Breakout sessions
Session One
Marketing in a Digital World:
Unique Business Identity: Define and leverage your business’s unique qualities in the digital space.
Customer Engagement: Identify where your customers are and how to effectively reach them online.
Maximizing Online Presence: Optimize your digital spaces for maximum impact.
Data-Driven Marketing: Analyze and adjust strategies based on digital analytics.
Digital Ownership: Take control of your online presence and brand identity.
Presenter: Luis Mariscal (he/him), JPMorgan Chase
Customer Acquisition and Retention
Learn more about how you can acquire and retain new customers for your small business.
Getting started
The competitive marketplace
How can my business build customer trust?
How can I retain customers over the long term?
Measuring customer acquisition and retention
Calculation customer acquisition cost and customer lifetime value
Key points
Next steps
Customer acquisition and retention are essential to sustainable business growth, but success requires more than simply attracting new customers. Businesses must understand their target audience, create meaningful customer experiences, build trust, and develop strategies that encourage long-term loyalty. This course explores key acquisition and retention strategies, including digital marketing, customer services, relationship building, and the importance of evaluating customer feedback.
The course also emphasizes the role of data in determining whether these strategies are effective. Key measures such as customer acquisitions cost (CAC), customer lifetime value (CLV), churn rate, conversion rate, and time to conversion, help businesses evaluate performance and make informed decisions. By assessing current metrics, establishing measurable goals, reviewing existing strategies, gathering customer feedback, and continually analyzing results, businesses can refine their approach to customer acquisition and retention and support long-term growth.
Presenter: Chelsey Peitz (she/her), UMB
Hiring 101 & AI in the Employment Lifecycle
Explore the fundamentals of responsible hiring and the growing role of artificial intelligence in the workplace. This session will cover at-will employment, multi-state compliance, employee handbooks, and the legal considerations surrounding AI. Attendees will learn how AI can support recruiting, onboarding, performance management, and offboarding while understanding the importance of reducing bias, protecting employee data, and maintaining meaningful human oversight.
Hiring 101: Building and Supporting Your Team
Hiring employees involves more than finding the right candidate. This session will introduce the essential principles of U.S. employment, including at-will employment, multi-state compliance, employee handbooks, and workplace policies. Attendees will also explore how competitive benefits, thoughtful onboarding, and effective HR infrastructure can help small businesses attract talent, strengthen retention, and confidently support a growing team.
Presenter: Moses Balian (he/him), JustWorks
Do More With Less: How Small Businesses Can Grow Without Adding More Work
Small business owners are constantly told to do more. Post more content. Join more platforms. Attend more events. Add more services. Buy more technology. Work more hours.
But more activity does not automatically create more growth.
Do More With Less is an interactive workshop that introduces practical Lean business principles to help entrepreneurs identify where their limited time, money, and attention are creating value and where they are simply creating more work.
Participants will examine the activities inside their own businesses to distinguish revenue-producing and value-creating work from unnecessary complexity, duplication, inefficient processes, and busywork. They will also explore ways to increase visibility and market their businesses without continuously increasing their marketing budgets, including strategic relationships, referral partnerships, speaking, content, and community engagement.
Using a practical five-decision framework, participants will evaluate where they can Eliminate, Simplify, Standardize, Delegate, or Automate activities within their businesses.
This workshop is about making better decisions about where business owners invest their resources so they can create greater capacity for growth.
Participants will leave with:
A clearer understanding of what is actually creating value in their business.
Identified areas where time, money, and effort may be wasted.
A practical framework for deciding what to eliminate, simplify, standardize, delegate, or automate.
Strategies for increasing visibility without depending solely on paid marketing.
Specific actions they can take immediately to reduce unnecessary workload and focus resources on activities that support sustainable growth.
The goal is simple: Make what you already do work better.
Presenter: Shawn Renee Jones, iNet
Session two
The Story Behind the Logo: Using Visual Storytelling to Make Your Business Stand Out
Your logo may be the first thing customers recognize, but it’s only the beginning of your business’s visual story. In The Story Behind the Logo, Trenton Sivola of Siv Studios explores how small-business owners can use visual storytelling to communicate who they are, what they offer, and why customers should remember them.
Attendees will learn how photography, graphics, video, animation, 3D visualization, and other forms of visual content can support their brand and marketing goals without assuming every business needs a large marketing budget. Through practical examples and real-world case studies, the session will help entrepreneurs identify what parts of their business are better shown than explained and develop ideas for turning their brand identity into visual content that connects with customers.
Presenter: Trenton Sivola, Siv Studios
From Conflict to Connection: Techniques for Resolving Conflict While Strengthening Relationships
Conflict is inevitable wherever people work together, but it does not have to damage relationships or derail results. In this interactive session, participants will learn practical tools for navigating difficult conversations with confidence, clarity, and respect. Drawing on proven communication and conflict resolution techniques, attendees will discover how unmet expectations create tension, how emotional triggers influence behavior, and how to separate facts from assumptions when addressing workplace challenges.
Through real-world scenarios, participants will explore strategies to create psychological safety, keep dialogue productive during high-stakes conversations, and move from blame and defensiveness to understanding and collaboration. The session introduces actionable frameworks, including STATE My Path and AMPP, that help leaders and team members communicate openly while preserving trust and accountability.
Attendees will leave with practical techniques to address conflict early, strengthen workplace relationships, reach clear agreements, and turn challenging conversations into opportunities for greater connection, engagement, and performance.
Presenter: Colleen James, Looking Forward Consulting
Would YOU Do Business With You?
Your website may have only seconds to convince a prospective customer to stay, explore, call, buy, or leave.
In this interactive session, Bill Thompson will review real websites volunteered by businesses in the room and examine them from a prospective customer’s point of view. Together, participants will look at first impressions, page speed, clarity of message, calls to action, ease of contact, credibility, mobile presentation, and the small details that can determine whether someone becomes a customer or hits the back button.
The session is designed to be friendly, practical, and constructive. Attendees will leave with ideas they can immediately apply to their own online presence.
Presenter: Bill Thompson (he/him), LGBTQ.One
Tax Tips for Business Owners
Effective accounting and tax planning are essential for business success. Businesses need to plan and implement smart tax strategies in order to stay compliant and minimize tax liability. It all starts with detailed and organized financial records to make tax filing more accurate, efficient, and economical. It’s important to separate personal and business finances, keep receipts and documentation organized, and understand which expenses are tax-deductible. Businesses should also consider the most tax-efficient legal structure (e.g., LLC, S-Corp) for their operations. Hiring a professional accountant can provide valuable insights and ensure compliance with tax regulations.
Presenters: John Billington (He/Him) and Samantha Billington (She/Her), Valhalla Accounting
Session three
The Power of Showing Up: How Small Businesses Get Found, Build Trust, and Stay Connected
We'd explore three parts of a sustainable visibility strategy:
Get discovered: practical SEO and AI visibility, including what useful content needs to look like heading into 2027
Show up in borrowed spaces: social media, partnerships, and in-person events
Build an owned audience: turning visibility into a lasting connection through your website and email list
Presenter: Tanya Moushi (she/her), Moushi.co
AI for Beginners
This presentation introduces AI platforms as a powerful tool that can support businesses of all sizes. Attendees will learn the basics of how AI works, what it can and cannot do, and how it can streamline everyday tasks such as drafting emails, creating marketing content, generating reports, answering customer questions, and brainstorming ideas. The session will also cover best practices for prompting, ethical use, and integrating AI into daily workflows to save time, reduce costs, and spark innovation.
Presenter: Alexis Carbajal (He/Him), Phoenix Coqui
Beyond Good Enough: The Power of Plussing in Business
In today’s marketplace, “good enough” doesn’t get you noticed—and it doesn’t keep customers coming back. Plussing is the practice of asking: How can we make this better? and turning ordinary touchpoints into extraordinary moments. This session will explore how to build loyalty and differentiation by creating experiences worth talking about—and worth sharing. We’ll look at how businesses can design “grammable moments” (those small but powerful details that people want to capture and post on Instagram) as a way to surprise, delight, and build organic word-of-mouth. Through practical tools and interactive exercises, you’ll discover how Plussing transforms your business from service provider to unforgettable experience.
Presenter: Steven Rico (He/Him), Social Dizfunksion
Connection is Currency
Stop blaming the algorithm. Your content isn't underperforming — it's empty. If people don't know your story, they don't know you, and if they don't know you, they're not buying. Matt gets in the room and calls it what it is: you're not out of ideas, you're out of truth. This session hands you the currency you've been missing.
Presenter: Matt Gil (he/him), DO THE DAMN THING Brands
Session Four
Using AI to Grow Your Business
This session goes beyond the basics and explores practical strategies for using AI to drive business growth. Participants will discover how to leverage AI for marketing campaigns, customer engagement, product development, and internal operations. Real-world examples will highlight how businesses are using AI to scale content creation, improve customer service, and gain a competitive edge. The presentation will also share tips for customizing AI to reflect brand voice, enhancing productivity, and identifying new opportunities for revenue and expansion.
Presenter: Alexis Carbajal (He/Him), Phoenix Coqui
Myths of Entrepreneurship: Five myths, Two Tools, One Better Monday
Most business advice assumes your problem is strategy. It usually isn't.
This session walk through five beliefs that quietly hold small business owners back: that growth is a business problem, that waiting is free, that self-doubt is a verdict on your ability, that waiting to quit means you chose wrong, and that success requires a big break. One sounds like caution. Each one has a price.
Then it gets practical. You'll leave with two tools you can use immediately- a written method for turning a setback from tragedy into trajectory, and a way to move off a single operating account to accounts organized by purpose and you can afford to say 'yes' when the moment finally shows up.
Presenter: Steven Rico (he/him), Social Dizfunksion
Maximizing GPECC Benefits
In this breakout session, attendees will discover how to fully maximize the benefits of their Greater Phoenix Equality Chamber of Commerce (GPECC) membership. From navigating the ChamberMaster platform and leveraging marketing opportunities, to connecting with peers through NetMixers, luncheons, and signature events, participants will learn practical strategies to increase visibility, build meaningful connections, and grow their businesses. The session will also cover exclusive member resources, sponsorship pathways, and ways to get involved through volunteer opportunities. Whether you are a new member or looking to re-engage, this session will equip you with the tools and insights to make the most of your GPECC membership and deepen your impact in the LGBTQ+ and allied business community.
Presenters: Pedro Jungk (He/Him) and Jeff Castle (he/him)
Lunch Presentation
Manage Your Time, Balance Your Priorities
Today's leaders face constant demands, competing priorities, and calendars that often feel out of control. This practical and engaging session provides participants with a proven framework for making intentional choices about how they invest their time, energy, and attention. Rather than focusing on doing more, attendees will learn how to focus on what matters most and align their daily activities with their professional and personal priorities.
Participants will explore tools for identifying their most important commitments, distinguishing between urgent and important work, and making better decisions about tasks, requests, and interruptions. Using the Priority Matrix, DART decision-making model, and practical boundary-setting techniques, attendees will learn how to reduce distractions, manage competing demands, and create space for high-impact work. The session also addresses common time wasters, procrastination, technology overload, and the importance of self-renewal in sustaining long-term effectiveness.
By the end of the session, participants will leave with a personalized action plan and a toolkit of strategies they can immediately apply to better manage their workload, protect their priorities, increase productivity, and create greater balance in both work and life.
Presenter: Colleen James, Looking Forward Consulting
Lunch Sponsor
One on One Sessions
Everything you’ve always wanted to know about bookkeeping but were afraid to ask.
Come meet Jen & Mark and get your bookkeeping questions answered in a relaxed, confidential, safe, no judgment environment.
Jen Arnold (She/Her) and Mark Arnold (He/Him)
Jen & Mark Arnold are the owners of Namaste Bookkeeping. Jen was an Accountant in Corporate America for nearly 30 years. Mark is a former Special Ed Teacher. Together we help small business owners that are passionate about making a difference. Our philosophy is simple: when creatives feel supported, the world gets brighter. We believe in bookkeeping that doesn’t just crunch numbers – it nurtures confidence, honors vulnerability, and amplifies your impact. Let us help YOU, so that YOU can help the world!
Let's find your rich. Retirement by design.
What does it mean to be rich? Maybe it's about something other than money. The key to being rich is knowing what counts. It's about living a fulfilled life or making memories that last a lifetime. Come explore personalized financial strategies that help support a life you love. Let's partner to explore your financial goals. It's never too early or too late to start designing the retirement you dream about.
Matt Parker is a financial advisor with Edward Jones, working with clients to develop a complete, tailored strategy to help achieve their personal financial goals. He believes it's important to invest his time to understand what individuals are working toward before investing their money. Matt is a native Phoenician and graduated from Arizona State University. He has been a member of GPECC for over 10 years and current is serving as President of the Board of Directors.