From professional development opportunities to contracting set asides specifically for women owned businesses, there are abundant resources in the Washington DC area available to women professionals and women owned businesses. 

The WIT WBO 2023 event series will explore the various resources available and examine how women business owners have leveraged these resources to launch and grow their businesses. In this third event of the series you will learn how to grow your woman owned small business by leveraging contract set asides and resources designed to help new and small businesses thrive. 

Arti Varanasi founded Advancing Synergy to develop innovations that empower individuals to lead healthier and longer lives. She will discuss how she funds her operations primarily through grants. Jeanine Callahan is an executive leader who applies organization development methodologies to achieve goals for corporate growth and profitability, positive employee experience, and customer delivery. Jeanine has held many executive positions, including Chief Growth Officer and Executive Consultant for Eagle Ray, a woman owned small business. Jeanine will discuss business development techniques that will help you develop a pipeline of opportunities and win contracts. Dana, the membership committee co-chair for Small and Emerging Contractors Advisory Forum (SECAF) and the Executive Women’s Network (EWN), will discuss how you can employ SECAF resources to help you new, emerging, or small business scale and succeed in the government contracting space. She will also be sharing insights from the EWN.

Whether you are looking to launch your own business or expand opportunities for your current organization, this event will give you the keys to success.

This event is FREE to WIT Members and Non-members!

This event recording is available to view through the Member Portal.

Your WBO Sharing and Learning Partners

Jeanine Callahan
Senior Vice President, MasterPeace Solutions

Jeanine Callahan is an executive leader who applies organization development methodologies to achieve goals for corporate growth and profitability, positive employee experience, and customer delivery. She leverages deep managerial, technical, and business development experience supporting defense, intelligence, and homeland security customers to mature and enhance small businesses to achieve strategic outcomes. Jeanine's key competencies encompass various areas, including business operations, capacity building, change management, program/portfolio management, leadership development, operational effectiveness, organization development, and strategic solutioning. Her well-rounded skill set enables her to navigate challenges, optimize processes, and drive positive change within organizations.

In her role as a Senior Vice President at MasterPeace Solutions, Jeanine leads a mission-focused technology services organization, streamlining talent acquisition and placement processes while strengthening alignment between Technology Services and the MasterPeace LaunchPad portfolio companies. She manages all aspects of a sizable team, ensuring recruitment and contract placement for highly skilled software and systems engineers to meet corporate growth and retention objectives.

During her tenure as Vice President Corporate Operations at Plus3 IT Systems, Jeanine played a pivotal role in achieving corporate growth objectives by implementing key business functions, improving processes, and aligning them with evolving corporate goals. She spearheaded the integration of robust business development operations, resulting in significant contract wins and the expansion of the cloud engineering subcontractor base.

As Chief Growth Officer and Executive Consultant at Eagle Ray, Jeanine facilitated growth, expanded sales, and implemented effective marketing and engagement strategies. She successfully diversified the customer base, established strong partner relationships, and developed team processes and tools to drive growth through winning proposals.

Jeanine holds an MS in Technology Management from George Mason University and a BSFS in Economics from Georgetown University. She has obtained certifications in Organization Development, ISO 9001 Lead Auditing, Program Management Professional (PMP), Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL v3), Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe) Agilist, and Amazon Web Services (AWS) Cloud Practitioner.

Dr. Arti Varanasi
Founder and CEO/President, Advancing Synergy, LLC

As President and CEO of Advancing Synergy, LLC, Dr. Arti Patel Varanasi is passionate about developing innovations that empower all individuals to lead healthier and longer lives.

She has over 25 years combined experience in cancer research, advocacy, capacity building, health care, public health and project management. Dr. Varanasi’s ultimate goal is to work across sectors to “advance synergy” and develop tools and technologies that help to build sustainable health capacity in resource limited settings.

Dr. Varanasi received her PhD from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and MPH from the Johns Hopkins University. She is a graduate of the National Science Foundation funded ACTiVATE® program for women technology entrepreneurs.

Dana Fisher
Business Development Partner, Cordia

Dana is a strategic business development advisor driving revenue and connecting clients and colleagues.  She has over 35 years of business development, sales and marketing experience in the accounting and legal industries.  Her expertise includes strategic business plan development, partner and referral source management, overall business and sales opportunity development, networking, coaching, pipeline management and event planning and management.

Dana leads business development efforts for Cordia.   Cordia provides outsourced accounting, business advisory, technology consulting, technical accounting, and recruiting & staffing services to mid-sized organizations in government contracting, non-profit, and commercial industries. Our clients have a strong relationship with Cordia due to our integrity, knowledge, and commitment to manage their needs through the entire lifecycle of their business.  We excel at listening and presenting the most cost-effective solution for each client.

Dana also is Co-Chair of the SECAF Membership Committee and Founder of the Executive Women’s Network (EWN).  She is very involved in the community and serves on the Executive Leadership Team for the Heroines of March of Dimes Program and is also involved with the Make A Wish Foundation.  She also serves on the steering committees for the NVTC CFO Awards and CFO Series Events, the NVCC Government Contracting Awards and the Association for Corporate Growth Awards.

Kara Dickey
Co-Founder and CEO, SmartCom Solutions, Inc., and Chair, Women Business Owners Committee

For over two decades Kara has helped SmartCom Solutions’ clients gain a competitive advantage through technical innovations and reduce costs through efficiencies and modernization. Kara brings a breadth and depth of experience in employing automation to solve organizations’ mission critical business needs. These efforts typically required full scale business process reengineering, as well as custom application development. Kara has extensive experience managing and participating in all phases of the system development lifecycle. Kara has diverse application and industry experience including Mortgage Origination, Mortgage Services, Mortgage Securitization, Mutual Fund Processing, Financial Management and Accounting, Supply Chain Management, and Claims Processing. In her capacity as Chief Executive Officer, Kara is also responsible for setting the direction of the company, business development, marketing, and obtaining/managing resources. Kara holds a B.S. in Decision Sciences (computer science concentration) from George University and an MBA (finance concentration) from Marymount University.