Evolving Your Workplace

In the ever-growing space of digital marketing, Ken Braun, co-founder of Lounge Lizard Worldwide, has carved out a niche that holds strong almost 25 years later. Ken found early success working in agencies, known for dreaming up the Ocean Spray slogan, “Crave The Wave”, and working with brands like Jose Cuervo. But 10 years in, Ken hatched the idea to start freelancing on the side. He created a we...

From working out of his home to owning and operating a seven-office law firm – Matthew Davis knows the ins and outs of building a business from the ground up. Matthew founded Davis Business Law, a “soup to nuts” law firm for small businesses, recently featured on the Inc. 5000 list. He also authored the book “The Art of Preventing Stupid”, is working on another, and currently hosts two business-fo...

At age 27, Richard Blank made the bold decision to pack up and move to Costa Rica to work at a call center for a few months. Fast forward eight years – he opened his own call center with one essential component: pinball machines. Richard, founder and CEO of Costa Rica’s Call Center, began his business out of his home with just a website and now operates a 300-seat call center. In this episode, he...

James Laws, CEO and founder of Saturday Drive, puts it very succinctly, “Our number one value is people – over profits, process or products.” Starting his company in 2014 while working full time as a web administrator required family support, sweat equity and late nights. Making a deal with his wife to bootstrap the startup by banking two years of salary, Laws worked to solve the problem of reprod...

Two offices. Two countries. Two cultures. Charles Brecque, founder and CEO of Legislate, is leading the movement for small businesses and doing it across Europe. Legislate is a legal technology company that provides lawyer-approved contracts for small businesses that don’t have big legal budgets. It’s based on a knowledge graph technology (sporting a new US patent) that makes the contract data usa...

In this podcast, you’ll hear how a history student ended up founding not one, but two tech companies. Dipanwita Das, CEO and co-founder of Sorcero, comes from a long line of accomplished female scientists who endowed her with a legacy of service, problem solving and system sustainability. And as a leader, she doesn’t take that legacy lightly. Founding Sorcero, an artificial intelligence and insigh...

This interview, with Mark Towler, chief executive officer of Phase 2, is a refreshing view of common sense leadership and authentic team management. Building a business with family also adds a challenging element that Towler has achieved with a certain amount of style. It all started when Towler’s brother asked him to partner in a company back in the 90s focusing on wide area networks (remember th...

Katelyn Sorensen, President of B2B Social at Traject, CEO of Loomly and Sendible, found her calling as a leader very early in her career. Recruited to work at Traject, a social media company in the greater Seattle area providing a suite of tools for digital agencies and marketing, Sorenson volunteered to move to the United Kingdom where she now oversees multiple divisions and staff spanning the wo...

Small business owners everywhere are faced with soul-sucking challenges: staffing, supply chain, inflation, and marketing. In this podcast, Amanda Hoffman, chief operations officer of Madwire, a platform providing “360 degree” umbrella of business management products and marketing services for SMBs and franchises, discusses how Madwire’s unique umbrella marketing approach takes marketing technolog...

We could have been calling Tom Coburn, Dr. Coburn because he only wanted to follow in his grandfather’s footsteps as a biology student at Boston College. Instead, in 2011 while still students, Tom and his buddies entered a business plan competition in hopes of winning ten thousand dollars. On their second try, they won by presenting a version of what became Jebbit based on an “aha” moment Tom had...

Fun and passionate aren’t typical words used to describe a technology company founder. But it’s what Daniel Liebeskind, CEO and founder of Topia, is – passionate about people connecting in a safe space and a bona fide experience junkie. Topia, the company he founded that features a customizable, immersive digital space where the unique spatial video platform delivers an authentic in-person experie...

Watch out, Silicon Valley! San Diego is making a bid to become the new center of technology through innovation, creation, and disruption. David Tal and Verse.io are leading the charge! Raising $17 million over three rounds, Verse.io is well placed to create, innovate, and disrupt traditional B2C platforms. Similar to many tech leaders, David was just looking for a solution to a problem. After grad...

David Barrett is not your typical tech CEO, nor does he want to be. As a talented engineer, David has been part of many failed startups. His own company, Expensify, has gained notoriety because of what it doesn’t do – follow the VC handbook. David initially wasn’t trying to build a business. He only wanted to provide a way for people in his Tenderloin (San Francisco) neighborhood with a way to get...

Content marketing isn’t a new concept but the struggle to get to that essential number one ranking is an enigma that Christopher Day and his partner Shawn Schwegman are endeavoring to solve. Passionate about marketing tools and content as the foundation, Christopher and his team at DemandJump are disrupting marketing norms through pillar-based strategies. In this episode, you’ll hear Christopher e...

Join me in this fascinating discussion with Kathryn, a confessed serial entrepreneur, as she discusses how she’s built several profitable ventures because she kept finding problems that needed solving. During her early career in the burgeoning cable television industry, Kathryn loved how technology made lives better. What she did not love was the negative aspect of working in a culture of constant...

It all started because he was unemployed, bored, and didn’t want to be a system administrator anymore. Luke Kanies founded Puppet in 2005, raised $87 million in funding, and was then fired from the company for which he sacrificed his health and probably a bit of his sanity in 2014. He then set about developing a personal CRM product through a company called Clickety in 2019, but chose instead to s...

Kevin Price, founder of Accucode, Inc., quit his job at a Denver-based technology company on a Friday afternoon in 1995. By 10 a.m. the following Monday, working out of his basement, he had landed his first client. Since then, Accucode, Inc. has been on Inc. Magazine's fastest growing company list a whopping ten times and his family of companies now posts $100 million dollar revenues generated by...

When Annie Scranton found herself out of a job, she wasn’t planning to start a public relations company. But that’s what happened when she took a random $500 commission to put a specific client on a specific show. Though she always wanted to be Katie Couric in front of the camera, Annie has now found a sweet niche in the volatile and highly competitive national public relations arena by staying fo...

In this episode, Carol has an in-depth conversation with Emily O’Connor, CEO of ContentWriters, based in the greater New York metropolis. Founded in 2013, ContentWriters is a full-service content writing agency that puts quality written content at the heart of a company's growth strategy. Their mission is to connect businesses with diverse audiences through powerful content crafted by a supreme ne...

In this episode, Carol Schultz speaks with Robert Mason aka “Bobby”, CEO and President of SPOC Automation in Birmingham, Alabama. SPOC is an innovation company and the largest independent artificial lift controls manufacturer in North America, producing world-class variable frequency drive solutions for the oil and gas industry. As experts in the industry, with over two decades of automation exper...

In this episode, Carol Schultz speaks with BD Erickson II, CEO & Founder of Satic USA in Missoula, Montana. Satic is a US Based Manufacturer of high-quality clean power electricity filters that protect your home and work environment. SATIC is an acronym for sinusoidal-wave-form-technology-incorporated, which means; engineered clean power. Satic is a company driven by a passionate belief that "...

Many of us have Executive Assistants, many of us would like an EA, many of us may think of this job as a low-level task person, some of us may want to start with someone part time and see how it goes, and many of us may not know the value of a great EA. Gina Cotner, Founder & CEO of Athena Executive Services, knows all too well the ins and outs of this business. Gina stumbled into the business...

If you have an interest in innovation and/or your organization needs to work through dense, complicated contracts, this episode is for you. Street Diligence Founder & CEO, Stephen Hazelton, talks to Carol about how the idea came about. Founded in 2012, the Street Diligence platform is able to extract numeric and textual information around the terms and conditions and obligations of the contrac...

One of the common denominators among the most successful startups is that they are solving a problem that needs solving. Allstacks is on a mission to disrupt the value stream management category. This category of business looks at how people in an organization work and then map this by using machine learning to understand what may happen in the future. The value stream intelligence market, where t...

F2000 brands are investing hundreds of millions (or billions) of dollars a year on experiences in order to build brand love, and Jonathan Yaffe, Co-founder & CEO of AnyRoad, is on a mission to solve this problem. Having gotten his first job out of college 22 years ago with Red Bull's marketing department, he was awed by the fact that Red Bull was investing over a billion dollars a year on expe...