Lawyer Ashley Kirkwood hangs up a new shingle to assist Black women in business

Former trial lawyer Ashley Kirkwood is preparing to welcome 1,000 Black women entrepreneurs and professionals to Black Women Sell Live® 2026, a three-day sales and business conference taking place Sept. 25–27 at the Omni Hotel in Atlanta.

Kirkwood left a $300,000 partner-track legal career to become an entrepreneur and founded the sales training company Speak Your Way To Cash® in 2018. A Northwestern Law graduate, she previously worked as a federal trial attorney and at Kirkland & Ellis.

Her first Speak Your Way To Cash Live event attracted just 10 attendees. Eight years later, the company has earned a spot on the Inc. 5000 list of America’s fastest-growing private companies for three consecutive years, and its signature conference has sold tickets to 1,000 attendees nationwide.

Speak Your Way To Cash trains credentialed experts, licensed professionals and service-based entrepreneurs to secure corporate contracts, sell their expertise and generate revenue through public speaking.

This year’s Black Women Sell Live conference carries the theme “Fight Back” and will focus on practical strategies attendees can use to build stronger, more profitable businesses.

The speaker lineup includes billionaire entrepreneur Dr. Trisha Bailey, founder of Bailey’s Medical Equipment and Supplies. Bailey will discuss how she expanded her company into an enterprise spanning medical equipment, pharmacy and real estate.

Adesuwa Okunbo Rhodes, founder and managing partner of Aruwa Capital Management, will travel from Lagos, Nigeria, to teach attendees how to build companies that appeal to investors. She will also discuss investment opportunities in Nigeria.

Other scheduled speakers include Linda Clemons, sales trainer and CEO of Sisterpreneur® Inc.; Yash Daftary, founder and CEO of Commas; and Piper McCoy, senior director of marketing communications at HighLevel.

The conference will also connect today’s entrepreneurs with the legacies of two pioneering Black businesswomen.

Journalist and author A’Lelia Bundles, the great-great-granddaughter of Madam C.J. Walker, will examine the marketing and sales strategies Walker used to build her business empire. Bundles will be joined by Liza Mickens, the great-great-granddaughter of Maggie Lena Walker, who became the first Black woman to charter a bank in the United States in 1903.

Together, they will explore how Black women built, marketed, financed and sold their businesses generations ago—and how those principles can still be applied today.

Black Women Sell Live is designed as a working conference, with programming scheduled from 9 a.m. to 9 p.m. and opportunities for attendees to ask speakers questions directly. On the final day, participants will spend 90 minutes creating one-page sales, marketing and operations plans they can begin implementing during the fourth quarter.

The event will also feature a performance by BET’s “Sunday Best” season seven winner Geoffrey Golden, a message from Andrea Clayton and the debut of Kirkwood’s curated eyewear collection, See Your Way To Cash™.

Sign-language interpretation will be available throughout the ADA-accessible conference. Sponsors are also helping fund $199 “Justice Tickets” to make attendance more affordable.

“Black women have never had a problem building. We have a problem getting funded, getting bought from, and getting paid what the work is worth,” Kirkwood said. “So we brought in the women who solved it—a woman who scaled a medical supply company into an empire, a woman in Lagos writing checks to founders, and the descendants of two women who did it in 1903 without the right to vote. Nobody is coming to save us. We are going to sell our way out.”

Black Women Sell Live® 2026 will take place Sept. 25–27 at the Omni Hotel in Atlanta. Tickets start at $199, and fewer than 80 seats remained available at the time of the announcement. For tickets and waiting-list information, visit BlackWomenSellEvent.com.