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 CatP