Women Of Influence

After she graduated from high school, Debbie Penzone came to Columbus with one dream in mind: to work at a Penzone hair salon. Of course she wasn't yet Debbie Penzone at that point, she was just a girl from Springfield with a talent for making people look beautiful. When she expressed her dream to one of her teachers at cosmetology school, though, she was surprised at the reaction she got. “Debbie, you’re a small-town girl," Penzone remembered her teacher telling her...

Columbus Business First reporter Hayleigh Colombo got her haircut last weekend. She went to Great Clips. And when she returned to the office Tuesday morning and mentioned the cut, she was quick to defend that choice. Why? Because she feels women are unfairly expected to pay high prices for salon haircuts from a stylist they loyally visit every six weeks...

Like many out there, News & Brews has taken a post-holiday hiatus from beer. In recognition of this, the first episode of 2020 is tackling the topic of dry January (Dry-uary?) by cracking open a sixer of Nanny State, the 0.5% alcohol-by-volume offering from Canal Winchester’s BrewDog USA...

You might know Donna James from her time at Columbus financial and insurance giant Nationwide. Or maybe you or someone you know have been a member of the African American Leadership Academy, which she co-founded. Or perhaps you've served on a board with her, or worked for a nonprofit she's helped shepherd, or encountered her through her advisory work at her firm, Lardon & Associates. In short, James has a long resume and a lot of demands on her time...

Donna James was doing work she loved, leading several financial services subsidiaries of Columbus-based insurance giant Nationwide. Then she had a stroke. "It was what the doctors would technically call a mini-stroke, but it didn't feel mini to me," James said during a recent taping of our Women of Influence podcast. James, who was only 49 at the time of her stroke, recovered, but she saw the medical scare as a reason to think about what the shape of her career should look like...

Brian Higgins and his Arch City Development are busy all over Columbus. The Youngstown native thought Central Ohio would be a temporary stop when he landed at Ohio State University. Then he thought the cubicle life would be his fate. But none of those things were meant to be for the effusive Higgins, who has since become one of the pioneers into distressed city neighborhoods...

On the podcast today is David Harrison, president of Columbus State Community College, who recently joined Columbus Business First in studio to talk about what led him into higher education leadership. Since 2010, Harrison has been at the helm of Columbus State, an institution with about 45,000 students. And like his students, Harrison has taken a relatively nontraditional path into the education world. Harrison was the first person in his family to go to college...

Don't use the word "spin" when talking to Hinda Mitchell about her career in public relations. "That's … the sort of thing that really just gets my ire up," Mitchell, president of Inspire PR Group, said during a recent taping of our Women of Influence podcast. In Mitchell's view, her line of work does involve working with reporters to share stories, but she can't "snap (her) fingers" and make a negative story go away, nor can she immediately place any positive one...

Hinda Mitchell's entire staff is female, a not incredibly uncommon fact in the female-dominated public relations industry. But the Inspire PR Group founder has a simple reason for the reason her firm is currently entirely staffed by women: it's data, not just demographics. The women who Mitchell has hired on the people who've performed the best on what her team dramatically refers to as "the test...

Jonathan Moody is set for a new phase in life. As a child, he watched his Curt Moody found architecture firm Moody Nolan Inc., which has subsequently grown to become Columbus' busiest architectural firm, according to Columbus Business First research, with almost $66 million in architectural billings in 2018. Two-thirds of those billings came from Central Ohio, where the firm has 143 employees...