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Damien L. Halliburton & Ventry Media Spotlight NAWBO LA, Women in Business and President LaVada English

Damien L. Halliburton & Ventry Media Spotlight NAWBO LA, Women in Business and President LaVada English — featured illustration

Ventry Media captures the NAWBO Los Angeles 2026 Business Conference — Perseverance. Power. Presence. — celebrating women entrepreneurs, business leadership, and AI in Los Angeles. · Watch on YouTube ↗

Celebrating Women in Business, AI and Leadership at NAWBO Los Angeles

Los Angeles continues to be one of the country's most dynamic environments for entrepreneurship, innovation, technology, media, and relationship-driven business development. One of the things I have learned throughout my career is that business growth rarely happens in isolation. It happens when people get into the right rooms, build authentic relationships, share resources, and discover opportunities to collaborate.

That is exactly why organizations such as the National Association of Women Business Owners Los Angeles — NAWBO-LA — are so important to the Southern California business ecosystem. On September 24, 2026, women entrepreneurs, executives, community leaders, and business professionals gathered at The Garland in North Hollywood for NAWBO-LA's 2026 Business Conference, themed “Perseverance. Power. Presence.” The conference was designed around leadership, connection, business growth, and creating stronger opportunities for women business owners across Los Angeles.

For me, the event represented much more than another business conference. It reflected something I believe deeply at Ventry Group: successful organizations are built through the intersection of people, relationships, processes, technology, and opportunity. And we were proud to help document part of that story through Ventry Media.

Ventry Media Captures an Important Moment for Los Angeles Business

Through Ventry Media, our goal is to help organizations tell their stories visually and strategically. Ventry Media provides digital marketing, branding, web development, photography, and video production services designed to help businesses strengthen their digital presence and communicate their value to the marketplace.

For the NAWBO-LA event, Ventry Media had the opportunity to capture video that helps preserve and amplify the energy surrounding this important gathering of women entrepreneurs and business leaders. You can watch the event video below — a YouTube Short produced by the Ventry Media team.

Video is particularly important today because an event should not end when the doors close. A single event can become a video, a YouTube Short, an Instagram Reel, a LinkedIn post, a blog article, a newsletter, a social-media campaign, and an ongoing digital record of the people and ideas represented in the room. That is the type of media ecosystem businesses should increasingly think about building. For Ventry, the objective isn't simply to create content — it is to create digital assets that can continue working long after an event has concluded.

Congratulations to LaVada English, President of NAWBO Los Angeles

I also want to extend a personal and professional congratulations to LaVada English, MBA, on becoming President of NAWBO Los Angeles. NAWBO-LA's official 2026 Board of Directors identifies LaVada English as President of the Los Angeles chapter. The organization describes its board as women business owners who volunteer their experience to advocate for and advance women entrepreneurs throughout the Los Angeles region.

LaVada's work extends beyond NAWBO. She is also a co-founder of the National Association of Women in AI, where her work includes conversations surrounding artificial intelligence, leadership, workforce transformation, business readiness, and helping women understand how rapidly evolving technologies can be incorporated into their organizations.

That intersection is especially meaningful to me because it represents where business is headed. We need more leaders who understand that adopting artificial intelligence does not mean eliminating the human element from business. It means determining where technology can reduce repetitive work, strengthen communication, improve customer response, organize information, and allow people to spend more of their time doing the things humans do particularly well: building trust, exercising judgment, creating relationships, and leading. LaVada has publicly described the challenge as understanding where AI can make work easier while recognizing where human experience, judgment, and approval still need to remain in control. That is an important conversation for every business owner.

Why Organizations Like NAWBO-LA Matter

NAWBO has a long-standing mission centered around women business owners, entrepreneurship, business growth, and advocacy. The Los Angeles chapter describes itself as part of a network representing America's women-owned businesses and provides opportunities for members to participate in education, networking, and business development.

Those relationships matter. A business owner can have the best website, technology, or service in the world and still struggle if nobody knows they exist. Relationships create visibility. Visibility creates conversations. Conversations create opportunities. And opportunities, when properly followed up, can become partnerships, customers, contracts, referrals, and long-term business relationships.

That is why I continue to encourage entrepreneurs to become involved with professional associations rather than treating networking as an occasional activity. The value is not simply collecting business cards. The real value comes from showing up consistently, learning what people are building, understanding what challenges organizations are facing, and looking for ways to create mutual value.

The Connection Between Business Relationships and Artificial Intelligence

At Ventry Group, one of our core areas of focus is helping companies bring together people, process, technology, and artificial intelligence. The current Ventry platform is designed around creating revenue infrastructure that can centralize inbound opportunities, engage prospects, qualify leads, automate follow-up, and help businesses convert more conversations into appointments and business opportunities.

This is directly relevant to networking events. Imagine attending an event and meeting 25 prospective customers or strategic partners. The traditional process might be: collect business cards, put them in a bag, return to the office, get busy, and remember three weeks later that you never followed up. That is precisely where technology can help.

A modern process could look like this: meet the prospect, capture the information, enter the contact into the CRM, document the conversation, use AI to research the organization, draft a personalized follow-up, send an approved email or SMS, create a follow-up task, schedule the next conversation, and measure the opportunity. The technology doesn't replace the relationship — it helps protect the relationship from being lost because someone became too busy to follow up. That distinction is important.

Women Business Owners and the Next Generation of AI

Artificial intelligence presents enormous opportunities, but the business conversation needs to move beyond simply asking, “Have you tried ChatGPT?” The more important questions are: Where can AI improve customer service? Where are leads falling through the cracks? Where can administrative work be automated? How can employees become more productive? How can organizations improve recruiting and onboarding? How can business owners better understand their data? How can technology support business development? How can companies implement AI responsibly while maintaining human oversight?

Those are business questions before they are technology questions. Organizations such as NAWBO-LA and the National Association of Women in AI can play an important role in helping business owners become educated enough to make informed decisions about these technologies.

Entrepreneurship is still about people. Technology changes. Platforms change. Algorithms change. But business remains remarkably human. People want to work with people they trust. They want relationships with businesses that understand their needs. They want organizations that communicate clearly. And they want leaders who show up. That is what made the NAWBO-LA gathering meaningful — the conference brought business owners together around ideas of perseverance, leadership, and presence, not merely transactions.

A Special Congratulations to LaVada English — and What Comes Next

LaVada, congratulations on this next chapter of leadership with NAWBO Los Angeles. Leadership positions create an opportunity not simply to hold a title, but to create access for other people. I look forward to seeing how your work with NAWBO-LA, women entrepreneurs, and the AI community continues to develop. Organizations across Los Angeles need leaders willing to connect technology with people, education with execution, and opportunity with community. That work matters.

At Ventry Group, our work continues to center around helping businesses grow through executive recruiting, business strategy, fractional consulting, AI implementation, automation, revenue systems, and strategic business development. Our philosophy is straightforward: People + Process + Technology + AI. The objective is not to implement technology simply because technology exists. The objective is to create a better business — whether that means recruiting the right leader, improving a sales process, installing an AI voice agent, automating follow-up, creating stronger digital content through Ventry Media, or simply getting the right people into the same room and starting a conversation.

That is why events like the NAWBO-LA Business Conference matter. They create the room. The relationships created afterward determine what happens next. To learn more about Ventry Group and its work in AI-powered business infrastructure, consulting, and growth, visit ventrygroup.com. To learn more about Ventry Media for video production, digital marketing, branding, and digital-content development, visit ventrymedia.co. And to learn more about NAWBO Los Angeles and its work supporting women business owners across Los Angeles, visit nawbo-la.org.

DH
Damien L Halliburton
Head of Revenue Infrastructure, Ventry Group

Damien L Halliburton leads revenue infrastructure strategy at Ventry Group, helping service businesses deploy AI employees that capture, convert, and retain customers around the clock. He has advised hundreds of multi-location brands on AI-driven communication systems.