Each year, Diversified Restaurant Group’s (DRG) Women in Leadership Network (WLN) hosts an annual professional workshop. Held at our Restaurant Support Center (RSC) in Las Vegas, NV, these workshops aim to blend the spirit of teamwork with powerful leadership development. Upon their departure, our female leaders walk away with the tools they need to drive impactful change in our organization and beyond.
2025’s Theme
This year’s two-day conference took place on October 28 & 29. The theme was “Camp WLN,” a fun ode to the workshop’s abundance of sports- and team-centric activities. Highlights included keynote speaker and former football player Coach V, leadership “drills” and plenty of networking conversations.
We had the opportunity to speak with our Communications & Media Manager and WLN Network Lead, Sierra Burk, about all the prep work that went into the event. She says that she and her WLN counsel — which is composed of five other DRG women — worked to plan Camp WLN over a four month period. As they built out the agenda, they made it their goal that throughout the conference, attendees would be given opportunities to build new relationships, lessons on effectively leading a team and plenty of empowerment.
Nearly 70 women from across the organization (and country) gathered at Camp WLN, including DRG Area Coaches (ACs), Regional Directors, office team members, and for the very first time, Restaurant General Managers (RGMs). A number of male executives also stopped by the workshop to offer their support — including our very own CEO & President, SG Ellison, who gave a speech about the women leaders that have inspired and helped him get to where he is today.
Giving Back in a Big Way
It’s deeply important to us that we weave our community into development events like Camp WLN whenever we can. We have a close relationship with the Boys & Girls Club of Southern Nevada, so we invited eight female members of their leadership team to the workshop. Sierra shares that their presence was particularly impactful in the workshop’s leadership conversations, as the nonprofit leaders were able to provide important perspectives that DRG team members didn’t have previously.
At one point in the conference, attendees were split into teams and tasked with making hygiene kits for the Boys & Girls Club. As they assembled as many kits as possible in a given amount of time, the teams were able to participate in a little friendly competition. After all, Camp WLN was a sports-themed workshop! Participants put together 140 hygiene kits, which we then donated to the Boys & Girls Club.
The Future of WLN
Sierra shares that at the end of the conference, each attendee was given an “accountability partner.” These pairings were made to help those in attendance commit to their professional development. Over the coming months, the women will stay in touch with one another and share details about how they’re continuing to work toward their career goals. “We really wanted [what they learned] to resonate and stick,” according to Sierra.
WLN has grown exponentially in the four years since it first launched — and Sierra doesn’t see it stopping anytime soon. She says the group has big plans to use myDRG, our new internal company app, to reach more people in the organization. For example, a page dedicated to WLN on the app would allow DRG’s restaurant employees visibility into the leadership perks that we offer.
“I think with this new technology, we can reach even more women,” Sierra shares, adding that at some point, they want to make the WLN annual workshop and its resources available to women at every level on the DRG career ladder.
A huge thank you to everyone who attended Camp WLN! We can’t wait to see you next year.
