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byline: M.J. McAteer

Valley of the entrepreneurs

The Shenandoah Valley has long been recognized as fertile ground for agricultural endeavors, but it’s now being seeded to grow an entirely different kind of crop — entrepreneurs.

During the past few years, local and regional governmental bodies, nonprofits, and private and educational organizations in the valley have been coordinating efforts to create an entrepreneurial ecosystem. They aim to provide regional startups with all the training, advice, contacts and access to funding needed to turn kernels of good ideas into successful, home-grown businesses.

As director of technology innovation and economic development at James Madison University, Mary Lou Bourne is intimately involved in this informal system, which she calls “a coalition of the willing.” Bourne also is executive director of James Madison Innovations Inc., a nonprofit corporation for intellectual property management and licensing for inventions developed by JMU researchers.

The university does not lead the regional entrepreneurship effort, she stresses, but plays an “additive” role. However, “additive” hardly does justice to the list of organizations based at JMU that are dedicated to helping fledgling businesses in the valley. Among them are the Shenandoah Small Business Development Center, one of 27 such centers in the commonwealth that provide free professional consulting and training for new and small businesses, and Virginia Is for Entrepreneurs, which helps startups find financing.

JMU also has the Gilliam Center for Entrepreneurship, which helps student entrepreneurs develop business concepts into reality. Also on campus is the JMU-affiliated Shenandoah Valley Technology Council, which offers networking opportunities for entrepreneurs, as well as GO Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley regional office.

Outside JMU’s campus, Harrisonburg’s economic development department holds 10-week boot camps several times a year to teach entrepreneurs essential skills such as marketing and bookkeeping. The Harrisonburg-Rockingham Chamber of Commerce and Harrisonburg Downtown Renaissance, which promotes businesses in the central city, both offer training classes as well. The agencies collaborate to avoid duplication of services and to eliminate gaps in assistance programs.

“People start a business because it is their passion,” says Harrisonburg Chamber President and CEO Chris Quinn. “This [training] is the back-end stuff.”

This mother-and-daughters team — (L to R) Stephanie Auville Duncan, Chris Auville and Jessica Hall — started Harmony Harvest Farm in Weyers Cave. Photo by Norm Shafer

Elsewhere in the valley, there are plenty of other options for entrepreneurs seeking support. In Staunton, Shenandoah Community Capital Fund hosts a Business Bootcamp three times a year, says Anika Horn, SCCF’s director of marketing and ecosystem building. The eight-week virtual class helps budding entrepreneurs develop business skills and evaluate the viability of their ideas.

Additionally, each year SCCF hosts two or three Techstars Startup Weekends, offering an immersive 54-hour, three-day course that teaches people to become entrepreneurs. This year, SCCF also launched an annual two-day entrepreneurship summit with workshops, panel discussions and networking opportunities. The next summit will be held in October 2023, Horn says.   

Nearby Waynesboro offers extensive help for startups, too, mostly online, and the city’s Grow Waynesboro program recently received a $45,000 Community Business Launch grant from the state to expand its efforts. It plans to use some of the funding to hold a business pitch competition next year, with winners receiving grants, marketing support, customized training, mentorships and technical assistance.   

Cultivating businesses

Peter Denbigh is an example of someone developing the entrepreneurial ecosystem the valley is trying to nurture. He found success marketing a party game online, and he and his former wife, Alison Denbigh, co-founded a coworking space, Staunton Innovation Hub, in early 2017. The hub offers coworking and meeting spaces and private offices, as well as business programming and other opportunities for networking and sharing experiences that can be so important for budding entrepreneurs, Peter Denbigh says. For example, Shenandoah Community Capital Fund is headquartered in the hub and offers an accelerator program, Startup Shenandoah Valley (S2V).

About 110 companies have office space or are headquartered in the 30,000-square-foot Staunton Innovation Hub. Denbigh is looking to expand the entrepreneurial network he’s building by opening a similar size Harrisonburg Innovation Hub in late 2023.

“Local resources are your tribe,” Denbigh says. “Emotionally, technically and financially, they help you understand that you don’t know what you don’t know.”

Andrea Estep’s Harrisonburg women’s clothing and accessories shop, Charlee Rose Boutique, is another valley entrepreneurship success story. Estep started the business in her garage and now has a downtown storefront. “The community in Harrisonburg is like none other that I’ve experienced,” she says. “The support helped me survive through the pandemic.”

During the pandemic, Kirsten Moore also bucked the odds to start a coworking space in Harrisonburg, the Perch at Magpie. It has about 100 tenants housed in a 7,000-square-foot space atop her other new business, the Magpie Diner restaurant and bakery. “You have all of the right cheerleaders to walk you through the process” of building a business in the area, Moore says. “You can just walk into city hall and get your questions answered.”

Moore was fortunate to find private investors for her ambitious plans, which include a wine bar and retail and event space in a nearby building, but for many startups, securing capital financing is the biggest obstacle to starting and expanding their businesses.

Business loans from banks are sometimes hard to get, unless an entrepreneur has a big nest egg, and the valley’s lack of population density — the very demographic that makes the region appealing to so many would-be entrepreneurs — unfortunately correlates with a lack of available venture capital.

“You don’t have an extensive network like in NoVa,” Denbigh says. “You don’t have people here who go from zero to $100 million in six months.”

Crunching numbers

Only two local agencies (other than banks) offer substantial funding to valley startups.

One is Shenandoah Valley Angel Investors, a network of private funders capable of lending $50,000 to $300,000 to launch new businesses. Since its founding in 2015, facilitated by JMU’s Bourne, the fund, which is independent of the university, has invested $8.1 million in 23 companies.

The other major source of capital in the valley is Shenandoah Community Capital Fund in Staunton. Since it gave out its first loans in 2009, Horn says, the fund has invested $1.6 million to fund 108 businesses and support more than 450 others. That funding has come in the form of loans of $5,000 to $50,000.

Localities — including Waynesboro, Buena Vista and Augusta County — also make loans to small businesses, averaging about $15,000 each. Brian Shull, executive director of Harrisonburg Economic Development, says his agency can offer loans up to $25,000 to help entrepreneurs who are “not quite bankable yet.” So far, his agency has distributed 22 loans, adding up to $450,000.    

Some other options have arisen recently to aid minority business owners, who typically have a harder time than white entrepreneurs in securing capital. In the first half of 2021, funding to U.S. Black startup entrepreneurs hit a record $1.8 billion but accounted for only 1.2% of the $147 billion in venture capital invested in all U.S. startups during the same period, according to a report by Crunchbase.

In Harrisonburg and Rockingham, the chamber of commerce’s B-Cubed program provides minority entrepreneurs with advice on crafting business plans and networking, as well as grants. So far, the organization has awarded 17 grants to minority entrepreneurs in amounts ranging from $1,700 to $5,000 since 2020.

In Lexington, the all-volunteer Walker Program was started in 2020 to assist businesses owned by people of color in Buena Vista, Rockbridge County and Lexington.

In addition to its own program teaching the nuts and bolts of doing business and offering advice on issues such as trademarks and patents, Walker has made 15 business grants between $5,000 and $25,000 each, program coordinator Gabrielle J. Cash says. Thanks to Walker funding, three Black-owned businesses now are operating in downtown Lexington, where until recently, there were none.

Photographer Tasha Coleman received a Walker grant of $10,000 to help her secure a studio space in Buena Vista for her business, Tasha Lamar Photography & Films. She is grateful for that assistance, but she still has not been able to get up and running, because she needs more funding for equipment.

“Finding other loans to help furnish the studio has been very difficult,” Coleman says.

“Raising capital in the valley can be hard,” Denbigh says.  Organizations there “provide 101- and 201-level resources for entrepreneurs, but we need to get into 301 and 401 upscaling. That will be the tipping point when the money starts coming in.”

That extra push

To help more young businesses reach that tipping point, Shenandoah Community Capital Fund offers its S2V accelerator program, which more than 40 entrepreneurs have attended since it was established in 2020. Stephanie Auville Duncan of Harmony Harvest Farm in Weyers Cave is one of them.

Duncan, her sister, Jessica Hall, and their mother, Chris Auville, have been in the cut-flower business since 2013. The women started out by supplying flowers for weddings and other local events, and a few years later expanded into wholesale shipping to florists. Whole Foods stores up and down the East Coast started stocking their flowers, so business was great. Then, COVID-19 arrived, decreasing the need for flower arrangements, so florists and Whole Foods stopped buying from Harmony Harvest.

But with the help of the accelerator program, plus advice from Virginia Department of Tourism, Augusta County and Shenandoah Valley Partnership, Harmony Harvest was able to make a pandemic pivot and come up with a new business plan focused on shipping directly to customers. In 2020, its online sales increased by 1,600%.

The accelerator program, Duncan says, was “paramount to understanding the best way to grow” the family’s business, which has expanded to include agritourism.

This summer, Harmony Harvest began a pick-your-own-flowers operation and opened a retail store on the farm, a picturesque 20-acre property in Augusta County. Hall’s related business, Floral Genius, operates online and from the farm, too. Its pin- and cup-style flower holders called “flower frogs” got a welcome boost when Martha Stewart used them in a how-to video about flower arranging.

The bottom line, however, is that until more entrepreneurs like Duncan, Auville and Hall find ways to take their enterprises to the next level, finding financing is going to remain a sticking point for small business development in the valley.

The entrepreneurial ecosystem will be there, though, doing it’s dogged best to help them.

 

Shenandoah Valley at a glance

Shenandoah National Park Photo courtesy Shenandoah National Park

Settled in the 1700s, the approximately 140-mile-long Shenandoah Valley lies between the Blue Ridge and the Allegheny mountains. Agriculture remains a key industry for the region, which was known as the breadbasket of the Confederacy during the Civil War. Other notable industries include manufacturing, especially of food and beverages, and logistics. Bridgewater College, James Madison University, Mary Baldwin University, Virginia Military Institute, and Washington and Lee University call the region home.

Population: 373,472

 

Top employers

James Madison University: 3,887

Sentara Healthcare: 2,600

Augusta Health: 2,300

Cargill Inc.: 2,000*

Pilgrim’s Pride Corp.: 2,000*

Major attractions

The Shenandoah Valley is home to outdoor attractions such as Shenandoah National Park and the George Washington and Jefferson national forests. The region is also known for wineries and breweries, with the Shenandoah Beerwerks Trail and the Shenandoah Spirits Trail. Historical and cultural attractions include Civil War sites like the Virginia Museum of the Civil War and Melrose Caverns, as well as the Museum of the Shenandoah Valley and the American Shakespeare Center’s Blackfriars Playhouse.

Top convention hotels

The Omni Homestead Resort
 483 rooms, 72,000 square feet of event space

Hotel 24 South (Staunton)
124 rooms, 8,500 square feet of event space

Best Western Plus Waynesboro
Inn & Suites Conference Center
75 rooms, 5,500 square feet of event space

DoubleTree by Hilton Front Royal
Blue Ridge Shadows
124 rooms, 3,933 square feet of event space

Boutique/luxury hotels

The Blackburn Inn &
Conference Center
49 rooms, 8,400 square feet of event space

The Mimslyn Inn
45 rooms, almost 5,000 square feet of event space

The Gin Hotel
39 rooms

Hotel Laurance
12 rooms

Notable restaurants

Local Chop & Grill House
American, localchops.com

The Butcher Station
American, thebutcherstation.com

The Joshua Wilton House
American, joshuawilton.com

The Shack
New American, theshackva.com

Zynodoa
Southern, zynodoa.com

*Based on Shenandoah Valley Partnership estimates

 

Surf’s up for Chesterfield’s The Lake

It took a lot to make The Lake happen.

Developer Brett Burkhart had to nail down $323 million in financing, obtain a slew of permits and get Chesterfield County to offer performance grants or tax rebates. That took seven years, but he finally got it done, and clearing is underway on the 105-acre site on Genito Road across Route 288 from the county’s River City Sportsplex.

The centerpiece of The Lake, a 13-acre artificial pond with a tow cable, will accommodate water skiers, wakeboarders, paddle boarders and kayakers. It’s anticipated to open in late 2023.

“A lot of developments now are being anchored by entertainment elements,” says Burkhart, who started two entities, Lake Adventures LLC and Flatwater Ventures LLC, to run the park, which will also include a six-acre surf pool, one of just a handful of such facilities in the country.

The Lake will offer a 170-room hotel and 150,000 square feet of retail, restaurant and entertainment space. More than 1,000 residential units and 100,000 square feet of office space are in the mix, too, but a major priority for the county is the commercial piece of the project and its accompanying tax income. 

“It is glaring that we are losing opportunities,” says Chesterfield Board of Supervisors Chairman Christopher Winslow, who notes that 15,000 people can converge on Chesterfield for sports tournaments at the River City Sportsplex but then head to Richmond or other localities to seek restaurants, lodging and entertainment.

Under an agreement approved by the board in August, The Lake will receive county tax rebates of up to 80% over the next two decades for mixed-use and commercial development, although residential sections are not part of the deal. Its total value is estimated at $27 million to $28 million.

Winslow voted for the incentive. A report by WRIC 8News noted that he received a $2,500 campaign donation from Lake Adventures in May, but Winslow told the Chesterfield Observer he had supported the project before the donation.

Chesterfield County Director of Economic Development Garrett Hart III says that county funding, regardless of the incentives, “is not at risk at any point in the process.”    

Like Winslow and Burkhart, Hart is counting on The Lake to attract not just destination visitors but also tourists heading to the Sportsplex.

“I expect one out of 10 [of Sportsplex visitors] to get wet,” Hart says.

On the mend

After two years of severe staff shortages at health care facilities nationwide, conditions at the big three hospital systems in Hampton Roads are improving.

“The last two years have been some of the most challenging times for nurses in our lifetime,” says Cassie Lewis, chief nursing and quality officer for Bon Secours’ Hampton Roads market. “No one has an overabundance of nurses,” she notes, but Bon Secours was able to hire 150 nurses during a three-month period earlier this year. As of August, its job vacancy rate had dropped by 25%, compared with the prior six months.

“All my metrics are moving in the right direction,” Lewis says.

To keep metrics positive, though, hospitals, like just about every other business in America, have had to increase pay substantially, with merit raises, bonuses and cash rewards now an expected — even standard — part of compensation. In the past two years alone, for example, Sentara Healthcare says it has invested $310 million in covering the added costs of attracting and keeping health care workers.

A big chunk of such investments has gone toward benefits. Among numerous upgrades, Sentara now offers its nearly 30,000 workers a paid personal day, which 2,500 employees already have taken. It also has instituted a program that pays as much as $400 a month toward student loans, with more than 3,000 employees now enrolled.

With 9,500 employees, Riverside Health System has added a personal day and started a child care subsidy. It also offers money toward college, a benefit that has “been very well received,” says Jesse Goodrich, the health care system’s senior vice president of human resources. And at Bon Secours, which employs about 11,500 people in Virginia, paid parental leave has quadrupled from two weeks to eight weeks, and nurses are given a huge say in which facility they work at, a policy change that has received “an overwhelmingly positive” response, Lewis says.

With Virginia hospitals having lost some nurses during the height of the pandemic to better-paying travel nursing jobs or lower-stress private practices, competitive compensation is key to hospitals staying staffed — but so is listening to employees, executives say.

Goodrich notes that Riverside regularly surveys employees to “find the pebbles in their shoes.” Goodrich and Lewis insist that creating a positive workplace — even more than pay or benefits — is what ultimately attracts and retains employees.

“Health care is all about relationships,” says Goodrich, while Lewis says that “money is not what any nurse is in the business for.”

Aside from patient-level staffing, the three health systems have made some changes at the top. Most notably, in September, former Sentara Health Plans President Dennis Matheis succeeded Howard P. Kern as Sentara Healthcare’s new president and CEO. In September, Bill Downey announced he would step down as CEO at the end of 2022, with Dr. Michael Dacey, president and chief operating officer, succeeding Downey on Jan. 1. Allan Parrott, former CEO of Tidewater Fleet Supply LLC, was elected chair of Sentara’s board in June. And last fall, Pat Davis-Hagens came from Bon Secours Mercy Health’s The Jewish Hospital in Ohio to serve as Bon Secours’ Hampton Roads market president.

Sentara’s upcoming initiatives include increased community outreach, adding community clinics in affordable housing communities; a health care bus; and a $5 million investment in 30 community organizations involved in eliminating barriers to health and human services.

Riverside Behavioral Health Center’s emergency department is set to open in Newport News late next year, and in Williamsburg, the hospital system has broken ground on a 67,000-square-foot medical office building.

The system’s largest undertaking, though, will be Riverside Smithfield Hospital, a project anticipated to cost $100 million. Construction of the 50-bed acute-care hospital in Isle of Wight County is expected to begin this fall, with an opening date of late 2025 or early 2026. 

Launching pad

When COVID-19 hit in spring 2020, Cindy R. Earl lost her job as a furniture company’s sales rep.

But the Portsmouth resident’s sudden unemployment came with a positive side effect: She had time to assume care of her ailing grandmother after the pandemic had shuttered the assisted living facility  where her grandmother had lived. It was an experience that turned out to be unexpectedly inspirational.

“I’m an inquisitive person,” Earl says, and seeing the problems that her grandmother had suffered as an Alzheimer’s patient, which included dehydration and an unexplained injury, made her want to start a company dedicated to investigating elder abuse. She didn’t really know how to go about doing that, however, and that’s where Old Dominion University’s Hudgins Transitional Entrepreneurship Lab came in.

Launched in 2019 with a $1.2 million gift from Marsha Hudgins, an ODU alumna who owns a construction company in Hampton, the academic research enterprise is dedicated to educating and supporting would-be entrepreneurs who live in underserved and marginalized communities in the Hampton Roads area. Its focus is on aiding women, minorities, veterans, immigrants, refugees and formerly incarcerated people.

“Entrepreneurial efforts have long provided much less resistance and more immediate reward for hard work and creativity for groups with no readily available opportunities in the business world,” Hudgins says, explaining why she, the granddaughter of Greek immigrants, wanted to provide a leg up to other prospective entrepreneurs. But, for the disadvantaged, hard work and creativity often are not enough to ensure success.

According to a 2020 National Bureau of Economic Research study, Black entrepreneurs received an average of $35,205 in startup capital, compared with $106,720 for white entrepreneurs. And although venture capital for Black-owned startups doubled in 2021, according to Crunchbase, only 1.2% of all VC funding goes to Black entrepreneurs. 

“Our mentees have the passion and the ideas,” says Hudgins Lab Director Robert J. Pidduck, also an assistant professor of entrepreneurship at ODU’s Strome College of Business.

“They are eager to get something off the ground,” he says, but they often lack the specific skills necessary to launch and sustain an enterprise — as well as the professional connections that make the wheels of commerce go ’round.

Financing can be a big sticking point, though Pidduck labels a sole focus on money as a distraction. “Throwing money at anyone doesn’t solve deeper problems,” such as lack of know-how and business contacts, he says.

To tackle those issues, the Norfolk entrepreneurship research lab draws on both academic assets and community resources.

During the height of the pandemic, the lab offered virtual panels, seminars, workshops and informal gatherings focusing on make-or-break subjects such as marketing, accounting and the use of crowd funding to bypass possible racial bias in lending.

Foremost in its multipronged approach are monthly mentoring meetings to provide one-on-one guidance to entrepreneurs who have started businesses ranging from body care and bookkeeping enterprises to counseling providers and urban agriculture companies.

During these sessions, Jay O’Toole, deputy director of the lab and an assistant professor in the management department, helped Earl build a website for what would become her private investigation firm, Proof Please LLC. He also assisted her in writing a capability statement for government contracting opportunities and in applying for a $2,000 grant that she ultimately received from the Portsmouth Economic Development Authority. “He was available whenever I needed him to be,” Earl says.

Aletha Russell, another of the lab’s five mentees, received O’Toole’s help in launching her online body care products business, She’s Steamy. He guided her through building a website, obtaining a business license and registering her business with the state government.

Almost as important as such hands-on help was the lab’s assistance in connecting Earl and Russell to professional networks and to local entrepreneurs who already have been there and could share advice and lessons learned.

“You don’t need an MBA to learn these skills,” Pidduck says.

The lab, as the professor conceives it, functions as “a hub, a synergizing force” for area entrepreneurs, and he hopes it will keep growing in coming years. Last fall, O’Toole received a $15,000 grant from the Small Business Development Center to help graduate students and research assistants conduct a study into the needs of Virginia’s minority entrepreneurs. That project is furthering one of the lab’s other goals, to generate research with practical applications.

In 2020, Anil Nair, then chairman of Strome’s Department of Management, was awarded a $400,000 grant as part of the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation’s Knowledge Challenge initiative, which supports research that advances entrepreneurship and economic mobility. Nair says the Hudgins lab will use the funding to expand its outreach to middle and high school students, add more mentees, pursue local partnerships and hold conferences to spur studies in the field, all while showcasing the lab’s initiatives.

“Things don’t come that easily [to our mentees],” Nair says, but with the help of the Hudgins lab, the situation is improving for some of the mentees.

At her P.I. business, Earl now has about eight clients for whom she runs background checks, wellness checks and sometimes conducts surveillance in cases where neglect or physical, sexual, emotional or financial abuse is suspected.

For Russell, 2021 was all about putting plans in motion for She’s Steamy, but this year sales of her all-natural body oils, scrubs, butters and salts have really taken off, thanks in part to the lab, which, she says, has “been there step by step. I’ll stick with Dr. O’Toole through thick and thin.” 

 

 

MARCIA CONSTON

TCC president since 2020, Marcia Conston strives to be both a role model and a mentor.

“I wanted to be an administrator where I could make the most difference in the lives of people,” she says, and that has been her unwavering focus throughout her 30-year career in education.

As a Black woman, Conston is acutely aware of the value of social equity, which calls for fairness and justice in social policies for all people, regardless of race, gender or economic status. She holds multiple degrees from Jackson State University, Hood Theological Seminary and The University of Southern Mississippi, and is an active Alpha Kappa Alpha sister.

Before arriving in Norfolk, Conston spent two decades at North Carolina’s Central Piedmont Community College, where she fostered a culture that supported student success. At Tidewater, she has been furthering that mission by instituting programs to help students with food insecurity, partnering with Cox Communications Inc. to provide subsidized internet access for students and launching a center to connect students with community resources. That was particularly important during the pandemic, which hit just two months into her taking the helm at TCC, the state’s second-largest community college, with nearly 17,000 students.

Interacting with those students is by far Conston’s favorite part of being president. “I take as much time as I can, as often as I can,” she says, because that is a fundamental part of being “a servant leader,” a job description that requires both humility and self-confidence. Getting that combination right, Conston says, can bring powerful results.

TRACY GREGORIO

Nine years ago, Tracy Gregorio and two business partners realized the military needed better technology to protect its communications systems from cyberattacks.

G2 Ops was among the first small businesses to apply digital engineering to safeguard military communication systems, Gregorio says. The company plays a pivotal role in helping weapons and ship navigation systems communicate without cyber interference that could cause a missile to miss a target.

That’s a big responsibility, but Gregorio thrives under pressure.

“I have the ability to maintain calm in times of chaos,” she says. “We all want smooth pitches that we can easily hit but, in reality, we get curve balls, knuckle balls and fastballs, and we must make adjustments to hit the ball as it crosses the plate.”

Under Gregorio’s leadership, G2 Ops has increased its revenue from $3 million in 2013 to $23 million in 2021. The company employs 120 people, including 39 women. Before starting the company, she was vice president of information technology and enrollment management at Regent University and a computer scientist at the Naval Undersea Warfare Center in Suffolk.

Gregorio was often one of few women in the room when she started studying computer science in the 1980s, and that experience hasn’t changed for her. Leading in a male-dominated industry doesn’t intimidate her, and she coaches women on how to exude confidence.

“I was taught I could succeed at anything,” she says. “I never spent a watt of energy thinking about barriers. My goal is to stay sharp and on my game.”

LATITIA McCANE

Growing up in Alabama, Latitia McCane was inspired by the work of her father, a mechanic at Ciba Geigy Chemical Corp. (now BASF), and her uncle, an electrician at Ingalls. So, she forged her own career path in STEM and manufacturing fields. A throughline in her work, however, has been to support and encourage women and people of color.

“Because I have a background in equity and diversity, it’s just a passion of mine to be able to give more women access in the manufacturing sector,” she says.

As director of education for The Apprentice School at Newport News Shipbuilding, McCane has led the way as the institution expanded beyond offering apprenticeship programs and became a degree-granting school. Founded in 1919, The Apprentice School provides apprenticeships in 19 shipbuilding disciplines and eight advanced programs of study. 

“We were very well-known, but we were not considered a school of higher education in the state of Virginia,” she says. “Now we will be recognized as a post-secondary institution that can award degrees.” In 2023, The Apprentice School will provide associate degrees of applied science in 26 maritime technology disciplines.

In her role serving on the Virginia Apprenticeship Council — to which she was appointed by former Gov. Ralph Northam in 2019 — McCane has provided guidance on the recruitment and retention of women and people of color for apprenticeships.

“We find that inclusion comes when employers of apprentices are intentional about hiring women and people of color,” says Patricia Morrison, director of the Virginia Department of Labor and Industry’s Division of Registered Apprenticeship. “Latitia truly walks that talk.”

CECILIA HODGES

Outside of her three-decade career in banking, in which she currently manages more than 60 branches, Cecilia Hodges enjoys volunteering for community organizations and charities.

“I can see in the work that those dollars really make a difference to people,” she says.

One organization she’s involved with, Women Giving Back, is a boutique that provides free clothing to women in need. Many of its clients “are either living in homeless shelters or transitional housing or enrolled in some type of program to help them get back on their feet,” Hodges explains. To boost funding for the organization, she started the annual Women’s Empowerment Luncheon, building on the many connections she’s made in the greater Washington, D.C., region over the years. M&T Bank sponsors the event, and the proceeds go to Women Giving Back.

Organizations like Women Giving Back are important to Hodges, who recalls that, early in her career, she was often the only woman in the room. Male colleagues would often blithely suggest she take up golf because “that’s how you connect.” But, Hodges says with a laugh, “I don’t like to play golf.  … I’m not good at it.”

Hodges also mentors younger people and women in the banking industry on how to embrace themselves as they build their skills and connections. “Your authentic self is a tremendous value that you can bring to any organization,” she says.

DIANNE JEWELL

Dianne Jewell’s work as a physical therapist and administrator has not just been about helping patients but also her colleagues.

In 2011, Jewell founded the Rehab Intelligence Network, which helps rehabilitation practices use data to demonstrate the value of their services, and served as its CEO for a decade.

“Health care is awash in data of all kinds,” she says. Her goal in founding the network was to help her colleagues in the medical field sort through available data to be able to better use it for their work.

All the while, however, she was still involved with Sheltering Arms — and became its president and CEO in 2021. Jewell, who has been a physical therapist since 1989, joined Sheltering Arms in 1993 and was its director of quality management from 1998 to 1999 before becoming a professor at Virginia Commonwealth University. She later went on to serve on Sheltering Arms’ board of directors, serving from 2009 through December 2020. Jewell served as a director of clinical practice, outcomes and education for BMS Practice Solutions, and then WebPT after its acquisition of BMS. 

Jewell has also served on the boards of the PCPI Foundation, the American Physical Therapy Association and the American Association of Cardiovascular and Pulmonary Rehabilitation.

Jewell was also a faculty member at VCU for 11 years and has continued to serve adjunct roles at other universities.

“I am somebody who loves the variety of opportunities that come my way. I think that would be true, even if I wasn’t a physical therapist,” she says. “The fact that I could be a clinical practitioner, be an educator and administrator, be a CEO, be a board member — all of that fuels my interest and different experiences.”

BUFFY BAREFOOT

BUFFY BAREFOOT

President — Virginia Beach, TowneBank, Virginia Beach

Buffy Barefoot describes herself “as a pretty steady Eddie.” During her 27-year career in finance, she has worked for only two companies, and she credits her steady rise to staying in her lane, keeping her nose down and doing the best job she could. “End of the day,” she says, “everything works out.”

As Virginia Beach president for TowneBank, Barefoot manages the bank’s largest region, with almost 30% of the market share in Hampton Roads, but she also finds time to mentor employees. She tells them that they need to invest in their careers and never stop learning. She also advises them to build relationships in the community, which might mean sitting on local boards and committees, or sometimes stepping out of their comfort zones. “You’ve got to go to that chicken lunch,” she says.

Barefoot doesn’t just talk the talk. A lifelong Hampton Roads resident, she has donated her time to local institutions such as Virginia Beach’s Neptune Festival, the Virginia Aquarium and Marine Science Center and the Virginia Beach Rescue Squad. She also was a member of Lead Virginia’s 2021 class.

Perhaps ironically for a banker, Barefoot says that the best advice she ever got, which came from her father, concerned the ultimate value of money. “He told me that if money can fix a problem, it is not worth worrying about,” she says. “Money can’t buy happiness, health or family.”