Community & Guest List

Amie Thompson is an executive, investor, mentor, and leader and the current President & CEO of Creative Allies, a minority-certified marketing firm for entrepreneurs. Her company offers a wide range of marketing services to grow our client's brand. Creative Allies creates best practices from the lessons learned over its 10-year history to connect our clients with buyers, fans, and followers to enhance the brand story. Amie's passion is helping other business owners grow their businesses through great marketing.

Angela Proffitt is an Entrepreneur, Productivity Consultant and Wedding & Event Planner & Designer, with nearly two decades of experience within the creative industry. As the industry's leading creative disruptor, she has become a trusted resource and ally because of her commitment to exceeding the expectations of her clients and her passion for educating professionals. Her mantra “you don't know, what you don't know,” fuels her books, online classes, live events, and consulting. This has allowed her to help thousands of wedding & event clients, and hundreds of small businesses achieve success, grow steadily and “wow” consistently; she calls it GSD (Get Sh*t Done).

Andy Brenits is the Principal of Phoenix-based Brenits Creative, a branding, marketing, and creative strategy firm that helps growing businesses and business owners working (mostly) by themselves compete with name brands by creating a consistent way to look, communicate, and act.

He's a creative professional with 25+ years of experience running creative businesses specializing in branding, marketing, and design. Before founding Brenits Creative, Andy led in-house creative teams at Fortune 500 brands such as Banana Republic, The Gap, National Football League, KPMG, and Arizona Public Service.

An experienced mentor and teacher, Andy has taught undergraduate and graduate classes at Pratt Institute, Rowan University, The Art Institute of Phoenix, Sessions.edu, Columbia University, Grand Canyon University, and Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA). He earned his Master’s Degree in Design Management from Pratt Institute and has a BFA in Graphic Design from the School of Visual Arts.

Adam Roberts is the Executive Director of Bethesda Green, a Maryland nonprofit organization that is working to address environmental challenges locally by creating a sustainable, green community, built collaboratively through citizen engagement, environmental education, government partnership and innovative business development. They focus on local environmental projects such as increasing access to recycling and composting or planting raingardens to mitigate storm-water runoff; run an environmental education program for local high school students; and maintain the Bethesda Green Innovation Lab, which cultivates and nurtures eco-entrepreneurs, working to create businesses based on sustainability. He has spent three decades in the nonprofit sector, previously focused on international animal protection and wildlife conservation.

Adrián has created the leading online learning platform in the EdTech world – delivering a personalized learning experience to students and teachers from grade school through college and beyond. Adrián has spent the past two decades bringing together academic experts across all subjects, with the leading technologists and learning scientists to build the most innovative micro-learning platform with the sole purpose to eliminate the most common educational barriers and make education accessible.