The BOSS Network Blog

Founder and CEO of Bold & Becoming and Boss Babes, Alana Matthews is an entrepreneur, commercial real estate professional, and J.D. candidate dedicated to empowering women through leadership, professional development, and wealth-building education. With a career spanning real estate, compliance, and legal services, she is committed to creating opportunities that inspire women to lead boldly, build generational wealth, and create lasting impact in their communities. At 23 years old, I am learning that purpose is not just about what you build; it is also about who you become in the process. Being recognized as an honoree at Regina Stevenson’s Raining Pearls Awards Night allowed me to reflect on that truth. The evening was not simply about celebrating 25 Black women entrepreneurs. It was about recognizing the woman behind the work. Regina reminded us that a pearl begins with an irritant, a wound that the oyster cannot remove. Instead, layer by layer, it transforms what caused pain in...

Alicia T. Bowens is an AI Execution Architect and founder of ATB Innovative Solutions. With 20+ years in enterprise project management, she helps businesses stop automating chaos and start building systems that actually scale. Learn more at atbinnovative.com. If you've ever thought “everyone else gets AI but me” — read this first. Here's the truth that many course sellers don't share: you're not behind. Most businesses are still dabbling. The people posting AI wins didn't post their 47 failed attempts first. But being early doesn't mean you should rush out and buy tools. Here's why. AI won't fix chaos. It amplifies it. Drop AI on top of a broken process, and you don't get a fixed process. You get a broken process running faster. Leads still fall through. Follow-up still fires late, or never. Your team still double-checks everything the AI does, until they quietly stop using it and go back to manual. That's not an AI problem. It's a process p...

Cassandra Hill is a Master Life Coach, Best-Selling Author, and Speaker. Her passion is empowering Black women to live life on their terms by up-leveling their emotional, spiritual, and mental well-being. Cassandra is passionate about spreading self-love as one of the solutions to eradicate the domestic violence epidemic among Black women. Blogs are one of the most powerful marketing tools you can utilize in your business. They’re great at getting potential customers into your sales funnel, and they help your website to rank better on search engines like Google. Let’s break up the effectiveness of blogs into two separate categories, specifically SEO and content marketing. SEO SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. This means that your website is optimized to be found by users on search engines. This can be done through a variety of methods. Keywords and phrases can be incorporated into your website and blog copy. Typically, these keywords consist of words or phrases people on the ...

Alicia T. Bowens is an AI Execution Architect and founder of ATB Innovative Solutions. With 20+ years in enterprise project management, she helps businesses stop automating chaos and start building systems that actually scale. Learn more at atbinnovative.com. I've sat in a lot of war rooms. Rooms where a company just spent six figures on a new system: ERP, CRM, workflow automation, you name it, and six months later, nobody was using it. The help desk tickets were piling up. The consultants were gone. And leadership was quietly wondering if they'd been sold something that didn't work. The technology worked fine. That was never the problem. After two decades managing enterprise-level projects and Agile transformations, I can tell you the failure pattern is almost always the same: organizations invest in tools before they've fixed the processes those tools are supposed to support. Then they're surprised when the tool doesn't perform. AI is making this worse. Not b...

Briantria Smocks is a devoted researcher, visionary strategist, producer, and gifted educator. She is Editor-in-Chief of Levi&Toonk and CEO of Smocks Media Group (SMG). Also a member of Delta Sigma Theta, Bri enjoys lounging with her family, reading a juicy book, and getting lost in music. With all the learning courses and modules available for business professionals today, it can become overwhelming and daunting to sort through which options may be the best fit. I found it to be a tedious process once I became an entrepreneur in 2019. As it was not my first career choice, I sought out any and every space that offered complimentary sessions, prime networking, group feedback, sample coursework, you name it. About a year into my business, I had begun to realize how crucial it was (and still is) to seek out resources that were in alignment with either where I was at the time or where I was headed. Thankfully, that was around the same time that I'd heard of the Invest In Progress ...

Alana Iman Matthews is a real estate professional, visionary community founder, and future attorney redefining modern leadership. Through authenticity, consistency, and service, she is building a legacy of empowerment, proving that purpose-driven women don't choose one lane; they create their own.  People often ask how I've been able to navigate multiple career paths as a 23-year-old, from real estate to founding a thriving community, stepping into leadership roles, and now pursuing a legal career. They assume there must be a secret strategy behind it all. There is. First and foremost, God. But my dynamic duo is authenticity, paired with consistency. I've learned that opportunities don't come from trying to be the loudest person in the room. They come from becoming someone people trust. In real estate, clients aren't simply buying or selling property; they're placing some of the biggest financial decisions of their lives in your hands. That trust isn't buil...