Start Strong, Stay Strong: Brand & Culture for Startups
Early-stage companies often overlook brand and culture, assuming they’re concerns for later growth. In reality, neglecting these areas leads to shaky foundations for scale, misaligned teams, and inconsistent messaging.
A strong brand and a healthy culture, built early, provide clarity, cohesion, and resilience. They drive trust, efficiency, and competitive advantage—equipping start-ups to grow on solid ground.
Join H2i mentors Heather Furman (brand strategist) and Carol Shen (culture and leadership expert) on March 25th to learn essential brand and culture foundations that guide strategic planning and set teams up for early investment and beyond.
Learning Objectives:
- Define brand and culture in the context of business strategies with specific examples pertaining to healthcare.
- Understand what you have to gain (and lose) when you are (and aren’t) intentional about building and aligning brand and culture.
- Hear the learned do’s and dont’s of other successful entrepreneurs / H2i ventures.
- Share brand + culture design process and how to deploy in your teams.
Meet the Speakers
Carol Shen, founder of Start Culture Shift, helps leaders build people-centered, high-performing cultures. She advises founders/CEOs, leadership teams and boards on how to embed culture into strategy, paving the way for improved work environments and scalable growth.
Carol has spent over two decades in advisory and leadership roles including 7 years as ILPA Institute curriculum advisor and faculty, fractional Chief Learning Officer at a philanthropy advisory firm, Director of Learning & Development at CEB, now Gartner, and non-profit board and executive director roles. Both at CEB, and Mercer HR Consulting, where her career started, Carol developed her expertise in organizational effectiveness and leadership best practices. She serves as an H2i mentor guiding start-ups on building strong teams and culture.
With extensive instructional design and teaching expertise, Carol also facilitates workshop experiences and leadership offsites that have a life-long impact on improving work (and personal) relationships, teamwork and accelerating productivity. In her workshops, she brings a cross-functional lens complemented by her roles as a mother of two kids, spouse, business owner, coach, friend and mental health advocate.
Carol has a BA in Industrial/Organizational Psychology from UC Berkeley and MBA from University of Maryland’s Robert H. Smith Business School. She lives in Northern Virginia with her two children, her husband of 20 years, and her two dogs, Roxy and Skye. She is originally from California, and has also lived in Indiana, Hawaii, Thailand and Shanghai. She is an avid reader, and her top recommendations for this year are Clarity and Connection by Yung Pueblo, Likable Badass by Alison Fragale and Matriarch by Tina Knowles.
Heather is a creative and strategic leader with 20+ years of experience shaping purpose-driven brands that are designed to stand out. As the Founder and Executive Creative Director of is + at, she builds brands from concept to launch, creates digital experiences for the global stage, and designs strategies that reach and engage all levels of audience. Her work spans industries from life sciences to professional sports—fields where authenticity, trust, and human connection are essential to success.
Her passion for meaningful design started as a student at Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA) in Baltimore, in a cooperative with Johns Hopkins Hospital. Designing and spreading deeply needed health communications to the underserved community of East Baltimore sparked a fire within to pursue work that provides real value, cultivates beauty into the world, and builds toward better.
Heather has worked with Fortune 500 companies and early-stage startups as an agency leader, brand advisor, and fractional ECD. Her strategically creative core fosters her an uncanny ability to deeply understand customer needs, anticipate future trends, and remain relentlessly goal-oriented. She is a designer, listener, problem-solver, communicator, and lifelong learner.
A leader at heart, Heather has a strong track record of fostering discovery cultures, encouraging creativity, experimentation, and continuous learning. She is equally recognized for guiding strategic change management, both internally and externally, by implementing communications, technologies, and processes that support organizational goals.
Heather serves on the Board of Directors for the International Volleyball Hall of Fame and Building Brilliant Futures, and is a mentor with the University of Toronto Health Innovation Hub. Alongside her co-founder, she earned is + at a place in the Hall of Fame as the recipient of the IVHF 2024 President’s Award.
Heather has earned numerous design accolades including the Connecticut Art Directors Club, Graphic Design USA, the Advertising Club of CT, and the American Graphic Design Awards. She was awarded First Prize from the Museum Publications Design Competition and has works appearing in Ellen Lupton’s Book “Thinking with Type, a Critical Guide.”