About Renee

Renee Lewis · CEO and President

Renee Lewis

Renee has 25 years of building successful businesses and business units. She loves to work with inspired business leaders who know they can do more with what they have but haven't quite figured out the formula for getting past a certain point. She has always leveraged her love of software engineering principles (that is, designing for efficiency and effectiveness) and getting things done through others (that is, managing difficult teams). Her most interesting adventures were turning around and then selling a technology company to Cerner (wonderful experience, tough ride), and creating a viable and productive team after a four-company merger targeting eLearning markets.

Having been directly involved in eight separate startup companies, Renee has a particular love for entrepreneurship and creating thriving businesses. Today, she instructs in the year-long UMBC ACTiVATE program, an entrepreneurship program for technical and scientific women who want to build a business around a patented concept or another proprietary idea. She loves to travel abroad in support women entrepreneurship programs. In partnership with Path Forward Int'l, she is developing new methods to adapt entrepreneurial concepts to large business needs leading into a "intrepreneurial" model driven by innovation, accountability and ownership.

Renee is a business owner, speaker, wife and mom. In her "spare" time, she is actively involved in her community supporting local civic and school associations. She spends time with her family at Deep Creek Lake whenever possible consuming every business book recommended to her (please send your favorite book referrals).

Here’s a little more details about Renee and details of her past travels.

Renee has held a variety of roles and responsibilities in a number of industries. Here is a list of key roles she has held during the last 25 years of her career:

  • Pensare Group, Founder, CEO and Managing Partner. Business advisory services.
  • Galt Associates, CEO & President. Technology, data and services for drug safety research. Sold to Cerner.
  • QED Solutions, COO. Technology, data and services for drug safety research support.
  • KnowledgePlanet (now Minza), CTO. eLearning and employee performance tools and services.
  • Saba Software, Director East Coast Consulting Services. eLearning tools and services.
  • Wellspring Resources (now Citi-Street). Director Health and Welfare Systems. Technology tools and services for benefits administration.
  • Bell Atlantic (now Verizon). Director Software Engineering for billing and customer care.
  • First Annapolis Consulting. CIO. Management consulting for banking and payment services.
  • Booz, Allen & Hamilton. Practice Leader for distributed database tools and implementation.

Renee stays actively involved in the both the professional and local communities aligned with her interests:

  • George Washington Graduate School of Education and Human Development Advisory Board
  • Women in Technology – Mentor/Protégé program
  • Women in Bio - The Entrepreneur and Executive Programs committee
  • Multinational Development of Women in Technology (MDWIT) – technology committee
  • Wood Acres Citizen’s Association (WACA). Past president.
  • Wood Acres Elementary School PTA. Past co-President, Communications Committee

Her educational background and certifications include:

  • BS from Pennsylvania State University
  • MS from George Washington University
  • Certified Facilitator - Achievement Seminars International (ASI)
  • Certified Quality Process Advisor - Total Quality Institute (TQI)
  • Certified Facilitator – Attribute Index

Some other interesting aspects about Renee include:

  • August 2008, she completed a trip with Meridian International to support entrepreneurship for women in South Africa discussing “Operating an Effective Business” in three different cities across the country. The work in South Africa was nominated for a Stevie Award (although we didn’t win the award, we still had a great time in NYC).
  • February 2009, she completed a trip with Vital Voices to support the Qatari Business Women’s forum in Doha, Qatar presenting a half day seminar “Operational Effectiveness: Looking at Your Business from the Inside Out”
  • She is developing new entrepreneurial methods of stimulating and maintaining innovative thinking for large organization through a partnership with Path Forward International. These clever approaches take into account the need to innovate to thrive while recognizing the difficulty of sustaining innovative behaviors over time.
  • She is a frequent speaker on topics such as Mastering Relationship Selling, How to Outperform the Competition, Developing Action Strategies that Work, Leveraging Your “Other” Sales Force – Customer, The Impact of Social Media and Semantic Web on Your Business.