Ovation Talent is Proud to Present: Donna Fenn, Small Business Expert & Inc. Magazine Contributing Editor

Speaking Topic: The Age of the Alpha Dog Entrepreneur
Success in today's highly competitive business environment isn't just about great products or services – it's all about expert execution of business strategy.

Bio:
Donna Fenn is the author of ALPHA DOGS: How Your Small Business Can Become A Leader of the Pack. Fenn has more than twenty years experience writing about entrepreneurship and small business trends. She is a contributing editor at Inc. magazine, a community leader at Work.com and a member of the Grow Fast, Grow Right. Her work has appeared in Inc., The New York Times, Newsweek, The Associated Press, The Washington Monthly, Working Woman, Working Mother, Family Money, CFO, Corporate Finance, Parents, and New England Monthly.

In her presentations Fenn explains why yesterday’s competitive tactics don’t work anymore and why every business must reinvent itself as an “Alpha Dog.” She tells stories from the entrepreneurial trenches, imparting lessons learned by a variety of small businesses: a bike shop, an auction company, a chain of ice cream parlors, a sock manufacturer, a commercial bakery. She explains how companies such as these, all lacking mountains of capital and stables of MBAs, nevertheless beat the competition and became marketplace leaders. Fenn lays out eight success strategies: innovation, customer service, branding, employee engagement, alliances, use of technology, community connections, and reinvention, to illustrate how any small company can become a leader of the pack. Entrepreneurs will come away with solid ideas to transform their own companies; larger companies seeking to market their goods and services to entrepreneurs, or that want to create entrepreneurial cultures of their own, will gain valuable insight into the unique challenges of running and growing a small business.

In 2001, Fenn was a co-recipient of the Women’s Economic Round Table Entrepreneurship Prize, sponsored by the Kauffman Center for Entrepreneurial Leadership. From 1988 to 1992, she lived in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, where she was a correspondent for The Associated Press and covered a variety of issues including business, culture, the economy and the Gulf War. She now lives in Pelham, NY with her husband and two children.