JJ Ramberg

JJ is the host of MSNBC’s Your Business, the only television show dedicated to issues affecting small business owners.  Now in its fifth season, the program has profiled thousands of small business owners and offered advice from countless small business experts and investors.  Your Business guests have included Senate and House Small Business Committee members, the head of the Small Business Administration, and members of the Cabinet.  She has received several awards including Self Magazine’s “Women Doing Good” and Jewish Women International’s “Women to Watch.”

JJ is a contributor to the Today Show on small business and financial issues.  She is also MSNBC’s small business expert and occasional on-air news anchor. She was a financial columnist for Cookie Magazine, Conde Nast’s parenting magazine and a contributor to Entrepreneur Magazine where she focused on social entrepreneurship.

What sets JJ apart is her passion for small business and her firsthand experience as an entrepreneur herself.  In 2005, she and her brother Ken founded GoodSearch.com, a Yahoo!-powered search engine which donates 50% of its revenue to the nonprofits and schools designated by its users.

In 2007, the company expanded to include GoodShop.com, an online shopping mall which has partnered with more than 1,600 retailers (from Amazon to Zazzle) to give a percentage of every purchase back to the shopper’s designated cause.  GoodSearch now works with nearly 100,000 nonprofits and schools ranging from large national organizations like The American Red Cross and The Nature Conservancy to small local causes like hospitals and animal rescues. It has more than 1.6 million unique users per month.

JJ’s interest in small business and entrepreneurship runs in her blood.  She comes from a family of entrepreneurs – including both grandfathers, both parents, her brother and her husband.  Small business is something that she has lived her entire life and while her first career out of college was general journalism (she was an Associate Producer at Dateline NBC), she could not resist the draw to enter into and then report on small business herself.  With a strong dedication to social responsibility, she firmly believes she was “brought up to give back,” and that “just being a small business owner and [hiring people] is one of the best ways to give back.”

In the ultimate program for entrepreneurs, at the podium JJ offers her unique perspective as a small business owner and reporter.  Sharing the ins and outs of small business, from the initial start-up process to topics such as hiring and firing and the importance of marketing, JJ uses the tools she learned in her own business ventures, as well as the unique lessons learned from her MSNBC show, to arm audiences with the skills and knowledge that will help make their businesses a success. With contagious energy and genuine know-how, audiences will eagerly devour every word of JJ’s boundless insight, motivated and inspired to get back to work and turn her advice into their profit.

Before joining MSNBC and founding GoodSearch, JJ hosted the program The Flipside on CNN Financial News and was a reporter for CNN, covering news stories ranging from small business news to the NYSE to Hurricane Katrina.  Previous to CNN, JJ was the Director of Marketing and Business Development at the Idealab!-funded Internet start-up Cooking.com.

JJ holds her MBA from the Stanford University Graduate School of Business and her Bachelor of Arts from Duke University.