Laurie Morgan - Principal Consultant, Working Strategy

Laurie Morgan is a seasoned marketing executive, successful publisher and start-up specialist with 20 years of management experience and a track record of launching and expanding new businesses.

Morgan's background as an experienced entrepreneur and corporate executive proves invaluable to her work helping small and medium businesses solve operational problems, plan and execute marketing efforts, and ready themselves for growth. In addition to her consulting activities, Morgan owns and publishes The Wedding & Special Event Yellow Pages (www.weddingyellow.com), which provides an efficient, affordable alternative to national magazines for small, local wedding businesses. Morgan's efforts to provide high quality marketing services to companies of all sizes were recognized by her clients in 2006 and again in 2008, when she was named "Associate of the Year" by AFWPI, the leading organization for wedding professionals.

Prior to launching her current ventures, Morgan led the development of high-profile startups for IDG, a $3B global publishing company, and 550 Digital Media Ventures, Sony's technology start-up incubator.

At IDG, Morgan was the founder and president of IDG.net, the IDG Online Network. In this role she created and oversaw the IDG Global Web Advertising Network, which provided Fortune 500 technology advertisers with centralized advertising programs spanning 55 countries, delivered more than 50% of IDG's total global online advertising revenues, and grew its own total revenues by nearly 15-fold by its third year. Morgan also oversaw the IDG.net web site, which organized content from 250+ individual IDG sites in more than 10 languages, using proprietary technologies which Morgan's team developed. As IDG's primary online spokesperson, she also led company-wide marketing, PR and business development efforts, which included negotiating a $50-million online and television partnership with CNN. Through press coverage and independent ranking organizations, IDG.net was consistently recognized as a publishing innovator and high-growth business; Morgan herself was honored by Advertising Age magazine, which named her to its list of "Women to Watch."

Prior to launching IDG.net, Morgan was a member of the founding team of IDG Marketing Services, a global sales organization that grew to more than $300 million in total revenue by its third year. As the division's senior operations executive, Morgan developed all the systems required to manage its explosive growth and global expansion, and was also responsible for pricing structures, contracts, technology and data and competitive analysis.

At Sony, Morgan was CEO of Digital Stories, an electronic publishing venture. Morgan assembled an advisory board of key publishing industry executives, acquired rights to innovative story content, assembled a team of exceptional technologists, and developed a patent-pending technology for delivering multimedia content efficiently.

Morgan holds an A.B. in Economics from Brown University and an MBA from Stanford.