Beers, a former advertising executive and undersecretary of state for public diplomacy and public affairs in the Bush Administration, has been branded as the woman who crashed through the glass ceiling in advertising. She had to find new ways to communicate in the early stages of her career.

“I learned to go right into [talking] business, because I found it fascinating and I knew a lot about their companies,” says Beers. “If someone was standing around talking about golf or fishing while I’m talking about how we can market the product, that person is not in the game.”

Beers will be the keynote speaker at The Center for Women’s 12th annual conference, “Women Educating Women: Entrepreneurial Leadership” on Feb. 19 at the Charleston Riverview Hotel. More than 200 people are expected to attend.

The conference will feature panelists in the fields of financial planning, wellness and transition planning. Beers, a former advertising executive who was once nicknamed “the most powerful woman in advertising,” will be keynote speaker.

“The theme is managing your life by using entrepreneurial principles,” says Jennet Robinson Alterman, executive director of the Center for Women. “The feedback the center gets on a regular basis is that all of us are constantly grappling with creating a better balance between our work and our personal lives. Both the panelists and our speaker will talk about how to do that.”

Although Beers says she finds women entrepreneurs extraordinarily brave, she claims a different sort of daring. “I wasn’t afraid of big companies and big executives. In a bureaucracy, you are encouraged to be safe and follow the culture of the company, and most of the time I had to violate it to make progress. If someone told me, ‘That’s not what we do here,’ I would challenge that.”

Beers has been a pioneer in almost every career step. She was the first female product manager for Uncle Ben’s Rice in Houston . She then became the first female senior vice president for J. Walter Thompson when she moved to the advertising business in Chicago in the 1970s. In 1988, she was the first woman in the 99-year history of the American Association of Advertising Agencies to be named chairman. Beers was featured on the cover of Fortune magazine in 1997 as one of the most powerful women in America .

Before Beers was named undersecretary, she was chair of J. Walter Thompson Worldwide in New York , where she started her advertising career. In addition, she was chair and CEO of Ogilvy & Mather, also in New York , from 1992 to 1997. She is the only executive in the advertising industry to have served as chair of two of the top 10 worldwide advertising agencies, and joined the State Department from 2001 to 2003, following the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11.

While she says a degree in math and physics originally made an important statement in a field formerly dominated by men, today she encourages women to master foreign languages, strategy and the art of communication.

One of the strategies she found empowering was a policy of absolute frankness and openness.

“I would encourage women entrepreneurs to speak with candor, because it saves so much time. There’s an awful lot of ‘company speak’ in corporations that slows things down,” Beers says. She often went alone to key meetings, so as not to appear to have a phalanx of people with her. “If you go alone to see a top official who will have unpleasant things to say about your company, you are more likely to get an honest response instead of the typical format. And you can build a relationship one-on-one and be engaged.”

Sarah Moïse is a staff writer for the ­Business Journal. E-mail her at smoise@crbj.com.

The Center for Women’s 12th annual conference, “Women Educating Women: Entrepreneurial Leadership” will focus on teaching women to manage their life using entrepreneurial principles. The panelists will discuss financial planning, wellness and transition planning to essentially help create a better balance between work and personal life.  

Moderator: Alyssa Rakovich

Financial planning specialist and retirement plan consultant for Smith Barney

Session: “Girls Just Want to Have Funds”

For this session, Rakovich will moderate a panel’s discussion of the five simple rules of investing, which apply to everyone no matter their stage in life or their goals. “It all starts with a basic plan,” she says. “You could be a college student saving for vacation, or your goal may be saving to buy your first home or educating children. Whatever those goals are, you need to know how the economy affects you, how mutual funds, equities, bonds, stocks and cash all have risk and rewards, and how to develop a portfolio using all these investments to balance and reduce your overall risk and increase your return.”

Rakovich says that women spend more of their life in transition, from taking time off work to care for families and children, to starting businesses. “We live longer than men, change jobs more than men, get paid less than men, and if we’re an entrepreneur, we don’t have the benefit of a company plan that puts in money for us. Women have to know the tax advantages and growth opportunities that apply to them as entrepreneurs or small business owners.”

Dr. Ann Gregorie Kulze

Owner, Just Wellness

Session: “Be Yourself Only Better—Dr. Ann’s 10 Steps”

Dr. Ann Gregorie Kulze founded Just Wellness in 2002 after practicing as a primary care physician for 15 years. She now speaks to various corporations as a wellness consultant on the “10 Steps to Permanent Vitality and Weight Loss,” and says wellness transcends every moment of people’s lives and motivates them to make changes by giving them information that can drastically improve their quality of life.

“I always want to raise our business leaders’ social consciousness by looking at wellness on a broader scale, within communities, businesses and within our country,” says Kulze.

She plans to share some shocking food culture realities and their tragic consequences. “It’s the private sector of American businesses that is footing the bill for our nation’s health crisis. Bringing the concept of wellness into their life and business model is a smart thing to do from a fiscal standpoint.”

Moderator: Claire Stuhr

Consultant

Session: “Making Successful Career Transitions and Life Changes”

Claire Stuhr teaches achievement skills that are universal, timeless and useful during times of transition in your lives such as going back to school or making a career change. You simply need to know what you want and to create a plan for how to achieve it, she says.

For this session, a panel of career experts share their approaches and advice on how to manage transitions and changes such as finding the right job, re-entering the work force, making mid-life career choices and dealing with later life employment and retirement issues

“It is so much easier to manage your time and change your habits when you have a clear plan. People spend their time differently, their money differently, and sometimes choose to be around different people who are supportive of their choices,” she says. “You are willing to sacrifice or do things differently than when you didn’t have that focus. Whether it’s investing your money or putting time into a project you’ve identified, all of a sudden those choices are so much easier. Getting that clarity is a skill.”