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Annual Women in Business Summit Marks 20th Year in September

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Attendees gather at the 2024 Women in Business Summit, also held in Springfield.
Women in Businesss

Connection and Inspiration

 

Attendees gather at the 2024 Women in Business Summit, also held in Springfield.

Attendees gather at the 2024 Women in Business Summit, also held in Springfield.

 

It was called the Women in Business Passing the Baton: Today, Tomorrow & Beyond Summit.

That’s … quite a mouthful.

Back in 2005, Kisha Zullo recalled, she was launching an event planning company called Events of Joy and wanted to plan a conference for women who had achieved a certain level of success and could learn from each other.

“But the summit name was very long,” she admitted. “So, later, I scrunched it into the Women in Business Summit, because who’s going to say all that every day?”

But there was a reason for that initially too-long name.

“I wanted the image of passing the baton, like we’re in this race together, and we’re just passing on knowledge so the next generation can close the pay gap — at the time, I think it was 77 cents to a dollar; now it’s about 83 cents. So, things like the pay gap and managing your time, how to communicate with confidence, topics like that have not gone away.”

Which is why Zullo’s annual Women in Business Summit — which started in Connecticut but moved to Springfield three years ago — is still going strong in what will be its 20th iteration next month. The event will take place on Wednesday and Thursday, Sept. 24-25 at Marriott Springfield Downtown. Registration is open at wibsummit.com.

“We started with 60 people, and we’re anticipating about 300 coming into Springfield this year,” she told BusinessWest. “They’re coming from Western Mass., Connecticut, New York, New Jersey … last year I saw Vermont, Florida, Colorado.”

The mission of the conference, as always, is to develop a strong community of women leaders and entrepreneurs by sharing resources, knowledge, and inspiration.

“This year, we’ve chosen to focus on leadership development because we’ve talked to our [past] attendees, and that’s what they want to hone — their leadership skills,” Zullo explained.

“We’re doing a wellness track, and wellness can be mind, body, soul, and spirit, but it can also be your relationship with money,” she added. “If you’re always saying, ‘money moves through my hand quickly’ or ‘I can never keep it,’ well, that’s a mindset shift that maybe you have to make. So I’m excited about that.

Kisha Zullo

Kisha Zullo

“Over the past 20 years, I have been really fortunate to have a really great group of people. Some speakers are returning from last year because their workshops were incredibly popular.”

“Then we have an entrepreneurship track,” she added, “because half of our audience are solopreneurs or small business owners, and the other half work for someone else in nonprofit, corporate, or other industries.”

 

Women to the Front

This year’s keynote speaker is Endia DeCordova, vice president for Institutional Advancement at Morgan State University and executive director of the Morgan State University Foundation. “She was at the very first Women in Business Summit, and I’ve kind of watched her career soar,” Zullo said.

Other presenters include María Elena Gavilán Alfonso, technology leader and technical program manager with MathWorks; author and activist Choc’late Allen; Jennifer Bouquot, vice president of Talent Development for Liberty Bank; Lisa Carrol, founder and CEO of LIVLY; Orlena Cowan-Bailey, chief elevation officer of HR Zoom Consulting and HR Swag Shop; Sara Diaz, founder of the First Gen Madrina; Iquo Essien, founder of Crowdfund Your Dream; Veronica Garcia, CEO of Latino Marketing Agency; Patsy Mundy, assistant vice president at Travelers; Tessa Murphy-Romboletti, executive director of EforAll Holyoke and Holyoke city councilor; Latonia Tabb, CEO of Cooke Consulting Management; therapist Whitney Wilfred; and Michelle Wirth, co-owner of Mercedes-Benz of Springfield and founder of Feel Good Shop Local. Tiffany Joy Murchison, owner of TJM & Co. Media Boutique, will serve as emcee.

Meanwhile, panel and workshop topics will touch on managing burnout, technology and AI trends, the future of work, leading with purpose, thinking outside the box, entrepreneurship, the power of conversation, and much more.

“It’s really attendee-led,” Zullo said when asked how the roster comes together. “We get a lot of speaker inquiries, but it’s the attendees who tell us what they want to see.”

Take Carrol, who has turned LIVLY into a well-known high-end clothing brand. “I want her to talk about her story of how she brought LIVLY to life and was able to fundraise $10 million,” Zullo said. “That is of interest to an entrepreneur who’s just starting out or in the middle of their career.”

She added, “one the things that I’ve said to the presenters is, ‘please, when you’re in your session, it’s about have the experience … make your presentations interactive so you’re not just sitting there as a talking head in a workshop. And over the past 20 years, I have been really fortunate to have a really great group of people. Some speakers are returning from last year because their workshops were incredibly popular.”

 

From the Ground Up

Zullo’s event-planning business, Events of Joy, launched in 2005, and the Women in Business Summit — actually, the Women in Business Passing the Baton: Today, Tomorrow & Beyond Summit — was her first event.

“I didn’t know I wanted to be an entrepreneur. I remember, when I was working in D.C., I worked for this really cool property that did so many different events. I saw different types of weddings, cultural weddings, nonprofit events, corporate events, this really amazing mix,” she recalled, adding that she began to wonder about the woman she saw working behind the scenes, and what that job might be like.

“I thought, one day I want to plan parties. So I tucked it away, and when I moved to this area, I thought I would love to start my own business. And then it was like, how do I get it started? And what is going to be the name?”

In fact, Events of Joy has a double meaning, named after both Zullo’s mother and how she feels bringing events to life.

“I started out doing weddings — I don’t plan weddings anymore, but there’s someone on my team who does. I focus primarily on nonprofit signature events, fundraisers, and corporate events. And of course, planning events for the Women in Business Summit.”

Twenty years later, Zullo is gratified by the impact the event continues to have.

“As women leave, they say, ‘oh, I’m so inspired because I heard this,’ or ‘this is a new thought that I can implement the next day at work,’ or ‘I’m going to use this to resolve this issue in my life.’ That just makes my heart soar, to hear those kinds of testimonials.”

Cybersecurity Summit to Focus on Workforce, Ecosystem

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Cybersecurity

Strengthening the Lines of Defense

Peter Sherlock says the numbers certainly help tell the story.

There are roughly 26,000 employed in Massachusetts today in what would be called the cybersecurity sector. And there were, at the precise moment we talked with him, exactly 18,263 openings in that realm, a number that goes up seemingly every day.

That means this sector has about two-thirds the number of qualified individuals it needs, said Sherlock, adding that the dire need to close that gap was one of the motivations behind the creation of CyberTrust Massachusetts, which he now serves as CEO.

Another motivation was to make the state’s businesses, institutions, and municipalities more cyber-secure at a time when the number of victims of cyber and ransomware attacks — like the number of job openings in this sector — keeps going up.

Peter Sherlock

Peter Sherlock

“As we put these students into these SOCs, they’re going to be working under the supervision of cyber professionals. We’re going to put them to work making cities and towns more cybersecure.”

How CyberTrust is going about these assignments, which overlap in many different ways, as we’ll see, will be among the focal points of Sherlock’s presentation at the 11th annual Cybersecurity Summit at Bay Path University, set for Friday, Oct. 13 at the Mills Theatre in Carr Hall on the school’s Longmeadow campus.

Registration for the event, which has been drawing steadily larger audiences because of the importance of the subject matter, is required. Individuals can register at baypath.edu/summit, and attend either in-person or remotely.

The working title for the program is “Who’s Next? How a Stronger Cyber Ecosystem is the First Line of Defense.” And Sherlock told BusinessWest that there are many elements that comprise this ecosystem, including the business sector, government, and education (the state’s colleges and universities, and even its high schools and middle schools). Together, they work on those twin assignments of building the workforce and making entities more cyber-secure.

At the forefront of these efforts is CyberTrust Massachusetts, a nonprofit committed to building both opportunity and security through a consortium of statewide businesses and colleges.

“CyberTrust arose out of a long-running dialogue among business and academic leaders, with some folks in government; these were discussions centered around workforce,” he said, adding that he understands first-hand the challenges of hiring — and retaining — within this sector.

Indeed, he previously served as chief operating officer of MITRE, as well as senior vice president responsible for MITRE’s defense and intelligence business.

“In my roles there, I had to worry about our annual hiring programs; trying to hire 1,000 STEM professionals every year was quite a challenge, as was retaining them,” he explained. “I would talk a lot with other executives in the Massachusetts area about the challenges of growing the pipelines in some of these technologies to keep up with the demand.

“And as the pandemic disrupted the workforce a bit more, those problems have become even more urgent,” he went on, adding that this urgency helped bring business and education together in the CyberTrust Massachusetts consortium to “move the needle,” as Sherlock put it, on not only these workforce issues, but the growing threat — in the form of cyber and ransomware attacks — to businesses of all sizes, nonprofits, institutions, and municipalities.

In his presentation at the Cybersecurity Summit, which will followed by what is expected to be a robust question-and-answer period, Sherlock said he will address a number of issues and initiatives, including the workforce challenges, efforts to activate new pathways for the talent pipeline in order to both grow and diversify and workforce, and cybersecurity approaches for municipalities across the Commonwealth.

While doing so, he will discuss how these problems intersect, and also about efforts to address them jointly, such as the security operation center, or SOC (pronounced ‘sock’ by those within this sector) that is taking shape at Springfield’s Union Station. This SOC, to be established by Springfield Technical Community College, will provide threat monitoring and other cybersecurity services for the state’s municipalities, small businesses, and nonprofits, while also creating learning opportunities for those in or seeking to join this sector at a ‘cyber range,’ a new testing lab that will mirror real-world IT environments to provide hands-on training opportunities to local companies, universities, and other cyber-focused organizations.

“We need to introduce new people to the cyber career field, whether it’s recruiting them from high school or getting adult career changers, and making non-cyber majors credentialed in cyber.”

“While focusing on workforce, we decided we could be serving another purpose at the same time,” he explained. “As we’re training our cyber learners with hands-on experiences, we could actually put them to work securing cities and towns, nonprofits, and small businesses. We put together this rather ambitious plan to set up security operations centers at a number of universities across the Commonwealth and to infuse new cyber-range technology into these colleges and universities and enlist cyber employers from across the state into this activity.

“As we put these students into these SOCs, they’re going to be working under the supervision of cyber professionals,” he went on. “We’re going to put them to work making cities and towns more cybersecure.”

Overall, Sherlock said the workforce issue requires creative, outside-the-box thinking and efforts to encourage individuals to consider this field while they are still in high school or even middle school.

“We need to introduce new people to the cyber career field, whether it’s recruiting them from high school or getting adult career changers, and making non-cyber majors credentialed in cyber,” he said. “There are a lot of different ways to get people into the field that we weren’t working at too much.”

Sherlock said he would go into much more detail at the summit, which grew out of the growing importance of cybersecurity in today’s society, the emergence of that sector, and the need to keep businesses and the community at large informed when it comes to new trends, new initiatives — and new threats, said Tom Loper, associate provost and dean in the School of Management and Technology at Bay Path.

Loper said he hopes, and expects, this year’s summit to be well-attended because of its focus on businesses and municipalities, the efforts to keep them safe from cyberattacks, and the role that they play within the emerging cyber ecosystem.