Women of Color | Cultivating an Entrepreneurial Spirit – The Energy of Innovation

WBENC is pleased to invite you to attend “Cultivating an Entrepreneurial Spirit – The Energy of Innovation,” a Women of Color session.

This session will cover what it takes to build and keep an entrepreneurial spirit within yourself as an entrepreneur, your teams that must carry out your vision and your customers. Entrepreneurship is both a noun and a verb. Most importantly, it is a mindset that can be cultivated and nurtured that can withstand both obstacles and successes. It requires vision, strategy, energy, courage, and the ability to pivot in times of opportunity, uncertainty, competition, or crisis. This entrepreneurial spirit is the energy of innovation that can change your business, your community, the marketplace, and the world.

Speakers

Amy Hilliard
Principal, The Hilliard Group

Amy S. Hilliard is an award-winning serial entrepreneur, successful senior corporate executive, board member, author, international speaker, and educator. During her long career, Amy has sharpened her leadership skills in consumer marketing, general management, strategy, branding, product development, retailing, acquisitions, and global program implementation from experience with Fortune 500 corporations, legacy entrepreneurial companies, and her own businesses.

The Hilliard Group, her strategic marketing consulting firm for over 25 years, has worked in a pioneering way with major corporations and non-profits nationally and internationally to help them penetrate multicultural markets. As a food entrepreneur, in 2001, she founded The Comfort Cake® Company, makers of “Pound Cake so Good it feels like a Hug™”, which gained national distribution with United Airlines, Walmart, a McDonald’s test market and Home Shopping Network among others, using Amy’s own pound cake recipes. She also created Sugarless Sweetness®, a patent-pending sugar substitute. Amy now licenses the intellectual properties of ComfortCake and Sugarless Sweetness.

Previously President of Fashion Fair Cosmetics, the global legacy cosmetics company focused on women of color, Amy also held executive positions with Bloomingdale’s, Gillette, Pillsbury, Burrell Communications, and L’Oréal/Soft Sheen. Her marketing innovations to build one of Gillette’s brands into a $100 million-dollar business were documented in a case study for the University of Virginia’s Darden Business School.

Amy is now an Adjunct Associate Professor of Strategy at the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business, the #3 business school in the country, where is she teaches MBAs how to “Pivot for Success,” a course based on her recently published book by Wiley of the same name and supported by Michelle Obama. Based in Chicago, she served two terms as a Trustee of Howard University, thirteen years on PepsiCo’s Multi-cultural Advisory Board, and was the first African American elected to the board of the National Association of the Specialty Food Trade. Amy currently sits on the LeanIn.org Advisory Board and was personally recruited by Sheryl Sandberg, the COO of Facebook/Meta.