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Meet Dana Grinnell of prettysmart+badass in Downtown

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Today we’d like to introduce you to Dana Grinnell.

Dana, please share your story with us. How did you get to where you are today?
I spent 17 years in a male-dominated industry with the largest healthcare company in the world.

I managed to achieve great success. I delivered hundreds of millions in sales, innovated cutting edge initiatives, and found my way into a management role, the only woman in my division.

I had to dig deep to channel my inner badass every. single.day without much support or development resources specific to women. I founded prettysmart+badass to help other women shorten the curve to success.

I also observed men struggling to navigate the women’s movement with confidence. I believe that we need men and am excited to help men achieve success in this new world as well.

Ultimately, my hope is to help others go after it, professionally & personally, with a robust set of skills & a tidal wave of supporters behind them.

Great, so let’s dig a little deeper into the story – has it been an easy path overall and if not, what were the challenges you’ve had to overcome?
The reception has been very positive and all of the events we have hosted have gone incredibly well with great feedback. The biggest challenge has been our revenue model. Our goal is to keep events approachable, financially, for women and men in all stages of their career. This is very difficult to do, considering the enormous costs associated with putting on high-quality events and bringing in top caliber experts. We have also learned that our scope, by prioritizing live events, is small. So, we are looking to improve our ability to scale, so we can touch more people. We will be releasing a book by the end of Q3, followed by a signature webinar series with tracks for women newer in their careers, more established businesswomen, and men. We are also exploring models that will help us scale live events into additional cities.

What else should our readers know?
At PS+B, we provide education and community to help women exploit their inner badass professionally, physically, and in life. We launched March 14th with a bang at the Denver Art Museum Dior exhibit. Since then we have hosted education events including: Invest Like a Badass, The No BS Guide to Navigating a Wine List, Mothering Your Inner Badass, and we have to Protect Your Badass, Lead Like a Badass, and Raising Badass Kids scheduled. We also hosted community building parties including our launch at the Dior exhibit and a Kentucky Derby party with a game night and a badass ski movie planned for Q3 and Q4.

We currently specialize in live education events and networking parties. However, we are putting our content into a book followed by a signature webinar series which will afford our community members outside of Denver the ability to access the information. We believe in the power of human interaction so we will continue hosting live events and plan to bring them to additional cities. We are also looking at a permanent space for our members to enjoy, a place to come to hone skills, acquire knowledge, and fellow badass friends.

We are known for our real and no BS approach. We address the whole human, covering topics that are not “typical” women’s organization topics. For example, we are planning an ed event on sex, as well as bouldering, no topic is off limits. We believe that men are crucial to our success, so we include men in many of our events, and we are working on content specific to men.

We are most proud of the quality and diversity of our community. The most amazing, kind, brilliant, generous, fun women and men have been drawn to our events and have found us on social media. It is truly a badass group of people from all different backgrounds, in all different stages of their careers, with a wide range of goals and aspirations.

We love to collaborate with other women’s organizations, small businesses, women-owned companies, etc. The more we can bond together with others who are doing amazing work the stronger and better we will all become!

What moment in your career do you look back most fondly on?
I thought I had many proud moments during my tenure in corporate America, but looking back I’m not sure how authentically “me” those proud moments were. They were associated with achieving certain sales quotas or income goals, landing a new customer, implementing a new initiative. Accolades from senior leaders and bosses were important to me and being one of few women “surviving” and finding success in the business seemed to feed my ego enough to stay in it. Until one day, when I had a major epiphany “there have to be other jobs out there that give ME back more of a return on MY investment of ME”. The ahh ha moment was big enough I could not ignore it and it prompted me into months of self-exploration.

I made the very difficult decision to leave a large and sturdy bubble I had built around myself over 17 years with a lot of upward opportunities. And, that is my proudest moment. Making the tough decision to seek a career that fuels me, to pave a road less traveled, to face many unknowns, to find a better way of life for me. I was and still am uncertain what the future will hold, which is scary, but I do believe this journey is exactly where I am supposed to be to better myself, my life, to feed my soul, and to help others in a really big and meaningful way.

Contact Info:


Image Credit:
Kendra Smith – Kendra Smith Photography, Kalen Acquisto – Kalen Jesse Photography, Katie Charles – Catherine Barkley Photography

Getting in touch: VoyageDenver is built on recommendations from the community; it’s how we uncover hidden gems, so if you know someone who deserves recognition please let us know here.

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