With compassion and grace, Stacey’s dynamic speaking style connects with her audience, leaving a deep impact that inspires and empowers them to take the next steps in discovering and pushing their purpose with key strategies to effectively build their business.
Award-winning entrepreneur, author, speaker, and business coach, Stacey Banks-Houston has helped hundreds of entrepreneurs start and grow successful businesses. Her mission is to help women push their passion beyond mere hobby, hustle hard to build their business and enjoy the fruits of their harvest.
Inspired by witnessing her father’s own entrepreneurial spirit, when other children her age were selling lemonade, Stacey was harvesting seashells from her backyard, painting them and selling them for profit. She later owned a teen business and in her early twenties, co-owned a women’s accessory shop with her father. After earning her MBA in Marketing, Stacey started Occasions Event Designers, an event management company and co-founded with her father Business Builders Unlimited, a shared office space and business support service center, which closed only after twenty successful years of providing support services to attorneys, health care agencies, insurance companies, and educational facilities.
She’s devoted the last 13 years to motivating entrepreneurs to break down the barriers between having a hobby and transforming it into a harvest. She served for 6 years as the Director of the Cleveland Small Business Development Center, which was recognized as the top performing SBDC in the state of Ohio in 2007. In 2010, she won the Small Business Administration (SBA) Minority Small Business Champion Award. Stacey served as the Director of the Women’s Business Centre in Tampa, Florida at the Helen Gordon Davis Center for Women, where she passionately energized women small business owners to stop waiting for the right time and instead “push their passion” and position themselves for the next level.
As CEO (Chief Entrepreneur Officer) of RSVP Consultants, a consulting and coaching firm for small businesses, Stacey continues to push her own passion for entrepreneurship through speaking engagements, private consulting and coaching sessions, as well as hosting seminars and workshops for entrepreneurs, including youth and 50+ adults exploring the possibilities of small business ownership.
Author of Seasons of Wholiness: Inspirations for the Seasons in a Woman’s Life and The Passion Plan, Journaling Your Business from Passion to Position to Profit, Stacey is an often-requested motivational speaker because she meets entrepreneurs where they are. With grace, humor and wit she helps them develop a strategic approach to moving forward with actions that result in a thriving business.