Shana Bryant Consulting (SBC) is an event planning and management company based in the Dorchester neighborhood of Boston, MA. SBC provides end-to-end event management services, trainings, and consulting services for institutional clients, non-profits, and entrepreneurs seeking to coordinate high-impact functions. Shana, the founder of SBC, has oriented herself around empowerment and personal development. Events have ranged from conferences for middle school aged girls addressing the challenges faced by women of color, to workshops on time management best practices for non-profit leaders.
Beyond institutional events, SBC organizes HUSTLEx2, a program focused on providing guidance and accountability for minority women who are pursuing entrepreneurial ventures in addition to their professional career goals. HUSTLEx2 takes place as quarterly events with a flagship annual conference. Many small businesses start as “side hustles” before they become primary income sources, so a strong support network becomes imperative to entrepreneur success.
While Shana has operated in the event management space for over a decade, SBC is relatively young operation, founded in mid-2018. Shana has worked closely with mentors and consultants to evaluate SBC’s operations and to improve its effectiveness. SBC was connected with LEAF’s technical assistance team through the City of Boston Small Business Technical Assistance Program. Her primary objective was to develop a strategic plan for the business driven by financial analysis. In order to grow her staff and to increase her footprint, it had become clear that at least one business segment would need to grow significantly.
LEAF’s work began with a deep review of SBC’s revenue model and several conversations about vision for the future. The results of these conversations were a clear interest in growing the event management space to include multiple full-time staff, which would allow Shana to spend more time cultivating the HUSTLEx2 entrepreneur network. That transition would be augmented by the SBC positioning itself as a producer of and curator of content to be consumed by entrepreneurs as well as utilized for events. The LEAF team was able to compose these ideas into the form of a tracking and projection spreadsheet that will enable SBC to pursue expansion capital and to evaluate its progress.