Louis Basile is a passionate leader in the restaurant industry. He grew up in a family-owned restaurant in New Jersey. Previously, Mr. Basile worked at the Chart House and Au Bon Pain. He founded Wildflower in 1995. Wildflower operates multiple restaurants and a fresh dough manufacturing facility in Arizona. Wildflower is an award-winning brand that serves breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Mr. Basile is an emeriti National Restaurant Association board member, past chair of the Arizona Restaurant Association and ARAEF. As well, Louis has served on numerous boards for both charitable and for-profit organizations.

Troy Hooper joined Pepper Lunch as one of the three global business unit CEO’s for the brand, and oversees Pepper Lunch’s parent company in North America, Hot Palette America. Troy brings 30 years of unparalleled experience in hospitality, operations management and executive leadership to this role, which has fueled Pepper Lunch’s infrastructure development, growth efforts, and brand deliverables, creating a fruitful franchise model for the North American market. Throughout his career, Troy has successfully built new concepts, rebranded existing restaurants, and improved well-established venues for iconic brands. Troy’s decades of experience and business acumen brings a breadth of knowledge to the rapidly growing global brand, Pepper Lunch.

Amy Huff helps clients create a vision for their matters, while also providing skilled advice on various complex real estate issues. Clients value her ability to provide real-life solutions to challenging problems based on their unique and individual needs. She offers a competitive perspective in a variety of areas, including real estate transactions, entity formation, contract negotiation, and corporate governance. Clients range from national and local restaurant concepts to commercial developers to health care providers, including pro bono legal services for non-profit organizations.

A highly successful restaurant industry veteran with 30+ years of experience, Susan Taylor joined Juice It Up! in 2019 as VP Franchise Operations and was promoted to President and CEO of the brand in early 2020. In the five years following Taylor’s arrival, Juice It Up! has achieved record sales, generated impressive franchise momentum and significantly ramped up expansion efforts, with sights set on doubling unit count in the next four years. Menu innovation also tops the list of Taylor’s critically successful endeavors, ensuring the brand balances flavor and functionality and remains on the vanguard of ingredient trends.

Michelle Harden is COO and Managing Partner at Messner Reeves LLP. A former nurse, Michelle has extensive experience in defending catastrophic injury cases and multi-district, multi-plaintiff personal injury cases. She has significantly focused her practice on representation of physicians and other health care professionals as well as healthcare entities. In addition to a very active litigation and trial practice, she frequently represents health care providers in matters involving the Colorado Medical Board, the Board of Nursing, and other credentialing entities, and represents these providers in administrative law hearings. Beyond litigation, she serves as a trusted advisor to many clients on a wide variety of topics and acts as general counsel to several entities. She has received numerous awards and recognitions, including 5280 Magazine Top Lawyers, Super Lawyers and US News & World Report Best Lawyers and was awarded the Colorado Trial Lawyers Association Professionalism Award in 2020,