Meet The Team
Sherry Deutschmann
Founder and CEO
Sherry Deutschmann is a serial entrepreneur, author, and passionate advocate for entrepreneurship. In 2019, Sherry founded BrainTrust, a company dedicated to helping women entrepreneurs grow their businesses.
Prior to founding BrainTrust, Sherry was founder and CEO of LetterLogic, Inc., a company she grew to $40 Million and sold in 2016. LetterLogic was named an INC 5000 company (one of the fastest-growing privately held businesses in the US) for ten consecutive years.
Sherry attributes the success of LetterLogic to its unique culture in which the needs of the employees came before those of the customer or shareholder. That culture led Sherry and LetterLogic to be featured in the New York Times, Forbes Magazine, Business Leaders, INC, and Fast Company. Sherry was honored by President Barack Obama as a White House Champion of Change in 2016. Sherry’s book, Lunch with Lucy – Maximize Profits by Investing in your People, was released in March 2020 and received national honors, winning both the 2021 Gold Foreword Indies Business Book Award and the 2021 Bronze Axiom Business Book Award.
Morgan Stanley
Co-Founder & President
Morgan Stanley is an angel investor and business leader committed to helping women business owners build financial independence, wealth, and influence. As Co-Founder and President of BrainTrust, she leads the organization’s national expansion and oversees member experience, ensuring women have access to the tools, community, and accountability they need to thrive.
Before BrainTrust, Morgan spent over three years helping scaling organizations implement systems, improve communication, and drive alignment. She is also a DiSC Certified trainer and has coached hundreds of professionals on communication and team dynamics.
Morgan was named a 30 Under 30 honoree in Nashville and serves on the board of the Center for Innovation and Entrepreneurship at the University of Mississippi, where she earned her degree. She was the 2024 keynote speaker for the Ole Miss REDe Entrepreneurship Summit, a member of the Nashville Emerging Leader cohort, and serves on the Making Strides for the American Cancer Society committee.
Josh Bowling
Chief Operating Officer
Josh Bowling brings hands-on leadership experience across every stage of early-stage growth, from Series A through Series C, spanning industries including SaaS, fintech, media, hospitality, and healthcare. With roots in banking and public accounting, he has spent his career as a founder and executive in finance and operations, building a reputation for identifying and fixing the root cause bottlenecks across people, processes, and tools that hold growing organizations back.
Josh creates environments where people work to their unique abilities, free to execute without fear, and where collaborative problem-solving and diverse perspectives drive better decisions. That approach has earned him repeated invitations from top leaders and board members to advise, invest in, and rejoin their ventures, a testament to the trust he builds everywhere he goes.
He brings that same operational rigor and people-first mindset to BrainTrust, ensuring the organization has the infrastructure, alignment, and momentum to scale with integrity.
Holland Nix
VP of Member Experience
Holland Nix is an entrepreneur at heart. Prior to joining BrainTrust, she spent over 25 years forging a successful path in the male-dominated music industry. As former CEO and Founder of her own artist management agency “Anger management”, she understands the unique nuances, challenges, and rewards that come with owning a business.
It was Holland’s passion for supporting local artists that inspired her to leave a stable management position to start her own company. Not only could she create the work/life balance she craved, but she was able to give local rock bands a platform for creativity and growth that took them from Nashville to a global market performing from Japan to Moscow’s Red Square. And her influence hasn’t stopped there.
She’s used her experience and insights to coach women in business through peer-to-peer sharing, moderated forums, strategic planning and consulting. Holland’s impact continues here at BrainTrust. She’s responsible for executing and directing operations while ensuring the team and members are able to wholeheartedly execute the BrainTrust core values.
Jess Johnson
VP of Marketing
Jess Johnson brings 15+ years of dynamic experience growing brands and building communities in female-forward industries including wellness, fitness, and real estate. Working alongside bold, creative women throughout her career has helped shape a business philosophy centered around clarity, authenticity, and meaningful connection.
As a Bay Area–based working mom of two, Jess understands the realities of building an ambitious career alongside a full life, and she brings that perspective into how she helps organizations scale sustainably.
As VP of Marketing, Jess is focused on creating clear pathways for the right women to discover this community, feel aligned with its mission and growth method, and take the next step toward reaching their business goals.
Carter Koontz
Chief of Staff
Carter Koontz serves as a strategic partner to BrainTrust’s leadership team, driving organizational initiatives, managing complex projects, and ensuring the work that matters most gets done with clarity and momentum.
Since joining BrainTrust, she has been instrumental in building the operational foundation that makes scaling possible, bridging communication across the team and removing the bottlenecks that slow growing organizations down.
She came to BrainTrust with a background in marketing, sales, and event planning from the professional sports industry, and before that, a competitive edge honed as captain of her college lacrosse team. Carter brings that same drive and love for community to BrainTrust every day, creating an environment where women business owners feel welcomed, supported, and set up to grow.
Megan Mastin
Director of Events & Programming
Megan is an accomplished event strategist, program architect, and operations leader. For nearly a decade, she has carved out a dynamic career in the events and programming world, an industry that demands equal parts strategy and creativity. From high-profile conferences to intimate gatherings with purpose, Megan has dedicated her work to creating experiences that connect people, spark ideas, and drive communities forward. Her ability to see both the big picture and the most nuanced details has earned her a reputation as someone who not only executes flawlessly but reimagines what an event can achieve.
Entrepreneurship is woven throughout Megan’s story. As the co-owner of a family business, she built operational systems from the ground up, strengthened partnerships, and negotiated contracts that helped the business grow. That experience deepened her understanding of what it takes to run a company: the challenges, momentum, and courage behind every decision.
Today, her impact continues at BrainTrust, where she leads events and programming that shape member experiences and support long-term community and organizational goals. Megan is driven by the belief that events are more than gatherings; they’re catalysts for connection, growth, and lasting impressions.
Laurie Schible
Charlotte Market Leader
Laurie Schible leads the Charlotte BrainTrust community with the kind of credibility that only comes from having walked the path herself. After 20 years as a corporate executive in sales, marketing, and global brand leadership, she became a Master Certified Executive Coach in 2017 and has spent the years since helping high-achieving women unlock the success, wealth, and life they are capable of.
What sets her apart is the breadth she brings to every engagement: a transformative blend of neuroscience, somatic bodywork, holistic wellness, and leadership development, grounded in mindset mastery and emotional intelligence and sparked by her improv and performance background at Charlotte Comedy Theater.
She meets members not just where they are, but where they are ready to go, and carries a deep belief in what becomes possible when high-achieving women are fully supported and challenged to grow.
Em Wilder
Nashville Market Leader
With over a decade of experience in people leadership, program design, and community engagement, Em has made a career out of building communities that actually move people forward.
Before moving to Nashville with her family in 2023, she spent that decade developing innovative educational experiences for K-12 students across Chicagoland, including launching an entrepreneurship-focused high school program and a summer accelerator for young founders, closing opportunity gaps from the classroom to the startup. Over the following two years, she led the Twendé Program at the Nashville Entrepreneur Center, working closely with more than 150 founders and growing it into the NEC’s largest accelerator community with impact across Middle Tennessee and the state.
A partner, parent, and connector, Em is passionate about welcoming women business owners into BrainTrust and supporting them as they grow.
