Solo Together Summit
So, what will we actually do here?
Check out the agenda, workshops, speakers to explore the content and programming.
This is work-in-progress and will continue to change as workshops and programming are confirmed.
Limited capacity
Agenda
Monday & Tuesday, October 26 - 27, 2027
9 AM - 5 PM
9:00 - 9:30 AM: Registration
Show up ready to dive in! Check-in to grab your name badge, program, and more.
Location: Chatham Station
9:30 - 10:00 AM: Welcome & Connection Kickstart
Kickstart your summit experience with a quick overview of what to expect, logistical notes, and then an interactive activity to help you get what you need out of the event.
Location: Chatham Station
10:00 - 10:30 AM: Break
Long enough for a coffee, a conversation, a bio break, and time to walk the two minutes to your workshop of choice.
10:30 - 11:45 AM: Morning Workshops
Attend a 75-minute interactive workshop, learn together, and apply it in the moment. Follow a track or follow your energy. Download the track guide here.
TRACKS: 🚀Foundations, 🎯Positioning, ⚙️ Operations, 🤩 Clients
MONDAY:
🚀What Business Are You Really Running? Pinpoint Your Business Model to Inform How You Work In Your Business with Jessica Lackey, Founder & CEO, Deeper Foundations
🎯Niche to Get Rich: Discovering Your Distinctive Value with Kristen Hecht, Founder & CEO, Kristen Hecht, LLC
⚙️ Building the Minimum Viable Tech Stack: Choosing Tools That Earn Their Keep with Kendra Whitney, Founder & CEO, Perago Partners
🤩Listening for Interests: An Approach for Values Based Selling with Narissa Turner, Trainer & Senior Facilitator, Habitus COOP Inc.
TUESDAY:
🚀Coming Soon
🎯Positioning Your Business to Find Your Open Lane: How to Stand Out in a Crowded Market with Stacy Eleczko, Founder & Brand Strategist, Stacy Eleczko, LLC
⚙️Building the Project Milestones and Reflection Points for a Team of One with Sora Schilling, Founder, Devoted Way
🤩Relationship Rhythms: Build A Sustainable Sales & Outreach System with Jessica Lackey, Founder & CEO, Deeper Foundations
12:00 - 1:15 PM: Lunch
Grab your boxed lunch and socialize with people over food. Or disappear to a quiet corner to rest if that’s a better fit.
Location: Chatham Station & Cary Downtown
1:15 - 1:30 PM: Energizer & Connection Building
Join in a facilitated collective energizer to spark your afternoon energy, a bit of levity, and a moment of human-to-human connection.
Location: Chatham Station
1:30 - 2:00 PM: Lightning Talk & Activity
Get inspired with a quick 15-minute Lightening Talk from an awesome human paired with a 15-minute discussion activity to make it personal.
Location: Chatham Station
2:15 - 3:30 PM: Afternoon Workshops
Attend a 75-minute interactive workshop, learn together, and apply it in the moment. Follow a track or follow your energy. Download the track guide here.
TRACKS: 🚀Foundations, 🎯Positioning, ⚙️ Operations, 🤩 Clients
MONDAY:
🚀The Critical Path: What To Do First, Second, Third and Last When Starting Your Business with Brian Tarallo, Founder & Managing Director, Lizard Brain
🎯Commit or Quit: Pressure Test and Validate Your Business Idea Before Going All In with Rachel Anderson & Raven O’Neal, Co-Founders, Startup Women NC
⚙️ The Intentional Week: Crafting Work Themes and Time-Blocks That Stick with Anna Lawton & Kevin Shane, Co-founders, noodle research + strategy
🤩Leverage Feedback to Build a Stronger Customer Experience with Jonathan Kalinowski, Founder & Director, convivial
TUESDAY:
🚀Know Your Numbers: Bookkeeping, Cash Flow, and the Story Behind Your Financials with Elizabeth Skibbe, Founder, Accountant & Financial Analyst, Acorn Accounting, LLC
🎯Mapping the Spark: Designing Your Client's Journey to "Yes" with Anna Lawton & Kevin Shane, Co-founders, noodle research + strategy
⚙️ Curating Your Digital Presence: A Strategic Approach to Making Your Public Profiles Work For You with Rachel Thompson, Founder & CEO, Daring Studios
🤩 Coming Soon
3:30 - 4 PM: Break
Long enough for a beverage, a conversation, and a bio break.
4:00 - 4:45 PM: Wise Trios Facilitated Peer Advising
Share a challenge (you’ll have time to decide onsite) and get practical help, insights and wisdom from peers.
Location: Chatham Station
4:45 - 5:00 PM: Closing & Connection Building
A closing bookend to the day with a moment of reflection, integration, and sharing.
Location: Chatham Station
MONDAY 5:30 - 7:00 PM (ish): Happy Hour & Social
A casual social hour(s).
Location: TBD
Build Solo
→
Build Connections
→
Build Together
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Build Solo → Build Connections → Build Together →
Explore the Workshops
Dive into the descriptions to learn more about what will be happening, what skills you’ll learn, and how these interactive workshops might impact your business.
Workshops are organized into four tracks: 🚀Foundations, 🎯Positioning, ⚙️ Operations, and 🤩 Clients
Download the track guide here.
Feel free to follow a track, or follow your energy.
Monday Morning Workshops
10:30 - 11:45 AM
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JESSICA LACKEY
Business advice online rarely distinguishes between creators, freelancers, agencies, and startups — it lumps them all together, and that costs you time, energy, and cash. In this session, you'll pinpoint what business model you're actually running and how that, not generic advice, should guide your focus, profitability approach, and marketing and sales methods. You'll leave with clarity on which model (or models) are at play in your business, so your decisions fit the business you have.
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KRISTEN HECHT,
Many solo business owners and consultants struggle with the idea of “niching down.” What if you choose the wrong niche? What if you want to do more than one thing? What if narrowing your focus limits future opportunities? In this interactive workshop, we’ll reframe niche development as a process of discovery and possibility rather than restriction, helping you clarify and communicate your unique value.
Participants will explore their assumptions and beliefs about finding a niche through a series of experiential opening activities. Next, they will complete an interactive “DNA-building” exercise to identify the unique experiences, relationships, and accomplishments that set them apart from others in their field. Building on these insights, participants will explore multiple directions for their solo business. By the end of the session, participants will leave with greater clarity about their distinctive value and one or two niche ideas to test through conversations, marketing, or client work.
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KENDRA WHITNEY
Quick gut check: could you name every tool in your tech stack right now, and explain why each one earns its spot? Often we can't. Our stack grows one free trial and "everyone uses this" recommendation at a time, and now it's quietly draining time, money, and focus. And still not meeting your needs.
This workshop starts with your needs, not the next shiny tool. You'll learn a simple framework for evaluating what you need, what you have, and what you're considering, so every addition is a deliberate choice instead of a reflex.
You'll leave with an honest audit of your current stack, a reusable decision framework, and when you might be at an inflection point to upgrade. No tech background required, just a willingness to get honest about what's working. -
NARISSA TURNER
Instead of relying on pressure or over-explaining your services, participants will learn how to center curiosity and uncover what clients truly need—so you can position your work as a meaningful fit.
We will explore two common challenges: trying to convince clients your service is the solution before fully understanding their situation, and taking client requests at face value without digging into what is really driving them. Through practical examples and guided exercises, participants will learn the difference between positions (what a client says they want) and interests (the underlying needs, priorities, and motivations behind those requests).
By strengthening listening and inquiry skills, participants will be better equipped to lead authentic sales conversations, avoid misaligned projects, and build client relationships rooted in trust and shared value.
Monday Afternoon Workshops
2:15 - 3:30 PM
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BRIAN TARALLO, Founder & Managing Director, Lizard Brain
Starting a service-based business means a long list of tasks and no clear sense of which ones matter now versus later. This workshop cuts through that by covering everything you need to do to get your business off the ground and organizing it into a clear timeline, so you know exactly what to tackle first, second, third, and last.
Rather than a straight lecture, we'll draw on the knowledge already in the room alongside Brian Tarallo's experience, facilitating a planning activity where you map your own launch timeline alongside other participants. You'll leave with a sequenced plan built for where your business actually stands.
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RACHEL ANDERSON & RAVEN O’NEAL, Co-Founders, Startup Women NC
Every entrepreneur has an idea they're excited about. The hard part is knowing whether it's worth investing your time, money, and energy.
In this interactive workshop, you'll pressure-test your business idea before you commit. We'll dig into what makes an offer stand out in a crowded market, how to price it, and the business model shifts that turn a good idea into a sellable one.
You won't leave with a generic framework you'll never open again. You'll leave with a practical decision-making process you can use anytime a new idea strikes, so you'll know whether it's time to commit... or quit.
Expect honest conversation, sharp questions, and a room full of entrepreneurs putting their ideas to the test alongside you. You'll leave with clarity you can act on.
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ANNA LAWTON & KEVIN SHANE
As a soloist, you are the CEO, operator, and administrator all at once. Sustaining this business-of-one over the long haul requires supportive digital structures, solid systems, and clear boundaries. In this interactive, 75-minute breakout session, noodle research + strategy will help you transition from chaotic, reactive scheduling to strategic momentum.
We’ll start by auditing your current operations to pinpoint admin and digital "ouch points". Next, using noodle’s Four Work Themes Sorter, you will map your micro-tasks into clear quadrants, separating deep creative focus from groundwork. You will then translate these themes into a customized Model Week calendar that aligns demanding tasks with your peak-energy blocks, leaving Cary with a practical Operator Manifesto and a realistic schedule designed to protect your energy, focus, and sanity.
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JONATHAN KALINOWSKI
You know there’s room to improve your business, but you aren’t quite sure where to start.
Most business owners judge their businesses against ‘gold standards’. But your customers judge your business by measuring their actual experience against their expectations. Exceed their expectations and they are delighted. Meet them and they are satisfied. Miss them and they are disappointed.
Business owners who start from their customers’ expectations fix the right things, first.
Based on the core principles of the Gap Model of Service Quality and the CX Hierarchy of Needs, this interactive workshop finds and prioritizes bottlenecks holding your business back. Whether you are a high-volume creator or a high-touch service delivery firm, you will map your own real-world customer friction onto a reusable diagnostic framework.
You will walk out of this workshop with a clear, unique-to-you problem statement, a first-draft fix to your foundational fires, and the confidence to run this research with your customers, by yourself.
Tuesday Morning Workshops
10:30 - 11:45 AM
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There are a lot of moving parts with summits and this workshop is one of those things still in motion. More details soon.
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STACY ELECZKO
You've been at this long enough to know your work is good, but the right buyers either aren't finding you, or they're finding you and still not choosing you. Those are different problems that both start in the same place.
You've tweaked your website, rewritten your bio, and tried new ways of explaining what you do. But it still doesn't land the way you expected.
The missing piece is usually knowing where you actually fit in the market your buyers are navigating, and most people are only looking at a small slice of what they're actually up against.
In this workshop, you'll build a complete picture of your real competitive landscape, including alternatives most solos never think to consider. You'll leave knowing exactly who you're up against and finally have what you need to stop guessing and start clearly explaining what you do and why people should choose you.
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SORA SCHILLING
On a team, the structure that keeps your work growing is built in. There's a kickoff where you set intentions, a midpoint check-in where you catch what's drifting, and a retrospective where you ask what actually happened. The moment you go solo, all of that quietly disappears. No one schedules your reviews, so most of us barrel from one project to the next, measuring the work by a single number and never asking what it cost us or taught us.
Drawing on the team practices she ran as an Experience Lead at IDEO, Sora walks you through a simple way to run all three on your own projects. You'll build a one-page kickoff, check-in, and retrospective you can use immediately, and you'll fill them out live on a real project you're in right now. We'll track more than revenue and deadlines: what you learned, the mindset you carried, the stress it cost, and what drained or energized you, so the next project is shaped by honest data about how you actually work.
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JESSICA LACKEY
Most outreach advice boils down to "do more" — until it burns you out. In this training, Jessica introduces Relationship Rhythms and the Sales Sacred Hour, her framework for consistent, relational outreach that builds clients, collaborations, and connections without burnout. You'll learn to structure outreach blocks, organize contacts, and shift from reactive pinging to intentional rhythms across four pillars:
Ecosystem (a network that leads to sales),
Authority (content that doesn't wear you out),
Distribution (expanding your reach without cold pitching), and
Invitation (moving people through their buyer journey without waiting or feeling salesy).
You'll leave with targets and activity levels tailored to your business and buyer.
Tuesday Afternoon Workshops
2:15 - 3:30 PM
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ELIZABETH SKIBBE
Building a successful and profitable business means getting paid for your work. It also means you have to figure out how to manage the revenue, expenses, cash flow, and financial records so you have the data to make strategic decisions, set aside money for taxes, and reap the rewards of self-employment.
In this workshop, learn the accounting terms, systems, and set-ups you need to be in control of your business finances. We'll read a P&L and other financial reports so you can learn how to use one to understand your financial health and make strategic financial decisions. Walk away with a clearer, more confident ability to make data-driven decisions for your business.
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ANNA LAWTON & KEVIN SHANE
Why do prospective clients drop off before hiring you? Solopreneurs often build elaborate, automated marketing funnels based on assumptions and polite validation rather than actual customer behavior.
In this highly interactive, 75-minute breakout session, noodle research + strategy helps you de-risk your client-acquisition pipeline and understand the unvoiced anxieties driving purchasing decisions. Using noodle's Discovery Journey Safari framework, you will map your acquisition flow across three core human phases: LEARN, FIND, and ENGAGE. You will identify administrative and emotional friction points (your business's "Ouch Points") where clients might feel confused or neglected. You will then pressure-test your map using four skeptical peer provocations and design a scrappy, zero-dollar experiment to manually fix your biggest friction point by Wednesday morning. Walk out of Cary with a validated client experience designed to build trust and increase conversions.
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RACHEL THOMPSON
Your digital presence belongs to you. Learn you how to own it so you have theconfidenceto invite others into your virtual space. Let’s craft the foundations of your digital presence with intention and minimum viable effort to make your public profiles work for you.
In this workshop, you'll audit what you have, clarify how you want to be positioned, and leave with one concrete and actionable fix. This is not about ongoing content creations, just a practical session that helps you build a curated digital presence across platforms.
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There are a lot of moving parts with summits and this workshop is one of those things still in motion. More details soon.
Meet the Speakers
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Rachel Thompson
Rachel Thompson is the founder and CEO of Daring Studios, a strategic creative studio helping founders, freelancers, and creatives build solo businesses with more clarity, confidence, and creative freedom. A Certified Professional Facilitator with 15+ years of experience, she works at the intersection of strategy, creative, and facilitation to help people move in the direction they actually want to go.
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Anna Lawton
Anna Lawton is a seasoned business anthropologist, applied ethnographer, and the CEO and co-founder of noodle research + strategy. She brings extensive experience utilizing qualitative methods and human-centered design (HCD) principles to solve complex problems for NGOs, market research agencies, and global manufacturers. Anna holds an MA in Applied Cultural Analysis from Lund University in Sweden and a first-class honors BSocSc in Social Anthropology from the University of Manchester.
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Brian Tarallo
Brian is an IAF Master Certified Professional Facilitator (M|CPF), an INIFAC Master Certified Facilitator (MCF), an INIFAC Certified Virtual Facilitator (CVF), an IFVP Master Visual Practitioner (MVP), and an MBTI Master Practitioner. He holds an MBA from Arizona State University and a Certificate in Facilitation from the University of Virginia. In 2023, Brian was awarded an IAF Facilitation Impact Award.
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Elizabeth Skibbe
With an MBA and a decade of corporate finance experience, Elizabeth Skibbe brings a rigorous approach to small business accounting. She holds QuickBooks ProAdvisor certification and a Xero partnership, and as founder of Acorn Accounting, emphasizes tailored, one-on-one service. Her firm supports setup, cleanup, forecasting, and ongoing management, guided by her belief in empowering business owners to make data-driven decisions.
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Jessica Lackey
Jessica Lackey is the founder of Deeper Foundations, a consulting and training firm that turns experts into expert business owners through implementing stronger business foundations. She brings a unique blend of corporate expertise and soulful business building, including an MBA from Harvard Business School, a coaching certification from iPEC, and experience at McKinsey & Company and Nike, Inc.
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Jonathan Kalinowski
Jonathan Kalinowski runs convivial, a hands-on practice helping locally owned businesses serve their customers better. After a decade working in operations and service design at Fortune 500s and global consultancies, he chose to bring that work to local, human-scaled businesses. His approach starts with the customer's experience and traces it back to root causes, usually in the business's machinery.
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Kendra Whitney
Kendra Whitney is the founder of Perago Partners. She works with founders whose businesses have outgrown the informal systems that built them: the team is capable, the work is there, but the way things get coordinated, communicated, and decided hasn't kept up, and everything runs a little harder than it should. Kendra builds the operating structure that closes that gap, so tools support the system instead of standing in for one.
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Kevin Shane
Kevin Shane is an accomplished qualitative researcher, ideation leader, and partner at noodle research + strategy. With over 20 years of experience translating insights into global design realities, he has led impactful projects across North America, Asia, and Africa. Kevin has designed critical malnutrition diagnostic toolkits, managed slum sanitation initiatives, developed innovative training programs, and much more throughout his career.
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Kristen Hecht
Kristen Hecht is a leadership development consultant, coach, and facilitator with a niche in fellowship programs. She helps nonprofits, foundations, associations, and universities to design and deliver cohort-based leadership experiences. Her clients include Columbia University, Georgetown University, Habitat for Humanity, and the United Nations Association. She is an active contributor to the Impact Fellowships Network, a global community of practice for fellowship program practitioners.
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Narissa Turner
Narissa Turner is a Trainer and Senior Facilitator at Habitus Incorporated–a worker owned cooperative. At Habitus, Narissa has facilitated complex multi-stakeholder dialogues, designed training programs on collaborative negotiation and stakeholder engagement, and supports individuals and organizations in navigating difficult conversations. Her approach prioritizes trust-building, equitable resource allocation, and sustainable commitment to collective impact.
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Rachel Anderson
Rachel Anderson is a leadership coach, entrepreneur, and Co-Founder of Startup Women NC, a statewide network dedicated to helping women build businesses that thrive. With more than 15 years of experience leading marketing, operations, and business growth, she equips founders with practical strategies, meaningful connections, and the support they need to grow sustainable businesses while fostering stronger entrepreneurial communities across North Carolina.
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Raven O'Neal
Raven O’Neal is a media founder, serial entrepreneur, and business advisor decoding how women’s power shapes markets. Through Savvy Gal Media and Startup Women NC, she’s helped guide more than 300 founders and over $100 million in business growth. Her work sits at the intersection of women, power, and economic influence, helping women move smarter inside systems that weren’t built for them.
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Sora Schilling
SORA SURYA NO LLC/ DEVOTED WAY
Sora Schilling is a writer, coach, and former Experience Lead at IDEO, where she ran the team practices that kept complex projects honest from kickoff through retrospective. Based in Raleigh, she now helps self-employed people build businesses that are sustainable for the human running them, not just profitable on paper. She is endlessly curious about the inner mechanics of how we work, sell, and grow on our own.
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Stacy Eleczko
Stacy Eleczko is a positioning strategist, keynote speaker, and messaging architect who's worked with 30+ B2B brands. She specializes in one question: what actually makes us different? Instead of guessing or hiring an agency built for a company ten times their size, she digs into the brand, audience, and market research most businesses skip, and helps founders finally say why they're the obvious choice. Because if they can't answer that, how is anyone else supposed to? She's built her practice around giving solos and small teams the kind of strategy that used to require an enterprise-sized budget and team.
FAQs
What’s the format of the Solo Together Summit?
1
Solo Together Summit is a two-day, in-person business conference. This event is designed to be interactive and centered around the people in the room, not the people on stage. We are gathering to work on our solo businesses together. This is not a passive sit-and-listen conference. There are no panels and no long keynotes. Expect facilitated sessions, working time, peer conversation, and space to think and connect.
Do I have to attend both days?
2
It’s highly recommended, but you’re an adult with a messy, complex life. Your ticket covers both days and there are no single-day tickets available.
Will sessions be recorded? Or streamed?
3
Nope, this summit is centered around the people in the room and is intentionally NOT a hybrid or virtual event.
Are the workshops concurrent? How many can I expect to attend?
Yes, workshops are concurrent. There will be 4 breakout sessions for interactive workshops over the two days (Monday AM, Monday PM, Tuesday AM, Tuesday PM) so you’ll have a chance to go to 4 separate workshops plus the plenary programming. Each breakout has 3-4 concurrent workshops to choose from and you’ll have information in advance to choose which is right for where you are in business. You will not need to register in advance for a specific workshop and can choose on the day.
The workshops are organized into four tracks: 🚀Foundations, 🎯Positioning, ⚙️ Operations, and 🤩 Clients. You can download the track guide here. Feel free to follow a track or follow your energy.
4
What should I bring?
5
Something to write with and something to write on. Business cards if you use them. An open mind, a sense of curiosity, a real question you've been sitting with, and comfortable shoes. Likely a layer based on the weather.
Ready to work on your solo business together?
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