She built it.
She lived it.
Now she shares it.
Forty years of opening restaurants, launching brands, feeding communities, and reinventing herself on the Jersey Shore. This is not a keynote about theory. It is a story about what actually happens when you bet on yourself and keep going.
Real stories. Real lessons. Real impact.
Marilyn does not speak from a slide deck. She speaks from four decades of building, failing, rebuilding, and refusing to quit on the Jersey Shore and beyond.
Entrepreneurship and the Art of Beginning Again
From stepping behind a stove in 1982 to opening fifteen-plus restaurants to launching a Cosmopolitan Holy Grail Award-winning beauty brand: Marilyn knows how to start, and more importantly, how to start over.
- Building businesses without a roadmap
- Resilience through financial crisis, superstorm Sandy, and COVID
- When to hold on and when to let go
- Selling what you built and finding what is next
Sustainagility: Sustainability as a Business Strategy
Sustainagility is Marilyn's framework for building businesses that are financially strong and socially and environmentally responsible. Not because it looks good, because it is the only way she knows how to build.
- What Sustainagility actually means in practice
- Local sourcing, adaptive reuse, and waste reduction
- Community investment as competitive advantage
- Building a brand with a conscience from day one
Reinvention: The Boardwalk Keeps Moving
Marilyn has reinvented herself more times than she can count: from chef to restaurateur to nonprofit founder to beauty entrepreneur to bistro owner. The throughline is not the industry. It is the values.
- Knowing when a chapter is over
- Moving from the boardwalk to the bistro
- Taking your expertise into entirely new industries
- Identity beyond the role you are known for
Women in Business: Building on Your Own Terms
A self-taught chef who became a restaurateur, an activist, a founder, and a disruptor without ever asking permission. Marilyn's career is a masterclass in building power from the inside out.
- Leading with values in male-dominated industries
- Building community as a business strategy
- Motherhood, marriage, and running a restaurant empire
- Mentorship and lifting the next generation
From Kitchen to Brand: Disrupting Beauty with Oshin Oil
How a decade of kitchen experiments, a surf trip to Nicaragua, and a daughter's eczema became a Cosmopolitan Holy Grail Award-winning product. The story of leaving the industry you know and building something completely new.
- Translating culinary expertise to a new category
- The moringa journey from Haiti to Nicaragua to the Shore
- Bootstrapping a beauty brand with authenticity
- What disruption actually looks like from the inside
Community as the Core: Restaurants That Feed More Than Hunger
The restaurant is never just a restaurant. Marilyn's businesses have been community anchors, activist platforms, and crisis response centers. How to build a business that serves a place, not just a market.
- 3,000+ meals a week during COVID
- Food For Thought By The Sea and culinary job placement
- The Cheers philosophy: everyone belongs here
- Partnerships with Clean Ocean Action, Surfrider, and more
What is Sustainagility?
Marilyn coined the term to describe the way she has always built: sustainable in values, agile in execution. A framework for businesses that want to do good and do well at the same time.
Sustainagility is not a buzzword. It is a practice. It means sourcing locally before it was trendy, using adaptive reuse before it was fashionable, and feeding your community before it was a marketing strategy.
It means building businesses that are resilient because they are rooted: in a place, in a community, in a set of values that do not change when the economy does.
Marilyn has been living this framework since before she had a name for it. Now she shares it with organizations, entrepreneurs, and leaders who want to build something that actually lasts.
Nobody handed her a blueprint. She wants to be yours.
Marilyn Schlossbach did not go to culinary school. She did not have a business degree. She stepped behind a stove one night in 1982 because nobody else showed up, and she has been figuring it out ever since.
What she has is forty years of real decisions made under real pressure: opening restaurants during a financial crisis, rebuilding after Superstorm Sandy, keeping kitchens running and people fed during COVID, selling beloved institutions and walking toward the next chapter with her head up.
She speaks because the story matters. Because entrepreneurs, especially women entrepreneurs, need to hear that reinvention is not failure. That sustainability and profit can coexist. That the Jersey Shore is not a limitation but a launchpad.
Her talks are warm, honest, funny, and full of the kind of hard-won wisdom that only comes from actually doing it for four decades.
"The ocean taught me everything I know about business. It keeps moving. It does not apologize for the tide. Neither do I."
Marilyn SchlossbachThe experience behind the words.
Forbes,
WSJ Among the national publications that have covered her work
Ready to bring Marilyn
to your stage?
Available for keynotes, panels, workshops, brand partnerships, and podcast appearances. Conferences, corporate events, universities, and community organizations welcome.
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