Jennifer Lewis – Small Food Biz A former professional pastry chef turned small food business owner, Jennifer is intimately familiar with the challenges food entrepreneurs face as they start and grow their businesses. Responding to the lack of food business information, Jennifer founded and runs the popular website, SmallFoodBiz.com. It provides information, resources, and tools to help artisan food entrepreneurs on their food business journeys. In addition to her culinary degree, Jennifer also holds an MBA from Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management. She is the author of 5 business books: Starting a Part-Time Food Business, Food on Wheels, and Getting Your Specialty Food Product Onto Store Shelves, The Soup To Nuts Business Plan Workbook, and Handmade.

Holly Verbeck – Hey Chef! Armed with credentials and corporate experience in risk management, human resource and organization systems, Holly’s career took a gastronomic turn when she married a chef. The typical chef profile: a passionate artist who suffers from being overworked and underpaid, and who knows more about food than running a business, astounded her. Responding to the growing demand for private chefs in the world-class destination of Lake Tahoe, she assembled a talented culinary team and founded HeyChef! in 1997. Focused on developing and elevating the professionalism and business acumen of hundreds of chefs, she teaches her well-tested business systems and back-office solutions to food and beverage entrepreneurs in order to free them from the overwhelm of running a business so they can get back to doing what they love most – making people happy with their food.

Kathleen Minogue – Crowdfund Better With a resume that ranges the worlds of business, marketing, education, non-profits, and the arts, Crowdfund Better founder Kathleen Minogue has made a career of wrangling creative ideas into cohesive projects. After running her own successful crowdfunding campaign in 2012, Kathleen invested time behind the scenes with the creators and executives of major and niche alternative funding platforms to understand crowdfunding from the inside out. It has given her a unique perspective on this rapidly growing space. Kathleen’s focus is on empowering entrepreneurs and creative businesses to run successful campaigns and find alternative funding through a combination of education and strategic planning. She has worked alongside project creators on platforms ranging from Kickstarter and Indiegogo to niche platforms like Seed&Spark, Barnraiser, Fund Dreamer, and Hatchfund on campaigns that have raised over $350,000. Kathleen has also run workshops for venues including General Assembly, Pepperdine University, the Director’s Guild of America, and the Small Business Administration. Kathleen is also a member of the Crowdfunding Professional Association (CfPA).

Barry James – The Crowdfunding Centre The Crowdfunding Centre provides real time big-data-driven tools & insights for crowdfunders, backers, platforms, investors & analysts including daily and weekly charts & news. Their work has been featured in the BBC, Wired, the guardian and Forbes. Barry James is an entrepreneur, global pioneer and innovator of Crowdfunding and FinTech, based in the UK. With his team he’s founded TheCrowdfundingCentre, TheCrowdDataCenter and VentureFundingHubs. A champion of entrepreneurs, and entrepreneurship at all levels, he comes from a tech / digital background (latterly designing and building cloud services) and has recently been directly involved in helping form the policy debate on the regulation of Crowdfunding in the UK and beyond. He’s currently a Visiting Fellow at the University of Portsmouth Business School.

Jennifer Lewis – Small Food Biz A former professional pastry chef turned small food business owner, Jennifer is intimately familiar with the challenges food entrepreneurs face as they start and grow their businesses. Responding to the lack of food business information, Jennifer founded and runs the popular website, SmallFoodBiz.com. It provides information, resources, and tools to help artisan food entrepreneurs on their food business journeys. In addition to her culinary degree, Jennifer also holds an MBA from Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management. She is the author of 5 business books: Starting a Part-Time Food Business, Food on Wheels, and Getting Your Specialty Food Product Onto Store Shelves, The Soup To Nuts Business Plan Workbook, and Handmade.