Ann Marie Sorrell and the business of showing up

Two hundred dollars bought Ann Marie Sorrell a business registration. It could not buy the next client, a mentor, or anyone’s confidence. After being laid off from a real-estate company, she registered The Mosaic Group and began the less easily itemized work of getting people to trust her with something. The amount makes a tidy opening to an entrepreneurial story. The years that followed are where the story becomes interesting.

“I had zero experience, zero mentors,” she recalled of the beginning. She had, however, a willingness to volunteer. Through the Urban League, the Black Chamber of Commerce, and other nonprofit organizations and boards, she became what she called a “super volunteer.” Relationships developed there helped her business grow. A registration form had created a company. Being useful gave people reasons to remember its founder.

Two hundred dollars, then the long part

The Mosaic Group was established in 2005. By 2023, Sorrell was being recognized as an Ultimate CEO by the South Florida Business Journal. Between those dates lies the part of entrepreneurship that makes awkward cinema: returning, helping, learning people’s concerns, and building a working reputation. There is no particularly glamorous way to photograph follow-through.

Her account of starting with little money also gives some weight to the advice she later singled out: “Network or not work.” In her telling, connections developed through participation in organizations doing things she cared about. The relationship preceded the introduction to a prospective client. Volunteering gave her a role in a community before that community became a market for her services.

The other Palm Beach County

To understand her later move into conservation, travel west from the county’s coastal image to Pahokee, beside Lake Okeechobee. Sorrell was born in Jamaica. Her family moved to Florida to join her grandfather, who worked in the sugarcane industry. She grew up in an agricultural community where land and water belonged to the economy of everyday life.

That geography matters. A county can contain several different public identities, and a person raised in one of them may notice what the others overlook. Sorrell’s public commitments would come to include explaining agriculture, water, and conservation to residents. Her family history supplies a direct connection to the people whose work depends on those resources.

Her formal education took her to Florida A&M University, where she earned a bachelor’s degree in 2002, and then to Nova Southeastern University for an MBA in 2004. The Mosaic Group followed the next year. The sequence joined business training to a career that would repeatedly require understanding different communities, institutions, and kinds of work.

A company with more than one audience

At Mosaic, Sorrell’s responsibilities have included daily operations and project management, alongside the creative and strategic work associated with running a communications agency. Its assignments have involved public relations, branding, public-awareness campaigns, and research through focus groups, interviews, and surveys. Listening is a practical task in that list, with time and labor attached to it.

The clients have included AECOM, local governments, housing organizations, and colleges. Such work asks an agency to address people who may have very different reasons for paying attention. A public body has responsibilities to residents; a business has customers; a college needs to reach prospective students. The same polished sentence will not necessarily serve all three.

Mosaic now describes a portfolio of more than 650 campaigns and events, with offices in West Palm Beach, Fort Lauderdale, and Miami. Its work extends across the United States and Caribbean. Those are measures of the agency’s activity. The more revealing feature of Sorrell’s career is how often communication appears beside participation: client outreach, community organizations, teaching, and eventually public office.

A ballot brings the story home

In November 2020, Sorrell won election to Seat 2 on the Palm Beach Soil & Water Conservation District board. She received 398,354 votes, close to 66 percent of those cast. Sworn in on January 28, 2021, she became the first Black woman to serve on the board. The granddaughter of a sugarcane worker now had an elected role in conservation.

Her stated priorities included helping residents understand wetlands, the water system, and agriculture’s economic role. The work drew on her experience explaining complicated subjects to different audiences. Conservation has its technical vocabulary, but it also needs residents who can see how decisions about resources connect with their own communities.

She was re-elected unopposed in 2024. The district’s current roster lists her in Seat 4 for a term running from January 2025 to January 2029, and identifies her as a past chair. Its supervisors serve without pay. That detail fits naturally into a career in which substantial work has taken place outside the client invoice.

Her environmental involvement has also included helping raise funds for a visitor center at the Arthur R. Marshall Loxahatchee National Wildlife Refuge and serving as environment and sustainability co-chair on West Palm Beach Mayor Keith James’s transition team. These activities put the conservation election within a longer record of civic participation.

“we as leaders should always work to serve people”

Ann Marie Sorrell, on her approach to leadership

The CEO at the book table

There is another place to meet Sorrell: across a table covered with books about entrepreneurship and dating. Her Chronicles of a Serial Dater uses personal experiences as short stories, ending each with advice for women and men. Executive biographies generally make room for a management book. A dating book adds rather more possibility for conversation.

She took it to Essence Festival in New Orleans, selling out her supply in 2018 and returning in 2019. Her writing also reached readers through a dating column in The Miami Times. The subject gave her an audience with concerns quite different from a municipal communications brief, although the desire to compare experiences was familiar enough.

She also co-authored No Glory Without a Story: Stepping Out on Faith to Birth the Business Within, a collection of entrepreneurial experiences. Her current Live Audaciously collection includes a Self-Mastery Journal and Daily Power Planner. Across these projects, she moves between recounting experience and inviting readers to examine their own plans.

Making room for the next business

Sorrell’s interest in helping people start businesses has taken several forms. At Palm Beach State College, she taught entrepreneurship, small business management, and human relations. With the Network for Teaching Entrepreneurship, she has worked as a classroom speaker, coach, and competition judge. NFTE recognized her as a Southeast Region Volunteer of the Year in 2021.

These roles have a useful intimacy. A student preparing a pitch needs someone to hear it, ask questions, and help make it clearer. Experience accumulated in client work becomes something another person can use. The owner who began without mentors has spent part of her subsequent career supplying guidance to people at an earlier stage.

In 2020, she and five co-founders established Cannabiziac, supporting entrepreneurs in the cannabis industry through education, resources, mentorship, and connections. Its work has included a Jamaican business roadshow and pitch competition. Her contribution there has included teaching, consulting, and coaching, extending the business-education strand of her career into a specialized industry.

She also founded the National Black Economic Conference. Its 2020 virtual edition focused on generational wealth, with sessions addressing business development, homeownership, investment, and technology. The format brought entrepreneurs and subject specialists together around questions that go beyond any individual company: how businesses develop, how families build resources, and who gets access to practical knowledge.

The conference’s generational focus also helps explain her range of interests. An agency can work on a particular campaign; a conference can give business owners a place to compare problems and learn from specialists. Sorrell has pursued both kinds of work, with education recurring as a practical part of her entrepreneurial activity.

The calendar keeps filling

In September 2026, Sorrell shared news of joining the YWCA of Palm Beach County’s 2026-2027 board. It adds another organization to a public life already involving businesses, community groups, and elected service. Her stated mission connects that activity to opportunities for women and minorities and to using her business and leadership experience in service of her community.

There are smaller details, too. She enjoys golf, dancing, travel, and cultural events. Asked how she unwound after work, she described tea, a candle, and smooth jazz. In the same interview, she disclosed that she had auditioned for two reality shows. The calendar, apparently, has occasionally had room for a casting call.

Her professional feed has had room for the arts, too. In March 2015, she published LinkedIn articles encouraging people to discover Palm Beach Opera, including a performance of The Daughter of the Regiment. It is a modest detail, but a pleasing one: among the business opportunities and civic commitments, there was also an invitation to make an evening of it and go hear some music.

Her public identity leaves room for the professional and the personal to sit together. A book about dates need not disappear when its author runs for office. A childhood in an agricultural town can remain relevant after an MBA and years of client work. Her career has kept those experiences in view.

Those details belong beside the titles. So do the book table, the classroom, and the maps. Sorrell’s working life has expanded through a repeated willingness to enter rooms where people are trying to do something together. The $200 registration supplied a beginning. The rest required her presence, again and again, long after the paperwork was filed.