Donna Fenn is the author of "Alpha Dogs: How Your Small Business Can Become a Leader of the Pack" (Collins, Dec. 2005). She is also a contributing editor at Inc. magazine with more than twenty years experience writing about entrepreneurship and small business trends. In 2001, she 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. Her work has also appeared in The New York Times, Newsweek, The Washington Monthly, Working Woman, Working Mother, Family Money, CFO, Corporate Finance, Parents, and New England Monthly. She lives in Pelham, NY with her husband and two children.

Public Speaking
Donna Fenn draws on more than twenty years of reporting on small business to engage audiences in a lively presentation that draws from her recently-published book, Alpha Dogs: How Your Small Business Can Become a Leader of the Pack. Never before have small businesses faced so many competitive threats: Consolidation in nearly every industry is breeding behemoth competitors; consumers are more demanding and fickle than ever before; technology enables tiny competitors to look large and bigger competitors to forge more intimate relationships with customers; the marketplace is saturated with an ever increasing number of products and services, making it more and more difficult for small companies to differentiate and distinguish themselves. But the good news is that are also social and economic forces at work that make this a great time for small companies to step up to the plate. Fenn tells stories from the entrepreneurial trenches, imparting lessons from small businesses in a variety of “ordinary” industries: a bike shop, an auction company, a chain of ice cream parlors, a sock manufacturer, a commercial bakery. How do companies like these, none of which have mountains of capital or stables of MBAs, beat the competition and become marketplace leaders? Fenn lays out eight success strategies: innovation, customer service, branding, commitment to employees, alliances, use of technology, community engagement, and reinvention, to illustrate how any small company can become a leader of the pack. Small companies 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.