Our Team

Jen has a broad background consisting of business, non-profit and public-sector experience. She has provided customized solutions for clients from a wide range of industries including advanced and emerging technology, professional services, food manufacturing, and education.  She has experience in strategy, innovation, business development, sales, marketing, program management, training and education.  She is the lead consultant for Align and uses her multi-disciplinary skills to design growth initiatives that are both forward-leaning, yet practical. 

Experience

Jen is a builder. Prior to starting Align, she led the Commonwealth’s Office of Transformation & Innovation; she helped establish a first-of-its-kind education start-up; and she established a center and launched innovative inclusion programs at a local 2-year technical college.  She experienced first-hand the grittiness of launching something new in a highly competitive, mature market. Colleagues and clients appreciate Jen’s ability to think creatively and strategically, while staying focused and persistent on ‘getting it done.’  Jen also teaches graduate courses and provides training in entrepreneurship, innovation, negotiations, and leadership.  

Vision

Understanding the power of money to ‘move things’, Jen established Align as a way to empower purpose-oriented business leaders to achieve meaningful ambitions by improving the profitability of their business. By applying principles from social enterprise, the lean startup movement, design thinking, servant leadership and organizational development, she has produced user-centered experiences to refresh, renew and grow businesses, while fueling a bigger vision.  

Background

Jen has a Master’s in Business from Penn State University, and numerous experiences in non-profit leadership.  She is a wife and mother, and grew up among the dairy farms of Northeastern PA. Her blue-collar upbringing taught her the importance of hard work, persistence and creative problem solving.

Click here to read a short blog post about how her prior work led her to start Align.

Colette has a broad base of business experience.  She understands tailoring products and services to the end user, having managed an $80MM advertising budget as a media supervisor.  She excels in a B2B environment after serving as a marketing and sales leader in a Fortune 100 consumer product company. Colette leveraged her business background to purchase and operate a small recycling business, having no industry experience.  By forging strategic relationships, she built her business into a regional powerhouse and a top auto battery recycler in Pennsylvania.  Between her business ventures, she found time to lead the incorporation and board formation of a non-profit, now over 10 years old.  Her passion is to help businesses grow in a meaningful, purposeful way. 

Background

Having sold her company, Colette moved to a Corporate Faculty position at Harrisburg University where she supports students interested in business.  The wide range of topics she teaches matches her experience and includes courses in Entrepreneurship, Marketing, and Communications.

Colette holds a BA in Communications from Southern Methodist University and an MBA from the University of Tennessee.  She grew up in South Dakota and now calls Hershey, PA her home. 

Joel’s formal training is in communication and user experience, and his passion for technology began in college. Thus, he truly has technology and communication woven into his DNA. Joel is a tech enthusiast, and firmly believes it exists to make lives better without more complexity or stress. This creed has led him on occasion to develop highly effective, low-tech solutions for clients who don’t need more complicated options.

Background

Joel has worked in B2B marketing communications and digital communications. He was a principal in his own agency, held elected office, and now teaches as a tenured professor. His previous roles as an entrepreneur, employee, public official, and academic allow him to see a client’s organization from many different perspectives.

Joel has a bachelor’s degrees in science and humanities from Lebanon Valley College, a master’s degree in Communication from Temple University, and a Ph.D. from Texas Tech University. One thing a Ph.D. should teach you is that you cannot possibly know everything, even in the niche of a discipline.

He lives a charmed 3-2-1 lifestyle. Three kids. Two daughters who recently graduated from Philadelphia colleges and one son at Elizabethtown College. Two dogs, a sheep-a-doodle and labradoodle, and one spouse, Laura. Make sure you read the “…3-2-1...” sentence before you read “one spouse”, or it looks a little peculiar!

Andy has been working with learning technologies since the laser disc and Bernoulli drive!  He has broad experience in a variety of learning design, consulting and educational technology roles spanning training, K-12 education and higher education. Andy shares his knowledge of instructional design and educational technology best practices and emerging strategies as a speaker and author - "Alternate Reality Games: Gamification for Performance", 2016.

Andy personifies the definition of internal entrepreneur. He’s a utility player with multiple talents beyond his specialty in immersive technologies. He created the role of Marketing Coordinator at a small business college to begin his career and has been blazing a trail of innovative strategy and detailed execution ever since. Andy was the first team member in the multimedia department of what is now a regional media production powerhouse.  He launched innovative learning methods at a large regional healthcare provider.  Then he built a Learning Technologies graduate program at a higher-ed start upnd went on to develop an innovative social enterprise for workforce development of entry-level IT workers.

He has a creative portfolio of wide-ranging, innovative learning solutions and delivery methods. Learning games, simulations, blended learning and live online learning are specific areas of Andy's emerging learning technologies experience. 

Background

Andy has a Bachelor's Degree in Marketing and Business Administration and a Master's Degree in Instructional Technology.  He transitioned his career from marketing to instructional technology with the goal of making education and training a more dynamic and engaging experience.

Amber Swanick

Superpowers: Adapting the right attitude for every situation, and being tenacious regardless of failure or success.  

Interests: When she isn't busy with work, Amber spends her time traveling to see family, crate-digging at record stores, and embroidering artwork to sell on Etsy.

Amber has always been interested in small businesses and community service. In the past, she created and facilitated clubs and activities for kids and teens at her local public library. She also had internships with a small upholstery business, and with small museums in York, PA (her hometown). Amber believes in collecting diverse life experiences, and using her skills to better the world.

Currently completing her degree in Business with a concentration in Family Business and Entrepreneurship at Elizabethtown College, Amber pursues opportunities that embrace the college's "Educate for Service" motto, and reflect her own service ethic. She recently partnered with two other students to develop a business plan and prototype for a volunteer-recruitment platform. Amber will continue to develop the business, as well as work on developing a research project on trans-generational entrepreneurship. Another of Amber's interests is art. She’s double-minoring in Graphic Design and Arts Administration. So far, at Align and in the rest of her life, she has found her investigation of creativity and business to be very relevant. Diversity of thought and experience stimulates innovation and problem-solving, and that's what Amber brings to the table at Align.

Having grown up in an entrepreneurial family, Malia has witnessed and worked alongside her family as they built businesses from the ground up in an array of industries that range from tourism and hospitality to the wedding industry. This environment taught her the importance of hard work, true grit and value of the people around you.

Currently pursuing dual degrees in international business and digital communications at Lebanon Valley College, Malia works to combine her love for culture and the world with the practically of business, design, and communications. Though still in college, Malia has proved to be quite savvy when it comes to business and design. Besides being a part-time graphic designer in her free time, she is currently a Board of Trustee for Lebanon Valley College and is an avid traveler who has traveled to 11 countries. As a member of Gen Z, she offers a young, fresh, unique perspective that focuses on the interdependencies of business, politics, culture, and technology. 

Tim White, financial analyst and business advisor, has spent over a decade guiding small businesses to achieve stability and growth. He’s a visionary, and has a knack for speaking with business owners and leaders to pinpoint what, exactly, they love about running their business, and help them carve out a practical plan to move forward. Not only does he uncover the strategy for future success, Tim uses his experience and love of spreadsheets to detail how to get there. What tools can business owners use to streamline operations? How will they know if their efforts are working? What can they afford to invest in? What steps should they take first, second, and third to achieve their goals? All this and more are part of Tim’s leadership for small business clients. He forms his advice through very technical financial insights he can rattle off in a minute or less: budgeting, modeling and forecasting, financial analytics, data collection, process alignment, reporting, custom dashboards, and feasibility studies. The good news is you don’t have to speak finance jargon to work with Tim, because he tailors his analysis and recommendations to the business and the individuals he’s working with, holding staff accountable to achieve those goals and manage operations along the way.