Story World Explorers

Send us Fan Mail This week’s guests are our new friends, Ken Cameron & Russell Stratton !  Ken and Russell have together created the Forum Theatre for Business series to help organizations give their employees the tools they need to co-create a respectful workplace culture and empower individuals to challenge disrespectful behavior. We spoke about the power of Forum Theatre, how there’s nothin...

Send us Fan Mail This week’s guest is our new friend, Syya Yasotornrat !  Syya doesn't take herself too seriously. But what she does take seriously is building up the community of podcasting. Nevermind the 20+ years in Tech Sales and the wonderful time working for the Disney Company in her 20's. It's the connection of many shared experiences and stories that resonate with audiences....

Send us Fan Mail This week’s guest is our new friend, Garrett Spatz!  Garrett is a storyteller, educator, and culture specialist. He teaches courses on music and culture at the College of DuPage and received his Masters in ethnomusicology from BGSU, where he focused on American popular music, identity, and social movements. In addition to his interest in the science of learning and music, he is a...

Send us Fan Mail This week’s guest is our new friend, Jason Cutter!  Jason is the CEO of Cutter Consulting Group, an author, podcaster and sees himself as a sales success architect for companies and individuals. Even though he didn’t have a sales upbringing or background (his bachelor’s degree is in Marine Biology), he knows what it takes to be successful in sales. His first book – Selling With Au...

Send us Fan Mail This week’s guest is our new friend, Horace Flournoy !  Horace is an experienced entrepreneurial manager, with a talent for building creative, technology-focused business and revenue models.  He’s the founder of SwayBrand that helps brands connect with their target audiences through diverse “Authentikas” to execute authentic campaigns.  They often get mistaken for an influencer ma...

Send us Fan Mail This week’s guest is our new friend, Kate DiLeo !  Kate is Chief Brand Architect with brand strategy firm, Ennobble. She is a pragmatist who believes that brand is the path of least resistance to revenue and she is passionate about helping organizations create compelling common ground with their customers. Kate’s proprietary process quickly and effectively helps her clients articu...

Send us Fan Mail This week’s guests are our new friends, Angie Trigilio & Emily Sandberg !  Angie is a Creative Director turned Creative Coach based in Chicago. After nearly two decades in the corporate world, she pivoted to focus on the part of her job she loves the most and where she could have the biggest impact – mentoring, developing and coaching creative professionals.  Emily is a writer...

Send us Fan Mail This week’s guest is our new friend, Jennifer Palais !  Jennifer is a Creative and Cultural Strategist - working with brands, agencies, and production companies. She helps brands exist in big moments in big ways. By creating strategies that communicate brand stories across platforms - online and off and back again - she advocates for value-driven content with the intent to create...

Send us Fan Mail This week’s guest is our new friend, Mike Lewis!   Mike is a seasoned veteran of the sales and marketing trenches who has spent much of his professional career helping marketers find new and meaningful ways to engage key audiences. His current venture with his partners at Click360 does just that — by helping marketers see exactly which efforts contribute to revenue while optimizin...

Send us Fan Mail This week’s guest is our new friend, JP Dubé !  JP is the Sigmund E. Edelstone Professor of Marketing at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business.  His research interests include empirical quantitative marketing and empirical industrial organization, with specific interests in pricing, advertising, branding, digital marketing, retailing, and dynamic decision-making. This...

Send us Fan Mail This week’s guest is our new friend, JD Gershbein !  JD is the CEO of Owlish Communications and has been at the forefront of advancing the ideals of the digital world, inspiring opportunity-oriented individuals and companies to harness the power of the online media to elevate their profiles, engage their communities, and win new business.  JD was one of the world’s first independe...

Send us Fan Mail This week’s guest is our new friend, Larry Long Jr. !  Larry is the Director of Collegiate Sales at Teamworks. He is also the Founder and CEO of Larry Long Jr LLC, which focuses on sales motivation, inspiration, training & coaching and the host of the ‘Midweek Midday Motivational Minute’. We spoke about college athletes learning, building & using their brand to earn endors...

Send us Fan Mail This week’s guest is our new friend, Brian Bogert !  Brian is a passionate human behavior and performance coach, speaker, business strategist, top sales professional and philanthropic leader who believes in helping growth-minded individuals achieve the best version of themselves: their most authentic selves. Brian teaches how to leverage radical authenticity and awareness to creat...

Send us Fan Mail This week’s guest is our new friend, Stephen Klava !  Stephen is a social entrepreneur, founder of Klava fund. Klava fund is a fundraising platform that is bringing ease of use, donor first philosophy & true grassroots tools to impact causes.  The idea right now for the fund is to assist struggling local restaurants to be able to raise money to see the end of the pandemic. We...

Send us Fan Mail This week’s guest is our new friend, Sam Provenzano !  Sam has been in the fundraising world for eleven years, specializing in major gifts for the companies he worked for.  Currently, he is running a community on LinkedIn called NextGen Fundraisers where Fundraisers come to share insight, strategy and comradery.  Under the same name, he also is consulting fundraisers and other ind...

Send us Fan Mail This week’s guest is our good friend, Eric Clarke !  Eric is an event photographer stationed here in Chicago, doing work for networking event groups, corporate events, and even doing work for companies like Netflix.  We got to know Eric through Tony P’s Networking Events (listen to our conversation with Tony P and Greg DeKalb here) where he was the primary event photographer.  Wit...

Send us Fan Mail This week’s guest is our new friend, Chris Johnson !  Chris is one of the founders of SIL (Strategic Introductions League) which is a networking group here in Chicago and expanding.  SIL made a pivot during the pandemic to move to online networking, allowing for them to continue to grow the membership while allowing for vetting of each member to get rid of the “takers”.  This has...

Send us Fan Mail This week’s guest is our new friend, James McGuinness !  James is the founder of PondLeap, which helps entrepreneurs and companies looking to expand into new countries establish a sales strategy, hire freelance salespeople, and coach those freelancers to sell their products all for the average price of one full time salesperson.  Having experienced the struggles himself, PondLeap’...

Send us Fan Mail This week’s guest is our good friend, Kyle Jackson!  Kyle is the director of operations at a luxury hotel here in Chicago. Kyle has developed a reputation for caring about the well being of the people who work for him.  This reputation is due large in part to his belief that people matter more then profit. We spoke about the importance of people over profitability, the value of cu...

Send us Fan Mail This week’s guest is our new friend, Leigh Lahav !  Leigh is an animator and a writer, though on the podcast we discovered she’s more or a writer then an animator.  She’s worked on several projects as a writer and has channel on YouTube where she posts he own parody animations (super funny, see link below). We spoke about how it’s always good to have multiple projects while pitchi...

Send us Fan Mail This week’s guest id our good friend, Clint Barnard-El !  Clint is a model (if you didn’t notice).  He’s represented By Select here in Chicago and globally, and getting paid to model for about 10 years.  We spoke about receiving rejection, how networking catapulted his career, and why models often have to country hop to get new work. We also had a lot of laughs about fixing your f...

Send us Fan Mail This week’s guest is our good friend, Jason Weight !  Jason is a writer, director and voice actor with his own series named Starship Goldfish as well as several other projects for companies like Crunchy Roll.  Starship Goldfish has been a labor of love for the past 10 years, and recently signed with Starburns Industries to produce the show.  He is currently still pitching to find...

Send us Fan Mail This week’s guest is our new friend, Austin McCulloh !  Austin is the founder of Austin McCulloh Advising, where he performs as a Sales & Accountability Consultant.  He helps financial advisors grow their business by providing psychology revamping and leadership training.  Essentially, he helps salespeople understand themselves so they can help other people. We spoke about the...

Send us Fan Mail This week’s guest is our friend, Asher Ahmahd Waldron!  Asher is a musician and yoga instructor focusing on bringing physical and mental balance to musicians.  We spoke about the importance of artists health, how art is not easy, and how discouraging it is as an artist not to be valued enough to be compensated accurately.  We also had laughs about a devious plan to expose people a...

Send us Fan Mail This week’s guest is our new friend, Caitlin McAllister !  Caitlin is the COO (chief operations officer) at Workbox, a tech incubator and accelerator.  We are currently members of Workbox’s Faster Smarter Accelerator program for our own tech idea!   We spoke about how fundraising for a start-up is a lot like dating, how founders have more to gain by being open about their tech ide...