for the rooms where real things get said

Emily is available for keynotes, conference sessions, panels, and workshops.

Her talks draw on lived experience with bipolar disorder & ADHD, 11 years as Yelp's Small Business Expert, and a decade of honest conversation with entrepreneurs and leaders. She speaks from both sides of the story: the expert and the patient, the builder and the one who broke down.

Entrepreneurship

& Resilience

Success, Rewritten: Building a Business That Doesn’t Break You

For: Entrepreneurship conferences, industry associations, leadership events

Most success stories are told backward. The pivot looks intentional, the hard part looks shorter than it was, and the version of the speaker on stage is not the version who lived through it. This keynote is not that.

Emily spent 11 years at Yelp as their Small Business Expert and host of Behind the Review, working with thousands of entrepreneurs on reputation, customer experience, and digital presence. In 2018 she was hospitalized for a manic episode and diagnosed with bipolar disorder. In November 2025 she was laid off. She used both as the foundation for what she's building now.

This keynote is honest about what breaking down looks like. It offers practical frameworks for building a business that holds up under pressure. And it redefines resilience in a way that has nothing to do with grinding through it.

Key takeaways:

A working definition of resilience drawn from lived experience, not theory
Three foundational systems every business needs to hold up under pressure: reputation, customer experience, and digital presence
The early signs your business is succeeding while you are depleting
Why mental health and business strategy are not separate conversations
How to rewrite your definition of success when the one you inherited stops working

Available as a keynote or extended workshop session.

Conference Sessions

& Workshops:

For: Small business conferences, chambers of commerce, industry trade events, entrepreneurship summits

A three-part workshop series for small business owners who want systems, not inspiration. Each session stands alone or they can be taught as a full track.

Build to Be series

Covers customer experience: mapping the full journey from discovery through after, auditing every touchpoint, and building the kind of experience that earns advocates instead of just transactions.

Built to Be Loved

Covers reputation management and online reviews: why they drive revenue, how to respond to every type of feedback, how to generate authentic reviews without making it awkward, and how to build a system that compounds over time.

Built to Be Reviewed

Covers digital presence: translating your in-person business identity to your online footprint, the monthly batch method for creating 30 days of content in one to five hours, and building genuine connection through content.

Built to Be Found

Healthcare

and clinical audienes

On the Other Side of the Gurney: What Emergency Healthcare Providers Get Right (and Why It Matters)

For: Healthcare and nursing conferences, emergency medicine events, first responder organizations

This session offers something rare: a first-person account of experiencing a mental health crisis, an ED visit, and the transition to inpatient psychiatric care. Emily shares what patients may be thinking, fearing, and needing in moments when they cannot clearly express it.

Built for frontline responders, this session acknowledges the realities of today's ED: Overcrowding. Safety concerns. Compassion fatigue. Limited resources. It explores why brief moments of empathy carry weight long after a patient is discharged, and why the words said in the worst moments often determine whether someone asks for help again.