Building a Speaker Platform and Community: Bobbie Carlton on Innovation Women

Scott Ward, host of the HabitStack Podcast, interviews Bobbie Carlton, founder of Innovation Women, Innovation Nights, and Carlton PR & Marketing. Bobbie runs a unique business structure where her entire team works for Carlton PR & Marketing and treats her other ventures as clients — with Innovation Women being her largest and “dream job” client.

They dive into:

How Bobbie built Innovation Women after realizing she’d spent 20 years getting executives on stage but had never supported a woman or person of color

The challenge of building a double-sided marketplace — and how she solved the chicken-and-egg problem with calls for speakers

Why she crowdfunded the first 200 speaker profiles before the platform even existed

Her mission to reach 10,000 speakers to shift gender equity in the speaking world

The five Cs of public speaking: competence, confidence, connections, credibility, and compensation

Why live events and in-person connection will matter even more as AI blurs what’s real online

How events became the strongest marketing channel for her PR agency

The importance of SOPs when transitioning from leading individuals to leading leaders

Hiring people better than yourself — and why it matters

🎧 Listen to the HabitStack Podcast:

Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/55pgGeW...

Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/sg/podcast...

Buzzsprout Website: https://podcast.habitstack.com

🧠 Learn More About HabitStack:

https://habitstack.com