Built to Thrive celebrates Women Entrepreneurship Week with five days of virtual workshops designed to help entrepreneurs build stronger, more sustainable businesses. While we proudly recognize and celebrate the contributions of women entrepreneurs, the series is open to everyone interested in starting, strengthening, or growing a business.
WORKSHOP SCHEDULE
NOVEMBER 16, 2026
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About This Session
Learn tips on how to start a healthy small business, operate it, and grow. Learn the 3 keys to business success. Become comfortable with talking about financing, budgeting, bookkeeping, cash flow, and P&L statements. Know how to prepare and what documents you will need to apply for a loan, and learn how to build and maintain your credit to build a lasting legacy for your small business. Top 3 takeaways that attendees will gain:
- How can managing your finances help your business?
- What are some common practices, rules and tools to help you manage your business finances?
- How can these tools help you start and grow your business?
Meet the Presenter: Angela Aaron
Angela M. Aaron, MBA, CFEI, is a Financial Wellness Next Step Educator with Regions Bank and a Certified Financial Education Instructor. She brings a powerful combination of professional expertise, personal experience, and relatable storytelling to her mission of helping individuals and communities build confidence in their financial journey.
Angela holds a Bachelor of Arts in History from the University of Arkansas at Little Rock and a Master of Business Administration from Webster University. A proud U.S. Army veteran, she served for 10 years before transitioning into her career in financial education and community empowerment.
Deeply committed to service, Angela is the President of the National Association of University Women – Little Rock Branch and is an active contributor to outreach efforts within her local church.
A native of Little Rock, Arkansas, Angela is an outdoor enthusiast who loves exploring hot springs and hiking trails with her husband. She also enjoys traveling, collecting postcards, tending to plants, and cheering on the Dallas Cowboys and Kansas City Chiefs. And yes—she’s a self‑proclaimed professional shopper.
Driven by the belief that financial knowledge changes lives, Angela uses her platform to normalize conversations about money, remove stigma, and equip people with practical tools to achieve financial well‑being.
NOVEMBER 17, 2026
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About This Session
You started your business for more freedom-but somewhere along the way, you may have built something that requires you to constantly be "on." In this workshop, Alyssa Simpson explores the hidden stress patterns that keep entrepreneurs stuck in urgency, overworking, over-functioning, and feeling like everything depends on them. Attendees will learn how nervous system regulation impacts the way they make decisions, lead, delegate, set boundaries, and grow their businesses-and how to create sustainable success without sacrificing their ambition or themselves in the process.
Attendees will learn how to:- Recognize hidden stress patterns: Identify where urgency, over-functioning, control, and constant productivity may be driving the way you operate your business.
- Understand the business impact: Learn how nervous system regulation influences decision-making, delegation, boundaries, leadership, and your capacity for sustainable growth.
- Interrupt the hustle cycle: Walk away with practical tools to distinguish real urgency from conditioned urgency and begin building a business that can grow without requiring more pressure, work, and personal sacrifice from you.
Meet the Presenter: Alyssa Simpson
Alyssa Simpson is the founder of Restfully Rich™, a modern movement challenging the cultural belief that success has to come at the expense of peace. She helps ambitious women stop recreating stress so they can build wealth, leadership, and businesses they actually enjoy living inside of.
Her work challenges the cultural normalization of burnout, emotional exhaustion, and over-functioning as the price of success especially for women navigating ambition, business, motherhood, and visibility.
Through speaking, media, private communities, and transformational conversations, Alyssa helps women redefine success from the inside out so their external success no longer requires internal sacrifice.
NOVEMBER 18, 2026
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About This Session
Most business owners are told to grow. Almost nobody tells them that not all growth is worth having.
Revenue can climb while the business itself becomes harder to run, harder to finance, and worth less per dollar of sales than it was two years ago. Meanwhile, quieter changes — a client base that no longer depends on one person, processes someone else can actually follow, margins that hold as volume increases — build real, transferable value without adding a single hour to the owner's week.
Jana Minifie has spent her career determining what businesses are worth, and this past year she grew her own firm fourfold. In this session she brings both perspectives together: what she actually did to grow, and what she sees in valuation engagements every day about which kinds of growth show up in the number and which ones only show up in the owner's calendar.
This is a practical session for owners at any stage — whether you're planning to sell in five years or have no intention of ever selling. The habits that make a business valuable are the same ones that make it sustainable to own.
Meet the Presenter: Jana Minifie, Ph.D., CVA, BCA, ECA
Jana Minifie is the founder of Minifie LLC, an Austin-based business valuation firm serving privately held companies across the United States. She holds credentials spanning the full valuation spectrum — from equipment and hard assets to Main Street businesses to middle-market companies — and works with owners on everything from succession and buy-sell planning to quality of earnings analysis and expert witness testimony in divorce and ownership disputes.
Her practice has developed particular depth in franchise and insurance agency valuation, and she is presenting her research on franchise valuation methodology at the NACVA Super Conference this fall. Before founding her firm, Jana built her foundation in Big 4 audit and holds a Ph.D. in her field.
Jana grew her own practice fourfold in a single year, an experience that shapes how she talks with business owners: she has sat on both sides of the table, as the analyst who determines what a company is worth and as the entrepreneur doing the work of building one. She is an active member of ProVisors, ACG, and the Texas Association of Business Brokers, and organizes a women's professional networking group in Austin.
NOVEMBER 19, 2026
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About This Session
Success doesn't have to come at the expense of your energy, well-being, or joy. In this engaging session, we'll have a real conversation about the hidden connection between perfectionism, success pressure, and burnout among women entrepreneurs.
Together, we'll explore practical strategies to shift from survival mode to a thriving mindset, enabling you to lead with confidence, clarity, and purpose. Participants will discover how to identify patterns that contribute to burnout, foster healthier mindsets, and embrace excellence without unrealistic expectations. Attendees will receive actionable insights to support resilience, sustainable performance, and long-term business growth.The three main objectives of this session are:
- Understand the intersection between perfection and excellence
- Understand the intimate link between perfectionism and burnout
- Explore the impact of perfectionism in entrepreneurship
Meet the Presenter: Dr. Edna Sokoll
Dr. Edna Sokoll‑Arévalo is an experienced consultant, leadership coach, and educator with deep expertise in organizational culture, cross‑cultural collaboration, and high‑performing teams. With a bicultural and bilingual background, she brings a global perspective shaped by leadership roles in nonprofit, academic, and business environments. Edna is known for facilitating engaging, practical workshops that help teams communicate more effectively, reduce friction, and thrive. She holds a doctorate in education and is passionate about helping leaders create supportive, aligned team environments.
NOVEMBER 20, 2026
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About This Session
Every business needs to have a successful website to succeed, yet the art of generating new traffic and building loyal audiences organically has become more difficult in today’s landscape. Learn how to build brand awareness, increase your business listing in online searches, and earn more customers from Shannon Black, a Montessori school business owner who will share her "secret sauce" to blogging success (it’s easier than you think!).
Meet the Presenter: Shannon Black
Shannon Black is an entrepreneur and former math teacher who started a Montessori preschool business when she couldn't find a quality school for her 1 year old son. She expanded her initial four-classroom school into two locations with over 50 employees and opened her third location in Jarrell in 2025. Shannon also donates her time to SCORE as a Mentor, speaker, and Chair, promoting SCORE's free business mentoring and workshops to small business owners at SCORE.org.
Texas State University SBDC is a proud member of the Texas South-West SBDC Network, which is funded in part through the State of Texas and a cooperative agreement with the U.S. Small Business Administration (SBA), is hosted by Texas State University and accredited nationally by America’s SBDC. The Small Business Development Center services are provided to all U.S. citizens, legal residents, and foreign nationals that intend to invest in the United States, in accordance with Federal funding requirements. Reasonable accommodations for persons with disabilities or limited English proficiency will be made if requested at least two weeks in advance.