Build the system. Transfer the capability.

Zakia Ringgold

AI Enablement Strategist · Business Systems Architecture · Instructional Design

Small Business Advisor — certified GrowthWheel advisor since May 2025

Computer and Information Systems, Bloomsburg University, 2002

Business Tech Lab exists because of a gap its founder kept meeting. Zakia Ringgold went through seven entrepreneurship programs while building her own businesses. Each gave her strategy, plans, and frameworks. None answered the question that came after: how do I actually operationalize this inside my business?

That question is BTL's territory — the space between knowing what a business should do and having the systems and capability to do it. BTL starts by understanding the business. It designs the operating environment the business needs. It builds or connects the infrastructure — configuring existing platforms when they fit, building software when they don't. Then it works alongside the owner or team, transferring capability until routine operation no longer depends on BTL.

A website, a CRM, an automation, an AI assistant — these are components. The product is a more capable business.

Zakia Ringgold spent nearly twenty years as an instructional designer and learning-and-development leader, designing blended learning, LMS programs, and competency assessment for hospitals, law firms, and nonprofits — including Children's Hospital of Philadelphia. The career began at a technical helpdesk. Then she became an entrepreneur, and technology stopped being theoretical: she was the business owner figuring out websites, email, follow-up, automation, and everything behind the scenes.

In 2015 she began livestreaming soapmaking from her dining room and sold to seventeen countries. In 2016 she launched Natural Soap By Zakia, published the first of her books, and began teaching in libraries. The work took her to China in 2018 and to Ghana in 2019 — a trip that inspired Legacy in Lather, the forthcoming book whose writing planted the seed for GoAuthorLane. When live events stopped in 2020, she founded Virtual Experience Design Agency and produced more than one hundred virtual events — including taking the Black Caucus of the American Library Association (BCALA) conference fully virtual in May 2020, two months into the pandemic. Along the way she completed seven entrepreneurship programs. Each taught her what her business should have; none closed the gap between knowing and operating. So she closed it herself: every venture needed a back office it could not buy, and she built one — and then another, until the building became a portfolio of software and operating systems.

Business Tech Lab is where those streams meet. Today Zakia is a certified GrowthWheel advisor (since May 2025) serving as a business advisor for CDCs funded through the City of Philadelphia, contracted as a service provider for the Philadelphia Commerce Department, and part of the working group for Philly Biz Hub — the citywide initiative — where she builds the training on how to start a business in Philadelphia. Her position on AI is unfashionable and deliberate: orientation before automation. She tells most of her clients to wait.

She is the creator of the CLIMB Framework and the Business Operating Profile™, author of the New Soap Makers Cookbook series and Nothing Was Random, hosts the Scale Up Your Business Podcast in partnership with Community College of Philadelphia's Power Up Your Business initiative and the Business Tech Unraveled podcast, and speaks on AI enablement and small-business systems.