Meet the Boss Bee.
Samantha Hartman
Founder & Principal Consultant
Samantha grew up between the sandy shores of Indian Rocks Beach, Florida and the city lights of Philadelphia, surrounded by successful healthcare and finance leaders. Spending her childhood watching the adults in her life work tirelessly building successful businesses, she spent her early adulthood believing that finance was her path to success and to a beautiful life of her own.
Eager to begin her career the determined, young east-coaster headed to Albuquerque, New Mexico to work for Bill Richardson in the fundraising office of his presidential campaign. That summer, Samantha worked long days and most weekends but she had fun. Planning events, engaging with donors, and making sales was fun. Work could be fun. Samantha fell in love with marketing for the first time; planting the initial seed of doubt about her life in finance.
During her time with the Apella Group, the Boss Bee realized her aptitude for business development. Samantha knew, despite her love of math and her “finance path”, she could not spend her entire career chained to a desk, behind Excel spreadsheets; she belonged in marketing and sales. Once that discovery had been made, there was no going back. In 2011, Samantha declared a new major and set her eyes on a new goal, she no longer dreamed of the days that she would sit in a beautiful, corner office with a sign on the door reading, “Chief Financial Officer”, the sign on the door of her dream office now read, “Chief Marketing Officer”.
Shortly after graduating with her Bachelor’s degree from West Chester University, Samantha began working at Unisys Corporation, where she spent 3 years managing global strategic events and field marketing initiatives for multiple enterprise IT solutions.
The Boss Bee flew to Tampa, Florida in 2015 to work for Alvarez & Marsal building the events department for their Shared Services organization. In this role, Samantha implemented many new event management processes, including developing an event tracking system in Salesforce to efficiently process and manage events for each of their 18 business units as well as global corporate events.
From there, the Boss Bee took some “Bee-time” to begin building Boss Bee Branding and travel across Latin America.
Upon her return from Ecuador, Boss Bee Branding landed their first contract to develop the brand and create innovative marketing programs to increase the marketshare of a construction management software. There, the Boss Bee led a full rebrand of their signature ERP Solution, and the rebrand was more than just a name change, it included the design of a new logo, new website, new videos, all new exhibit displays, marketing collateral, and training materials.
Once this rebrand was complete, the Boss Bee headed to Australia for love… and adventure.
Samantha returned to the states in April of 2018, joining Sri Trang USA to develop the new Ventyv brand and to grow the Sri Trang Group’s presence in the North American market.
Moving to Jacksonville in early 2019, Boss Bee Branding found its next challenge, artificial intelligence. Samantha took on NLP Logix & Scribe Fusion in January 2019, lead all branding efforts and marketing initiatives for NLP Logix, Scribe Fusion, Logix Solutions, Paypensity, Matchpoint, and WiseEyeAI.
Eager to build a network in her new town, Samantha thought of ways to get involved in the community and after finding the perfect philanthropic group to work with, Chemo Noir, a social group was next.
Being a lifetime “Dog Person”, Samantha began to notice just how many other “Dog People” there were in Jacksonville. She also noticed that even with this large population of “Dog People”, along with the amount of wonderful organizations dedicated to dogs and “Dog People”, other than the dog parks in town there was nothing really connecting them all. Then, one day sitting at BrewHound with her pup, it hit her, the Boss Bee had the opportunity to not only build a network for herself in this new city but to connect and empower a community “Jax Dog People” and founded Jax Dog Life. Samantha then grew the “Florida Dog Life” brand to Tampa.