Kathleen Carroll

Kathleen Carroll is the President of The Branding Clinic, a company she founded in 2000. She helps some of the most prominent household brands reposition themselves to achieve double-digit growth. Some of her clients include: Abbott, American Express, Avon, Bath & Body Works, Benjamin Moore, Cendant, Domino Foods, The GAP, Glaxo-Smith Kline, Johnson & Johnson, Playtex, Samsung, Stryker and Unilever. Her fingerprints are on many recognized marketing successes including Unilever’s Simple skincare, Citibank’s U-Promise credit card program. Benjamin Moore’s Aura Paint and Procter & Gamble’s Puritan (Crisco now) cooking oil.

She is often hired as a branding, positioning, new product development and insights expert by other consultancies and agencies. She gained her experience in top-notch marketing and consulting organizations including Procter & Gamble, Marketing Corporation of America and CNBC.com where she held senior marketing, consulting and CMO roles.

She graduated from Cornell University’s accelerated, advanced dual-degree program with a BS in Food and Retail Marketing and MBA in Marketing. She is an annual judge for the HSMAI Advertising Awards for the hotel, travel and tourism industry. She is an officer in the highly prestigious President’s Council of Cornell Women and actively lends her marketing expertise to several not-for-profit organizations.

Kerry Fitzgerald

Kerry Fitzgerald is a Financial Advisor at Morgan Stanley. She thoroughly enjoys the opportunity to support women in their pursuit of sound and disciplined financial planning by applying her extensive professional and personal experience with her passion for investing.

Kerry has over twenty years of financial services experience within both USA and non-USA based financial services corporations including Credit Suisse, Merrill Lynch, Canadian Imperial Bank of Canada, and Mitsubishi Bank. She began her career at Price Waterhouse where she was a consultant.

Kerry earned an MBA from Pace University as well as a BA from Binghamton University and spent time studying overseas in the United Kingdom at Brunel University.

Kerry is married with two daughters and is a very active member of the Woman’s Club of Ridgewood, which is dedicated to enriching the lives of women and children in need within the greater Ridgewood community by supporting local charities. In her spare time Kerry enjoys tennis, golf, travel and being an enthusiastic spectator at her children’s sporting and entertainment events.

Investments and services offered through Morgan Stanley Smith Barney LLC. Member SIPC

Claire M. S. Meade

Claire M. S. Meade is a Vice President, Financial Planning Specialist at Morgan Stanley where she holds the Family Wealth Advisor designation. Her practice focuses on financial-planning based investment management – working with clients to develop personalized financial plans by helping them to set specific goals and objectives to plan for retirement, to make investment decisions, and to manage their insurance needs. Her clients are busy people – working together, Claire worries about their retirement so that they don’t have to.

She hosts a popular quarterly educational luncheon called Moms at Work: News You Need to Know for her clients and associates. She has served on the boards of non-profits such as Let’s Help Kids, the elementary school’s PTA, and Bite Me Cancer as well as the for-profit Success in the City. Claire currently serves on the board of WWLI.org (Washington Women’s Leadership Initiative). She has presented workshops for the workforce development program at Northern Virginia Family Service Training Futures and was a founding member of the ground-breaking group W.E. L.E.A.D (Women Engaged in Leadership, Education, and Action in Democracy).

She received her Bachelor of Arts degree in Rhetoric and Communication Studies from the University of Virginia as well as a Masters of Education. Married to her college sweetheart, she is a life-long resident of Northern Virginia where they reside with their two sons and their dog, Savannah.

Kelly Watson

Kelly Watson is the National Service Group Leader of KPMG’s Risk Consulting Practice, supervising a team of more than 7800 partners and professionals who provide the risk and compliance insights organizations need to protect themselves and grow. Prior to accepting this position, Kelly was for six years the first woman ever to serve as the Office Managing Partner of the firm’s Short Hills Office, which houses more than 1100 people who serve the state’s largest companies and mid-market clients.

Risk Consulting professionals help organizations transform risk and regulatory compliance into competitive advantage. They identify how businesses’ corporate strategies can expose them to various forms of risk – ranging from failure to adapt to fast-changing regulations to susceptibility to cybercrime – and help them avoid those pitfalls while maximizing value.

Kelly has 27 years of global auditing and advisory services experience serving the pharmaceutical, biotechnology and industrial product industries, and also has experience in acquisitions and regulatory and compliance issues. She previously served on KPMG’s Legal, Risk and Compliance committee, and in October 2013 was elected by her fellow partners for a five-year term on the KPMG Board of Directors, where she sits on the Professional Practice Ethics and Compliance and Nominating committees.

She is the global lead partner on a number of priority accounts and serves as an account executive on two SEC audit clients. Her international experience includes more than two years in the KPMG Czech Republic member firm’s Prague office.  During her time abroad, Kelly served on several global accounts and helped establish and develop the Central and Eastern European practice training program.

A fierce advocate for developing leaders in the firm, the accounting profession, and the community, Kelly initiated KPMG’s relationship with the United Nations Millennium Village Program, a global development initiative designed to alleviate poverty and promote gender equality in Africa. She is actively involved in KPMG’s Family for Literacy/First Book program, whose mission is to combat childhood illiteracy, and serves on the Essex County (NJ) Advisory Board of First Book. Kelly is also a member of the Liberty Science Center’s Women’s Leadership Council. She chairs the New Jersey Women’s “Network-to-Network” organization, a consortium of women leaders from some of New Jersey’s most prestigious companies that provides a forum for professional women to share best practices and form mutually beneficial business relationships. Most recently, she has joined Advisory Council of The New Agenda, which is devoted to providing “a voice for all women.”

Kelly’s leadership has been widely recognized. In 2014, she was honored by the Executive Women of New Jersey as an influential policy maker in the State, and by New Jersey Business magazine as a top managing partner. In 2010, Diversity Inc. named her among their “Women Worth Watching,” and she received the Helen Keller “Women Who Make a Difference” and the Boy Scouts’ “Woman of the Year” awards. In 2008, she was Garden State Woman magazine’s “Woman of the Year”; in 2007, she was named one of the Best 50 Women in Business by NJBIZ and won the YWCA Tribute to Women in Business Award.

Kelly received a BS from Fordham University in public accounting and finance. She is a certified public accountant in New York and New Jersey and a member of the New York Society of Certified Public Accountants and the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants. Kelly and her husband Derek Watson have two children, Victoria, 16, and William, 14.