Brooke Avishay, Orange Blossom Special Events & Cake Walk Consulting
Brooke Avishay created Orange Blossom Special Events in 2009 after learning the ropes by working for several wedding planners in the Los Angeles area. Since then, Orange Blossom Special Events has flourished into a team of 10 planners and designers working on 80-100 weddings each year. Their work has been featured in publications including People Magazine, Martha Stewart Weddings, California Wedding Day, and Style Me Pretty among many others.
Cake Walk Consulting provides small business consulting to aspiring wedding and event planners, producers, and designers throughout the US.
AVAILABLE TO SPEAK ABOUT: Wedding and event planning, entrepreneurship, women-owned businesses.
Jordan Foley, Founder of Chow
Jordan is active duty in the Navy and served on submarines for the first six years of his career. He is now training to be a Navy attorney in the JAG Corps and finishing his final year at Georgetown Law. After watching many of his friends struggle when they chose to leave the Navy, Jordan became disenchanted with the process of finding opportunities for veterans to succeed. Combining his passion and love for cooking, he decided to start a nonprofit that helped veterans become successful in the culinary industry. In January 2020, he founded a nonprofit, Chow.
Chow gives military veterans the opportunity to own and operate food trucks, bridging the gap between a veteran leaving the service and entering the culinary industry through its signature Food Truck Training Program (FTTP). The FTTP sets up select veterans with a food truck, menu, branding, supply chain support, food safety training, and much more. These veterans operate under the Chow franchise umbrella as we provide logistic and financial support. The goal is to teach the veterans enough about the culinary industry to allow them to pursue their own future business venture, perhaps one day launching a restaurant concept of their own. Through the profits generated by these trucks, Chow pursues other initiatives supporting veterans such as services through cooking therapy classes, cookware donations, and donating meals to underserved communities.
AVAILABLE TO SPEAK ABOUT: Veteran-related causes, culinary industry, Chow’s Food Truck Training Program
Ben Ganz, President of Vego Pictures
Ben spent 7 seasons with American Idol and FOX before launching his full-service digital production and marketing company, Vego Pictures, in 2016. With his background producing digital content for Fox and American Idol, Ganz built Vego Pictures to support major networks like ABC, FOX, and Lionsgate. In the rapidly changing digital ecosphere, Vego Pictures works with networks, brands, record labels, music festivals, content creators, and artists to develop and execute cutting edge platform-specific content strategies that reach audiences with the right message on the right platform.
In the summer of 2020 during the COVID-19 pandemic, Ganz launched Virtual Graduations by VEGO to bring Hollywood-quality live-streamed virtual graduation ceremonies to high schools and colleges across the US.
Ganz currently serves as an advisor for Vessel which has launched an at-home COVID-19 antibody test.
AVAILABLE TO SPEAK ABOUT: Video production, digital strategy, live-streaming & virtual events, startups