Utah Business has selected 10 women with enduring careers and exceptional impact, who we’ve named our “Most Influential Women.” Through their innovative efforts and inspiring examples, these women have significantly improved their workplaces, industries and Utah as a whole.
Ann Marie Wallace
State Director | Women’s Business Center of Utah
Ann Marie Wallace has spent more than a decade reshaping how and where women build businesses in Utah. As state director of the Women’s Business Center of Utah (WBCUtah), she has led the organization’s transformation from a Wasatch Front resource into a statewide engine for entrepreneurial growth, expanding access to capital, advising and education for thousands of women. Under Ann Marie’s leadership, WBCUtah has grown from serving 200 clients annually to more than 1,500. In the process, she has helped elevate Utah as a national model for supporting women-owned businesses.
Clients who have worked with WBCUtah in the past five years have accomplished the following: started 1,325 new businesses, accessed $62 million in capital and created 4,540 Utah jobs.
Her work with women is personal because it’s based on lived experience. Before she led WBCUtah, Ann Marie launched a business from her kitchen table. Like many business owners, she was navigating the uncertainties and ambitions of the entrepreneurs she now works with. That perspective defines her leadership. She understands both the isolation and the possibility that comes with starting something from scratch. The business-building system she designed was made to reach all women, whether they are sitting at a kitchen table in rural Utah or in a high-rise in downtown Salt Lake City.
Ann Marie faced a turning point early in her tenure as director of WBCUtah. At a national conference, Ann Marie heard a simple but clarifying directive: if an SBA Women’s Business Center is the only one in its state, then the entire state is its responsibility.
“That was the moment everything shifted,” she says. “I thought, we need to expand somehow to reach women across the entire state — from my hometown in the far north, down to St. George in the south, over to Vernal in the east, and everywhere in between. And we needed to do it with little funding and no spare staff time.”
What followed was a deliberate effort to erase opportunity gaps. WBCUtah expanded into rural communities through partnerships with chambers of commerce across the state and the opening of a Southern Utah office in the Cedar City Business and Innovation Center. Today, women far beyond the Wasatch Front have access to the same advising, funding pathways and business education as their urban counterparts.
“I grew up in a town of 200 people on a dairy farm on the Utah-Idaho border, so I’m deeply committed to supporting women who live in remote and underserved areas, helping them access the resources they need to succeed,” she says.
That expansion is just one piece of a broader track record. Ann Marie has also tripled the organization’s team and operating budget while securing millions in grant funding and sustained legislative support, creating long-term stability for its programs. During the pandemic, when many organizations scaled back, she moved in the opposite direction, launching virtual services. The official Online Academy launched in September 2023 and now offers 41 courses as of the summer of 2024. During the pandemic, the center also launched the Utah Women-Owned Business directory at Utahwomenowned.com as a public service, featuring 3,600 women-owned businesses and counting.
Her influence carries into policy and finance as well. Through years of service on state and regional boards, she has helped ensure women entrepreneurs are represented in the rooms where funding decisions are made. At the same time, she has built initiatives that move women from early-stage survival to sustainable growth, including cohort-based accelerator programs designed to strengthen strategy, skills and confidence.
“I feel that my creativity in disrupting the status quo has been critical to the advancements I’ve led,” she says. “A relentless focus on serving women and building their confidence is always at the top of my mind, and I never worry if we don’t know how to do something. We’ll figure it out.”
While Ann Marie has had a great impact on Utah’s women-owned businesses during her career, she’s not slowing down soon. WBCUtah just launched the Loan Bootcamp, which is helping women business owners improve their growth strategies to increase the likelihood of loan approval. The organization also partnered with A Bolder Way Forward in November of 2025, launching the first Utah Proclamation for Women’s Entrepreneurial Empowerment with more than 100 organizations as signatories. Signers committed to a specific activity over a 365-day period to support and advocate for women-owned businesses.
Her success isn’t measured only in expanded programs or funding secured, but in the number of women who go on to lead, hire and grow because they had access to knowledge and resources they didn’t have before. Ann Marie’s goal remains consistent — make sure geography, background and access don’t determine who gets to build.