Professorial Lecturer of Management; Director, Center For Entrepreneurial Excellence
George Washington University School of Business
Kathy Korman Frey is a professorial lecturer of management and the director of the Center For Entrepreneurial Excellence at the George Washington University School of Business (GWSB). She helped develop and currently teaches Women’s Entrepreneurial Leadership (WEL) at GWSB. WEL is the winner of a USASBE Excellence in Entrepreneurship Education Award. Frey is the founder of the edtech social venture The Hot Mommas Project, the world’s largest women’s case study library providing access to diverse, teachable, scalable role models and mentors from around the world. The venture’s Women’s Leadership Academies and group coaching workshops have directly reached women from 138 countries, increasing self-efficacy of participants 21 percent in a half-hour workshop and up to 300 percent in a 10-module session. The Hot Mommas Project is the winner of a Coleman Foundation Case Award and is included in the mission of the GWSB Center for Entrepreneurial Excellence. Women’s Entrepreneurial Leadership and the Hot Mommas Project have been featured in the media including the Washington Post Magazine, NPR, Working Mother, Forbes, BBC and TIME.
Frey served as an analyst and in management for the competitive analysis/merger and acquisition firm MMI (later acquired by Citigate) advising major multinational corporations on strategic business and acquisition decisions. She went on to serve as the chief operating officer of the National Council on the Aging Development Corporation. There, she was part of the senior management team raising $8 million in strategic venture and SBIR funding, and managing ventures for the aging and health markets (including BenefitsCheckUp.org, a benefits-matching service providing a 200-to-1 ROI). Frey later founded Vision Forward, a strategic and operational planning consulting firm working with senior executives teams. An early innovator in the flex-work place, the firm’s consultants were highly skilled part-time consultants (the original “Hot Mommas” case studies). Clients include AARP, Discovery Communications, the U.S. Department of Justice, and the U.S. Federal Drug Administration.
Frey is a former two-term board member of the Alzheimer’s Association, National Capital Area, and has served on the boards of Mixology and United Women in Business. She is a Washington Business Journal Women Who Means Business awardee, winner of the DC National Association of Women Business Owner’s Woman of Distinction award, a Virginia Women of Influence Awardee, and the recipient of a Most Influential Faculty Award at GW from the Office of Innovation and Entrepreneurship. Frey is the creator of the NFIB Young Entrepreneur Foundation curriculum taught to 40,000 junior high and high schoolers each year, and served as special advisor to the U.S. Small Business Administration on its free women’s entrepreneurship learning platform. Frey earned her B.A. in English from the University of Virginia and her MBA from Harvard Business School.