor and Founder, Sood 4 Thought

Monica Sood, MD, has practiced as an attending anesthesiologist since 2007. In 2016 she also opened a functional medicine practice, spending evenings and weekends with women navigating perimenopause, hormonal changes and burnout. Her one-to-one practice could only reach so many of them, but the group programs she ran grew into thriving communities and taught her the lesson she now builds everything around: women need community as much as they need good information.

Today Sood is a physician, midlife reinvention mentor and the founder of Sood 4 Thought, a thought leadership, personal growth and community brand for accomplished women in their 40s, 50s and beyond who have built full lives yet quietly wonder, “Is this it?” She helps them replace that question with a better one: “What else is possible?” A dual-residency physician trained in internal medicine and anesthesiology and board certified by the American Board of Anesthesiology, she has earned more than 30 certifications across functional medicine, women’s hormonal health, coaching, nutrition and personal development. She speaks on midlife identity and purpose, friendship and belonging, boundaries and self-trust, and the changing midlife body, from perimenopause to menopause.

Her message for these women comes through in one of her signature lines: “Midlife isn’t a crisis. It’s an invitation.” Now in midlife herself, and speaking from her own experience as a successful single woman without children, she is creating Endless First Date, a membership community launching January 1, 2027, with Founding Member enrollment opening in December. It is designed to give women a place to explore, without judgment, who they are now and what they still want to experience. As she puts it, “It isn’t about finding someone to fall in love with. It’s about falling back in love with your own life.”

Dr. Lucette Beall

Founder, Your Extraordinary Life Institute

Dr. Lucette Beall builds her work on a signature idea grounded in neuroscience: “Your brain isn’t broken, it’s outdated.” As a neuroscience-informed coach, keynote speaker and founder of Your Extraordinary Life Institute, she helps high-achieving professionals, particularly women entrepreneurs, break free of burnout and self-sabotage by rewiring the subconscious “should” patterns that keep them stuck in stress and survival mode.

She knows those patterns from the inside. After 22 years building and running a seven-figure veterinary practice, she stepped away to help her brother recover from a traumatic brain injury, a decision that led to three years of financial free-fall. She rebuilt to a million-dollar business in two years using the same framework she teaches today, and in 2023 she sold her practice to lead ExtraOrdinary Life, LLC full time.

That framework is the B.R.A.I.N. Reset Method, a five-step, neuroscience-based system for identifying and interrupting the “should” instructions behind stress and self-doubt. A Doctor of Veterinary Medicine and Certified Compassion Fatigue Professional with more than 25 years of business ownership, Dr. Beall also works with fellow veterinarians, a profession with well-documented burnout rates. Her book, Stop Shoulding Yourself, brings the method to a wider audience.

Her tagline sums up her outlook: “Extraordinary isn’t a dream. It’s a choice.”

Vicki VannBerstein

President and CEO, America’s Christian Credit Union

Vicki VannBerstein built her career on disciplined financial leadership. Over more than 20 years in financial services and Fortune 500 companies, she held senior finance roles at Kraft General Foods, Campbell Soup Company, Tropicana, PSCU Financial Services and ServiceLink, a Fidelity National Financial company, and served as Executive Vice President and CFO of FirstLight Federal Credit Union. She holds an MBA from NYU Stern School of Business and a bachelor’s degree in economics, accounting and finance from the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania.

Today she is President and CEO of America’s Christian Credit Union, a full-service, federally insured, member-owned credit union serving Christian individuals, churches, ministries, Christian schools and faith-based businesses nationwide. Founded in 1958 by five Nazarene pastors in Southern California who could not get fair terms from mainstream banks, ACCU has grown into a national institution with more than 150,000 members, relationships with more than 2,000 ministries and nearly $1 billion in assets, without changing what it stands for.

VannBerstein is guiding ACCU toward its goal of surpassing $1 billion in assets while expanding its reach in communities of faith. At a time when some faith-based organizations have lost access to banking, often with little explanation, she leads one of the very few full-service institutions built to serve the whole church, one that has never dropped a member for their beliefs. She speaks on credit union strategy, financial access and stewardship, including what members’ deposits actually fund.

Kim Walsh Phillips

Business and Marketing Coach, Co-Founder, Powerful Professionals Network

Kim Walsh Phillips is a business and marketing coach to high-performance founders, small business owners and entrepreneurs who want to grow beyond word of mouth and referrals. As founder and CEO of Powerful Professionals, a business coaching and education company, she went from 32 clients to more than 11,000 in less than a year, growth that earned the company the No. 475 spot on the Inc. 5000.

Her approach focuses on marketing tied to measurable revenue, and Dan Kennedy credits her with “dollar-measurable results” for his private clients. She has worked behind the scenes for Kevin O’Leary of Shark Tank, Profit First author Mike Michalowicz, Harley-Davidson, Hilton Hotels and High Point University, and O’Leary has said she is the first marketer he has recommended to all of his Shark Tank investments. She is the bestselling author of several books, including The Shift: Scale Your Business and Multiply Your Wealth without Sacrificing You, The Ultimate Guide to Instagram for Business and The No B.S. Guide to Direct Response Social Media Marketing, co-authored with Kennedy.

Walsh Phillips has spoken on stages in Dubai, Moscow, London and across the United States, and she co-hosts a business podcast with entertainer and coach Justin Guarini built on the belief that business can be both profitable and fun. She lives just outside Atlanta.

Deborah Felin Magaldi

Director, Helen Sanders CatPAWS

Deborah Felin Magaldi’s path to nonprofit leadership started with fostering cats for a shelter more than 20 years ago. After the passing of Helen Sanders, who had tirelessly cared for a colony of homeless cats along the Seal Beach jetty, she and fellow founding board member Annelle Baum formalized a nonprofit in 2010 to carry on Helen’s work. When it became clear someone had to file the paperwork, Felin Magaldi did it herself.

Sixteen years later, she is Director and primary spokesperson of Helen Sanders CatPAWS, the Helen Sanders Cat Protection and Welfare Society. She holds a B.S. in psychology and an MBA, credentials she credits for managing both the human dynamics of a volunteer team and the operational demands of a growing nonprofit. Under her leadership, the all-volunteer organization now draws roughly $400,000 a year in donations and grants. Serving greater Long Beach and North Orange County, Helen Sanders CatPAWS rescues at-risk and euthanasia-listed cats from public shelters, runs a nationally recognized DIY Kitten Care Program that supplies kitten care kits to public shelters, offers low-cost spay/neuter services and brings adoptable cats to assisted living residents through its Traveling Kitty Comfort and Therapy Show. The organization holds a verified 4-star Charity Navigator rating and is a PetSmart Charities adoption partner and a Best Friends Animal Society network partner.

Felin Magaldi speaks on fostering, neonatal kitten care, accessible spay/neuter and the well-documented link between animal abuse and domestic violence. Her leadership philosophy centers on equipping the community to help. As she puts it, “Our ethos is to help people help themselves and the cats they care about.”

Antuanette Patton

Co-Founder, Street Charity

For decades, Antuanette Patton and her husband, John, fed people on the street in every way they could think of: making sandwiches, serving in soup kitchens and taking people out to eat. Those years convinced them that people in need deserve something many forms of help leave out, the chance to choose their own meal.

In 2021 the couple formed Street Charity, an Atlanta-based 501(c)(3) nonprofit that equips generous people with a simple way to help someone eat. Antuanette was part of the nearly five-year effort to bring its signature tool to life with Discover: a $5 prepaid card that works only at quick-serve restaurants and is accepted at more than 200,000 fast-food locations nationwide, so the person receiving it chooses the meal. Any balance left after six months returns to Street Charity to support food banks and nonprofit partners. Individual donors, employers, schools, churches, veterans’ groups and police departments now hand out the cards.

As co-founder and one of Street Charity’s two public spokespeople, Antuanette takes part in the organization’s key decisions and represents it in the media, including on Telemundo Atlanta. Her work includes community partnerships with organizations such as the Latin American Association, which help bring the card to Atlanta’s Latin community, and she created a flyer listing the restaurant chains where a card can feed someone right away. She speaks about dignity and about seeing the person behind the sign.

Amanda Sains-Harris

VP of Marketing and Brand Spokesperson, Joolies

Amanda Sains-Harris leads marketing for Joolies, America’s fastest-growing date brand, and serves as its primary media spokesperson. Joolies was co-founded in 2018 by fourth-generation date grower David Kohl and entrepreneur Greg Willsey, growing out of the Kohl family’s organic farm in California’s Coachella Valley with a mission to make dates fresh, fun and impossible to ignore.

As VP of Marketing, Sains-Harris drives the social-first storytelling behind a brand known for its playful voice, its tagline “Changing the Date-ing Game” and its signature mint-green, character-driven packaging. Joolies ranks No. 2 in the U.S. date category, is available in more than 12,000 stores and has grown from a single line of fresh Medjool dates into a portfolio that includes Date Pops, Date Rolls and its breakout Date Sours, a whole-fruit swap for gummy candy made from organic dates with no added sugar. For the 12 weeks ending June 30, 2026, Joolies grew 28.9% year over year, nearly three times the growth of the overall U.S. date fruit category, according to SPINS MULO data.

Sains-Harris represents Joolies in press interviews, trade coverage and at industry events such as Expo West, and she is a go-to voice on date trends, better-for-you snacking and innovation in consumer packaged goods.

Maria Intscher-Owrang

Co-Founder and Chief Creative Officer, Simplifyber

Maria Intscher-Owrang spent 24 years in luxury fashion, working across five countries and rising to VP of Design at Vera Wang, where she led the ready-to-wear runway collection. The deeper she went, the more clearly she saw the problem behind every product: a long chain of steps, from spinning and weaving to laminating, cutting, sewing and assembly, that drives waste, cost and inflexibility. She concluded that the only real fix was to redesign the system itself.

In 2021 she co-founded Simplifyber with CEO Phil Cohen, and today she serves as Chief Creative Officer of the Raleigh, North Carolina based advanced materials and manufacturing company. Its proprietary liquid fiber platform draws a cellulose-based liquid into a mold and forms the material and the finished three-dimensional part at the same time, a process the company sums up as “Not assembled. Formed.” The resulting parts are lighter weight and acoustically dampening, with thermal and electrical conductivity properties conventional plastics cannot match, and the company is approaching cost parity with plastics. Simplifyber operates its first full-scale production line, serves the automotive, consumer goods and footwear markets with public partners including Kia and GANNI, and has raised $20 million from investors including At One Ventures and Suzano, the world’s largest pulp manufacturer.

Intscher-Owrang holds a master’s degree in fashion from Central Saint Martins and was named to the Grist50 list in 2025, which recognizes emerging leaders driving climate solutions. Under her and Cohen’s leadership, Simplifyber graduated from the Techstars accelerator and was named a Fast Company Innovation By Design finalist in 2023.

Rhonesha Byng

Founder and CEO, Her Agenda | Co-Founder and Chief Mission Officer, BOMESI

Rhonesha Byng was 16 when she started handing out her own business cards and calling editors to ask for press passes. Plenty of them turned her down, and she asked again. That refusal to accept a first no runs through everything she has built since.

A Posse Scholar who attended DePauw University on a full-tuition leadership scholarship, Byng founded Her Agenda after a college women’s studies class revealed a gap nobody was naming: the media women consumed didn’t reflect the lives they were living. What began as a dorm-room blog grew into HerAgenda.com, a digital media platform that gives millennial women the content, community and resources to advance their careers, guided by her motto, N.E.S.H.A.: No one Ever Slows Her Agenda. Her Agenda’s Breakthrough Grant puts capital directly into the hands of women founders, and a 2025 partnership with Hachette Book Group expanded its reach into publishing. Earlier in her career, as a field producer at NBC New York (WNBC-TV), she was part of a team that won an Emmy for breaking news coverage.

In 2020 she co-founded BOMESI, where she serves as Chief Mission Officer, to address a gap she names plainly: Black-owned media receives roughly 2% of ad spend. BOMESI has built a public database of more than 300 verified Black-owned media companies, each one personally vetted by Byng, and a wider coalition of more than 300 Black-owned and 2,500 diverse-owned publishers. In 2025 it secured a $750,000 Press Forward grant to expand its Accelerator Program, and every company that has completed the program is still operating today.

Named to Forbes 30 Under 30 in both the Media and Dorm Room Founders categories, ESSENCE’s 50 Founders to Watch, NBCBLK’s 28 Under 28 and BET’s 29 People to Know, she has spoken at The White House, Google, Cannes Lions and Adweek. Her guiding belief: “A door that was opened for you is a door you’re obligated to hold for the woman coming up behind you.”

Kelly Wyman

Co-Founder, TestWell

Kelly Wyman is a co-founder of TestWell, a direct-to-consumer lab testing company built on a simple idea: your body, your data, your call. She leads the clinical and consumer-health side of the business and is the voice behind why patients increasingly want more control over their own health decisions.

TestWell lets people order lab tests without a doctor’s referral, insurance or a subscription, building their own panels at transparent, cash-pay prices. Wyman’s focus spans the categories driving most of what customers order, from GLP-1 and metabolic testing to hormone and fertility panels. Her specialty is health literacy: translating lab science into plain terms so people managing their own care can understand what their results mean, and the limits of a “normal range.”

Wyman was quoted as TestWell’s media contact in the company’s national launch coverage in June 2026, and she comments on consumer-directed care, preventive testing and the labs people should be tracking alongside a GLP-1.

Dr. Youmna DiStefano

Clinical Spokesperson, TestWell

Dr. Youmna DiStefano practices medicine inside the traditional referral system every day, which gives her an unusual vantage point on direct-to-consumer lab testing. A practicing interventional pain medicine physician, she serves as TestWell’s clinical spokesperson and its go-to physician voice on medical questions.

Dr. DiStefano completed her anesthesiology residency at New York Medical College, where she received the department’s Chairman’s Award, followed by a fellowship in interventional pain medicine at Johns Hopkins Medicine. She has practiced in Fort Lauderdale since 2017, currently at Pain Treatment Specialists, and has authored ten peer-reviewed publications spanning cardiac anesthesia, regional nerve blocks and surgical outcomes. Her ties to the testing industry go back further: from 2012 to 2013, she co-founded the research and development team at Estrogen Gene Test Co.

She speaks to which labs people can order for themselves, which still need a physician in the room, and why the once-a-year physical no longer fits how people actually get sick.

Justine Charmley

Co-Founder, SailWell

Justine Charmley built her first career as a speech therapist, listening closely and helping people communicate with confidence. As a mother navigating a busy family life and her own changing wellness needs, she grew tired of keeping up with supplements, powders and routines, and her search for something simpler became the starting point for SailWell.

She co-founded the Pennsylvania-based brand with her longtime friend and college roommate Taylor Ondrejca, and the two run it as a founder-funded, women-owned, two-person team. SailWell is a functional sparkling beverage created by women, for women, with four blends, Balance, Glow, Boost and Calm, designed to support energy, mood, sleep and glow at different moments of the day with purposeful, non-hormonal ingredients such as magnesium, L-theanine, ashwagandha and collagen peptides. Since launching on August 14, 2026, the brand reached seven retailers in four states within two months, with wellness partners including Toastique and The Works Yoga.

Charmley co-leads every part of the business, from product and community tastings to retail and wellness partnerships, and she speaks candidly about women supporting women, balancing motherhood with personal well-being and the changing needs women face in every season of life, including perimenopause. Her approach is captured in SailWell’s own line: “However life moves, feel like you.”

Taylor Ondrejca

Co-Founder, SailWell

Taylor Ondrejca came to SailWell with a culinary school education and a corporate career behind her. That background gives her a strong appreciation for flavor and a practical approach to running a business, and it shapes the brand she co-founded with Justine Charmley, her college roommate turned business partner.

Like Charmley, Ondrejca is a mother juggling a full schedule and shifting wellness needs, and she wanted a functional drink that tasted like a treat while fitting into her day. As a first-time consumer packaged goods founder, she helps lead SailWell’s founder-funded growth, with the two co-founders managing wholesale relationships directly. Her focus is on hospitality and wellness partnerships, bringing SailWell into the resorts, spas, clubs and studios where women already spend time on self-care, including an onboarding with Miraval Austin.

Ondrejca speaks about flavor-first product development, the lessons of a brand’s first months in consumer goods, building a business while raising a family, and seasonal wellness moments such as holiday gifting and Dry January, when SailWell offers a non-alcoholic option women look forward to.

Debbie O’Connell

Golf Professional, Corporate Speaker and Author

Debbie O’Connell grew up a deeply shy kid who believed she wasn’t smart. The one place she felt like a leader was on the basketball court and the softball field, and as a teenager she began pushing herself out of her comfort zone with one simple question: what is the worst thing that can happen? That habit sparked a lifelong interest in psychology and high-performance mindset, which she applied to sports and to everyday life.

She built her career in golf as a professional, serving as a head pro who ran the entire golf operation at her club, from budgets and staff to merchandising, before becoming an entrepreneur. Today she runs corporate golf outings and leadership retreats that teach executives and sales teams how to use golf to build relationships, and she co-hosts Tee to Green, a weekly live golf radio show available on iHeartRadio and American Forces Radio in 30 countries. Her case for business golf is straightforward: a round can mean six hours with a client, and “people like to do business with people who they trust.”

As a corporate speaker, O’Connell focuses on culture, leadership and mindset; one of her signature talks teaches audiences to take charge of their emotional state so they can think clearly, even in a crisis. Her forthcoming book, slated for spring 2027, shares the stories of highly successful women executives, every one of whom she met directly or indirectly through golf, to help the next generation of women leaders pave their path to the top.

What These Women Have in Common 

Read together, these profiles show how many different routes lead to the top of a business. Some of these women built companies from scratch with no outside capital, while others stepped into established organizations and set them on new paths for growth. Several started second careers after years in medicine, fashion, financial services or broadcast news.

Many of them also make a point of passing on what they have learned. They certify coaches and trainers in dozens of countries, run an accelerator for independent publishers, host radio shows and podcasts, and mentor the women coming up behind them.

What connects these women is a willingness to claim their place without waiting for permission.

They raised their hands in rooms where few women sat, asked again after hearing no and earned their names on the door. Each of them knows exactly what she brings to her field, and her success makes it easier for the next woman to step forward with the same confidence in what she has to give the world.