Small Business Stories

Danielle Perlin-Good has deep experience in digital marketing and ghostwriting. She takes her clients on a journey of personal discovery and healing as the "Soul-Aligned Ghostwriter." Danielle exudes cautious optimism and a time-proven process that takes her clients step-by-step through getting their book idea out of their heads on onto the digital shelves of amazon. For many, this can be a daunti...

Dr. Brenda Boston is the President of the Dr. Marie Barney Boston Foundation which was founded by her late mother. It offers more than a scholarship to help students attend college, it also teaches accountability, responsibility, and giving back to the community. To date, since the foundation launched in 2015, they have helped 35 students with tuition in their respective pursuits of higher educati...

Jennifer Holmes founded Joyous Journeys - all because she was interested in "voluntourism" and "eco-tourism" but couldn't find the services that she needed to play her offshore vacations. She, like so many others, enjoys taking vacations but also wants to give back while she's holidaying. Whether it is for a day, a few days, or even the focus of the whole trip, Jennifer plans exciting excursions t...

Annie Mork is the founder of Jobs For Therapists, which is a job board made for theraplists including SLPs, PTs, OTs, and Psychs. She is helping connect recruiters and job seekers in the therapy world in a more meaningful way. Her training is in speech therapty where she now has a telehealth practice supporting children with speech challenges, many of whom are on the Spectrum with Autism. Annie of...

Meet Brilly Semenova - a disability self-advocate who does not take 'no' for an answer. She has the tenacity, spunk, and knowledge of an entire team of advocates. As a child, she was diagnosed with Cerebral Palsy and now has difficulty with daily living. But that hasn't stopped her from pursuing her Master's in Organizational Leadership and Nonprofit Management. Brilly is determined to change the...

Accolade Wines is innovating everything from its bottles to its technology and production processes. Like bubbles? They have a new Prosecco ... and there are so many new ideas that will pop later this year. Enrique Morgan, managing director of the Americas, shares his gritty tales of beginning his wine journey selling to California gas stations to taking the helm of one of the largest wine compani...

Colin Darretta is a "reformed investment banker," serial entrepreneur, investor, and a journalist for Forbes, Inc, TechCrunch, plus other major media. He is the CEO and co-founder of Innovation Department, which spurs the brands of the future. Colin also co-founded FINN, which recently celebrated its 10-year anniversary. He lamented all the virtue signaling out there where "hustle culture" is a st...

Christine Spang, founder & CTO of Nylas, has evolved over the last decade growing her software company which is essentially like "the plumbing for the internet" connecting code. She talks about how the highs are super high and the lows are super low but that foundation at MIT prepared her for the mental fortitude that she was going to need to lead her team on this journey. "Leadership is work and...

Christina Richards is the CMO (Chief Marketing Officer) of Virtana - a software company specializing in cloud services. She took the road less traveled. Indeed, Christina calls it the "dark side" where she took a deep dive into engineering then evolved into marketing. With her role today, she has the opportunity to influence rising professionals in STEM and has a message (or two) for aspiring tech...

Dr. Deborah Jonas is the director of SRI's Center for Education Research & Innovation. Yes, she has access to astronauts and researchers of the highest caliber in the world - but she focuses her efforts on community learning. Deborah shared her thoughts on how we can better support students to "fail productively" and essentially to fail forward so that our next generation of leaders learn how to l...

What a breath of fresh air! It's so easy to feel intimidated, especially when it comes to things like interior design, "Will my home meet your standard?" But Jeanelle Ditto, founder of Blush Interior Designs, is one of the most fun, accessible, down-to-Earth, and overall joyous people that you'll ever meet. No judgment! She offers listeners great advice on how ups & downs are part of an entreprene...

Lorrie Thomas Ross is a breath of fresh air. She's The Marketing Therapist(R) and founder of Wild Web Women and Web Marketing Therapy. She understands the value of relationships and follows the mantra, "to lead with love." Her best advice for other female founders out there is to, "Always do what you do best and let others do the rest."

John Glowacki , CEO of Combat Control Foundation, shares some deeply personal insights on life, loss, and leadership. He served our country in the role of combat control - for those unfamiliar with the role, it's like air traffic control but in a military application. Next year, a move feature a fallen combat control veteran will be released starring Jake Gyllenhaal and it will put this important...

For something a little different, Loralyn Mears recorded this podcast live from Collision Conference in Toronto. She highlighted some of the key insights around the downward trend of venture capital investment and spotlighted some key innovations. WebSummit does an incredible job organizing this event and, as usual, they were spectacular and made the media, sponsors, startups, and attendees all fe...

Chris Beck is the VP of the Family Law division of Soberlink. Their mobile sobriety technology helps document sobriety in real-time to ensure that a child is being co-parented by a sober guardian. Think of it like a breatholyzer on demand, all to keep children safe. This is especially important when parents are divorcing and fighting for custody of their child when one, or both parents, have alcoh...

Josh York, founder of GYMGUYZ, the global leader in personal fitness. He's elevated in-home training to a new level. But he had a rocky start and he openly shares how he's tapped into his unstoppable mindset, honed through fitness, to make the magic happen. Josh will challenge you to stop making excuses - and to just get it done. "Easy never pays well - you've got to do the work."

Meet Lucas Stoltze of ExitLag - the company behind-the-scenes of hundreds of games in countries around the world. They make your game connections faster so that you can communicate with other players sooner - maybe even before the bad guy sneaks up on your game buddy so that can avoid a takedown. Gaming can actually help improve soft skills like communication. Who knew?!

Nick Grewal, serial entrepreneur and investor, is on a mision to make electronic vehicles more efficient and sustainable. He shared a key tip for entrepreneurs, "Don't put your success in someone else's hands. Be prepared to do it yourself." He highlighted how you need to know who you are as a company - and who you're not, and that mistakes are par for the course. Every company has problems - how...

Meet Ahsan Rizvi, founder & CEO of Kiddom, who is transforming digital education to bolster the success of the next crop of learners. He's got a lot of wisdom to share about managing startup fires and digging in to gut through those infamously tough and gritty, early days of entrepreneurship. He'd know - he built Kiddom from the bathroom of a studio apartment.

Learn. Teach. Serve. That's a powerful motto and corporate culture that GCSIT's CEO, Michael Norring, has instilled in the workplace. It's more than a motto - people stand behind it - and employees are proud of the culture that they're helping create. Michael joins our show and shares some insights around digital transformation and how to lead an organization for growth. Here's the TL;DR - build a...

Michael (Mikey) shares some details about his "unusual" background and gives us a glimpse into how he, as a serial entrepreneur and software engineer, frames new ideas. As a neurodivergent, he has an insatiable appetite for learning new things and offers a fresh approach on how to combine the new ideas he learns - and that's what makes him an incredible ideator and entrepeneur.

Bryan Fried is the founder and CEO of Pangea Global Technologies. They're been around for more than two decades, but they've never stopped innovating. They're taking LED lighting to the next level embedding private broadband internet access and enabling the commercial scale of crops - indoors - to address the global supply chain and hunger challenges. So, how many lightbulbs does it take to change...

Meet Michael Esposito - a family man on a mission to be better and to do more. His inspiration, dedication to self-improvement, and commitment to his customers of DenTen insurance isn't something that you see much of these days. Tune in to get inspired. 

Meet the co-founders of Branch Energy: Alex Ince-Cushman and Daniel MacDonald. They're making it easy for consumers to be smart about their energy consumption. They're growing quickly and offfered great advice for founders enduring "slogging through the minutia." They said, "Entropy of the world wants companies to come apart," and they offer advice how to manage it.

Teresa Heath-Wareing found her calling to inspire others when they get "stuck." She faced her personal challenges head-on and emerged stronger than before. Today, she's a TEDx speaker, coach, entrepreneur and best-selling author. Anything is possible!