Our first conference! Held at the Mockingbird in Marion on a Saturday during a blizzard! We didn’t have a logo and Kendra and Rina were the only speakers. They talked about what it meant to authentically represent yourself online and in person with tips and tricks in each area. Afterall, YOU are the key to your business success.

The community loved what they had done and Kendra and Rina knew they needed to further support their community and decided that if they were going to support this new community by reinvigorating the new year’s goals and resolutions, then they had to also support them in the fourth quarter and really help to motivate and inspire again to push those goals across the finish line!

Again held at the Mockingbird in Marion, this time on Thursday, October 4th. They learned a thing or 100 about conferences and decided to include deeper connection opportunities, a panel of other successful women entrepreneurs, and that if they wanted to keep the ticket price reasonable they would need sponsors!

What Kendra and Rina also learned from the previous two conferences was that Thursday conferences will be attended and they should absolutely continue to be held on a Thursday because while You Conferences is drastically different from other conferences,

That time a 12 year old made over 100 women cry! Kendra’s daughter Alex shared her perspective over lunch and knocked it out of the park. She spoke of courage and how she and the rest of her generation see how we talk about ourselves and our friends and every word hit every woman right in the feels.

Hello global pandemic! The world shut down one week before the conference and just like every other business out there You Conferences had to learn real quick what an online conference would look and feel like. It was a learning curve like none other, but the team pulled it off and it was still a huge success!

Grace was what we needed during the entire year of 2020, but Kendra and Rina knew that the conference was still very much needed. Having only 4 months of prep between conferences, the team fully embodied thriving under pressure.

This was also the last year of holding two conferences, because that’s a lot of damn work, and they knew there needed to be more consistent connection throughout the year.

A hybrid conference! It was the first in person event of the year and for the first time in conference history, in person tickets sold out in Early Bird!! The community needed to feel connected in a way that just was not possible online. Still wanting to stay connected with the women who joined from all over the country, the decision was made to continue to live stream each session.

Similar to filling the gap in with a small business conference, there was a gap in business academies across the country. There needed to be an academy that was geared towards the needs of women business owners that was created by women business owners. The You Academy launched in April 2021. Still covering topics such as branding, marketing, cash flow, and the like, the Academy also encourages women to understand themselves in deeper ways, like how their hormones affect their drive, motivation, and sales. How past experiences affect their confidence, relationship with money as well as customers, and every other aspect of their lives and business. Business is personal and the Academy is a holistic program based on that understanding.

No one really wants to have a conference t-shirt with the conference logo, but they do want a shirt that says Perfection is overrated! None of us are perfect, if we were, the world would be a boring place. This is when we learned logo placement matters and it needs to accommodate a variety of….. Sizes.

There were many firsts at this conference. Two of Kendra and Rina’s favorites: The breakout session where a physical therapist discussed the importance of pelvic floor health and when the keynote shared that she told a former boss to “Eat a bag of dicks!”

This conference is they knew they would always be the community where women could have the conversations and share the stories that matter to them, to their businesses, and be able to show up unapologetically as their most authentic selves.