Entrepreneurship
(continued)
McPherson, Berry & Associates
offers performance and talent management for a variety of non-profit organizations, companies, and universities,
and has contracts with federal, state,
and local governments. “We train people
to be effective managers,” Berry says.
“We also provide consulting, coaching,
on-site, instructor-led courses, [and]
e-learning.”
opment, from Clemson University in
South Carolina, and became an operations manager at IBM. There, she led a
team that generated over $50 million in
annual revenues—an achievement that
earned her an IBM Leadership Award.
She started her company in September 2000 while still with IBM.
Initially called Get POISED, its focus
was workforce development for the
underemployed. She was inspired in
part by her experiences as a Welfare to
Learning to Lead
Work program trainer, and in part by
Reading was one of Berry’s favorite
her passion for working with youth. She
pastimes growing up, and it was natural
found her niche by offering leadership
for her to pass along her love for learnand life skills training to adolescents and
ing. At school, she shunned sports
those undergoing life
transitions,teaching
both groups the skills
necessary to enable
them to enter the
workforce.
Berry spent vacation days, evenings,
and weekends trying to
get the business off the
ground. Get POISED
was incorporated in
2003, but juggling a
full-time job and running a business soon
proved too challenging
for Berry. She quit her
Berry attending the Charleston Business Journal’s “Forty under 40” awards
job in 2005 to focus
ceremony.
her efforts on expanding the business. It was a decision she
for books and excelled academically.
wrestled with. “There was some fear at
“I love to learn and I am often taking
first, but you can’t be successful without
workshops and