Throttle Up Leadership Podcast

Colin Davis spent two decades in pastoral and nonprofit leadership, including years as a missionary and monk, before founding First Principles Coaching in Richmond. He works with the two to ten person shops that quietly power local economies; too established to wing it, too lean for white glove coaching, too personal for a generic online course. Colin argues that real growth starts with something...

Dennis Meador spent 30 years watching talented attorneys lose business not because they lacked skill but because they lacked positioning. In a market squeezed from below by cheaper competitors and from above by mega-firms with million-dollar ad budgets, most law firms have exactly one lever left: becoming the recognized authority in their niche. That's the insight that drove Meador to found the Le...

Daria Rudnik has spent her career proving that leaders do not need to carry everything. Drawing on work across six continents and her own time inside toxic workplaces, she argues that the heroic leader who saves, protects, and sits in every conversation is the wrong model for a world moving this fast. Her answer is leadership as a process the whole team owns. She calls delegation a myth, because i...

This is an audio overview of The Throttle Up from the Field Volume 1: Canaries in the Coal Mine--The Workforce Crisis Gen Z is Exposing

Rich Kozak doesn't market brands; he excavates them. After nearly fifty years of defining and languaging brands across hundreds of industries, the founder of Rich Brands and co-author of the Amazon bestseller Cracking the Rich Code has earned a fitting title: the brand archaeologist. He goes in, listens deeply, and digs up what's already true at the heart of a person or organization. In this episo...

Most people know what they want. They can write it on a whiteboard, build a SMART goal around it, and explain it in a performance review. What they cannot do is say why it matters — and that gap, according to Randy Belham, is where every leadership failure quietly begins. Clarity is not a planning exercise. It is the inner work of understanding your values so thoroughly that your goals, your cultu...

What does herding cows in communist Romania teach you about leading under pressure? Quite a lot, as it turns out. Anca Platon Trifan, AI strategist, five-time natural bodybuilding champion, and host of the Events Demystified podcast, built her leadership philosophy from the ground up, literally. After two decades running stadium-scale live events and mixing front-of-house for A-list celebrities, s...

For 45 years, Dr. Matt Chodkowski has been quietly telling organizations to stop following the leader, and asking the one question they still can't answer: what if everything we know about leadership is built on an industrial-age framework that no longer works? Founding director of the Institute for Post-Industrial Leadership, Matt has taught leadership and organizational behavior across eight uni...

Tissa Richards has a problem with the word resilience, specifically, the part where you're supposed to bounce back. In this episode, the TEDx and keynote speaker, CEO, and author of Rethinking Resilience makes a compelling case that the bounce-back model was borrowed from material science, designed for rubber balls and metal springs, not human beings navigating real organizational pressure. It put...

What happens when the plan hits the wall, the clock is running, and nobody's reading the manual? For Michael Gips, that's not a hypothetical: it's Tuesday. With over 30 years navigating the intersection of security, risk, and leadership, Michael is Managing Director at Kroll, one of the world's foremost global risk advisory firms. He's a Certified Protection Professional, a Chartered Security Prof...

In this episode, Dr. John Dentico sits down with Oleg Danyliuk to explore a transformative vision of Artificial Intelligence—one where technology acts as a powerful co-pilot rather than a replacement for human talent. Moving beyond the overwhelming hype and fears of job displacement, Oleg explains how AI is "collapsing" routine, repetitive tasks—the digital drudgery that often drains productivity....

Lindsay White carries Alberta homesteader DNA, generations of powerful, independent women who earned the vote through partnership work, not permission. That matriarchy shaped everything about her 20+ year HR career, though she insists it's never been about HR. It's about the messy inflection point where brilliant female founders can no longer touch everything in their business yet still try, burni...

In this deeply personal and transformative episode of the Throttle Up Leadership Podcast , host Dr. John Dentico welcomes Raul Pereyra , a first-generation Latino leadership coach with over 25 years of experience. Raul's approach to leadership is forged not in academia, but in the challenging environment of East LA, where he learned to navigate the "invisible weight" of growing up with an alcoholi...

In this compelling episode of the Throttle Up Leadership Podcast, host Dr. John Dentico sits down with Zoe Arden, a fellow at the University of Cambridge Institute for Sustainability Leadership and author of Story Centred Leadership: Crafting Cultures of Change . Zoe brings over 20 years of experience to the table, demonstrating that storytelling is not just a "soft skill" but a vital strategic in...

In this insightful episode of the Throttle Leadership Podcast, host Dr. John Dentico welcomes Leanna DeBellevue, founder of DeBellevue Consulting and an international speaker. After building and scaling an award-winning global marketing agency for over 15 years and successfully selling it in 2025, Leanna realized a profound truth: success often creates its own set of blind spots. She now specializ...

In this episode of the Throttle Leadership Podcast, host Dr. John Dentico sits down with Cortney Watson, a fractional advisor and business coach with over 20 years of experience. Cortney shares her journey of scaling a consulting firm to $40 million in revenue and growing a network from 50 to over 450 consultants. The conversation dives deep into the "founder bottleneck" and the critical inflectio...

In this insightful episode of the Throttle Up Leadership Podcast , host Dr. John Dentico sits down with Scott Geller , a fractional CFO who has carved out a powerful niche supporting staffing agencies with revenues under $30 million . Scott shares his journey from the rigid corporate world to the agile fractional model, explaining how he helps underserved firms bridge the gap between basic bookkee...

What happens when a billion-dollar CIO decides the nonprofit world deserves better strategic planning tools? You get StratSimple — and one of the most honest conversations about strategy, leadership, and AI you'll hear this year. Mike Burns spent over two decades driving organizational transformation, including serving as CIO of Benco Dental. In 2023, he co-founded StratSimple, an AI-powered platf...

  In this episode of the Throttle Up Leadership Podcast, Dr. John Dentico interviews Steve McNicholas. Steve McNicholas failed education in working-class Liverpool, the city that gave the world The Beatles, yet became an executive in global banking before the 2008 crash forced brutal clarity. That failure catalyzed three decades investigating what works. Interviewing 100+ highly successful leaders...

In this episode of the Throttle Up Leadership Podcast, Dr. John Dentico interviews Karim Jaafar. Karim Jaafar didn't just pivot from award-winning filmmaker to brand storytelling strategist; he decoded how the entire consumer landscape fractured beneath our feet. Born in Cyprus, raised across Canada, Egypt, and Lebanon, now headquartered in UAE, this Grithaus.me founder crafted narratives for Kell...

In this episode of the Throttle Up Leadership Podcast, Dr. John Dentico interviews Kimberly Collins Co-Owner of Collins Orthodontics and The Donut.  Kimberly Collins isn't just another personality assessment enthusiast, she's the multihyphenate who turned childhood road trips to Yellowstone into a leadership philosophy. Growing up in Montana with two musical sisters and a manager father obsessed w...

In this episode of the Throttle Up Leadership Podcast, Dr. John Dentico interviews Dave Chauhan. Dave Chauhan didn't just study leadership, he lived it through two value systems. Born in Libya to Punjabi parents working in embassy health roles, young Dave was raised by his grandmother in India, creating an early identity crisis that became his secret weapon. Two sets of parents meant two conflicti...

I n this episode of the Throttle Up Leadership Podcast, Dr. John Dentico interviews Andrew Ackerman. Andrew Ackerman isn't just another VC with opinions; he's the startup whisperer who's lived every role in the ecosystem. This serial entrepreneur turned angel investor turned venture capitalist has invested in 70+ startups, mentored hundreds of founders, and built innovation programs that deliver....

In this episode of the Throttle Up Leadership Podcast, Dr. John Dentico interviews Sean Kling. Sean Kling doesn't apologize for being Gen X—he weaponizes it. As author of "Outwork Them All: A Gen X Guide to Business and Leadership," this former Marine and Pennsylvania native makes the provocative case that in a world drowning in viral trends and AI hype, old-school fundamentals like consistency, l...

In this episode of the Throttle Up Leadership Podcast , Dr. John Dentico speaks with Christoffel Sneijders , a master of psychological coaching, clinical therapist, and pioneer of the 3 Brains Intelligence . Christoffel shares his journey from working in a supermarket and playing football to becoming a leading expert in human behavior and organizational transformation. He discusses how leadership...