Barbara Findlay Schenck is a marketing strategist, small business success advocate and author of books and columns that help entrepreneurs and small business leaders plan, brand, market and, when they're ready, sell their businesses to new owners.

A graduate of Oregon State University, Barbara began her career in Honolulu, where she was admissions director and writing instructor at Hawaii Loa College (now part of Hawaii Pacific University). She spent seven years as an account executive at Hawaii's largest public relations firm before joining the Peace Corps to manage a community develop program in Malaysia with her husband, Peter.

Upon their return from Southeast Asia in 1980, Barbara and her husband moved to Oregon and launched a marketing agency that grew to one of the Northwest's Top 15 agencies, with a roster of nationally known brands, by the time they sold it in 1995.

Since selling her agency, Barbara has produced the following business success aids:

• Author, Small Business Marketing Kit For Dummies
• Co-Author, Business Plans Kit For Dummies
• Co-Author, Branding for Dummies
• Author, Selling Your Business for Dummies
• Author, the BizBuySell Guide to Selling Your Small Business
• Co-writer, Edgar Award-nominated memoir Portraits of Guilt
• Lesson developer, Microsoft Small Business Relationship program
• Marketing Specialist, BusinessBreakthrough.com presented by Visa and Microsoft
• Columnist and marketing anchor, BusinessOnMain.com presented by Sprint and Microsoft
• Contributor, American Express Open Forum and other business sites
• Presenter, 10-hour creativeLIVE Powerful Business Planning online course

Today, Barbara is a nationally recognized marketing columnist and public speaker who thinks in headlines, talks in bulleted lists, and, according to BusinessWeek, addresses “real-world problems with real-world solutions.”