Vivá La Visionary™ Podcast

What happens when the people who love you most warn you, and you don't listen? Dan Glisky and I have sat in the same forum for nearly 30 years. He went from Digital Equipment Corporation to a basement tech company with his brother that grew to $38 million. Today he runs Woodberry Wine and Kindred Vines Import Co. right here in Michigan. Dan went into what he calls savior mode, and it cost him...

Can AI really change the Virtual Assistant industry? Ryan Angott has built four companies and generated over $50 million in revenue. Before any of that, he was a sixteen-year-old burning CDs in his bedroom because he saw an opportunity nobody else at his school did.. He walked away from a great job at a cybersecurity company, a job with real money and real freedom, to bet on himself.  Now he runs...

Steve Acho is a pop-rock songwriter with over 60 million streams on Spotify! Now he calls himself a Human Performance Architect, and once you hear his story, the title makes sense. There's a piece of that story most people never get to. At seven years old, one confusing piano lesson convinced Steve he wasn't smart enough for music. That belief followed him around for ten years. What we cov...

David Galbenski built a legal staffing company out of his parents' basement with $2,000. Then life turned. He went into end-stage liver disease from a rare autoimmune condition, and the only reason he's here today is his brother-in-law Mark, who gave him part of his own liver. Dave didn't just say thank you and move on. He and his wife built the Living Liver Foundation to support trans...

Mike Morse built the largest personal injury law firm in Michigan. Over a billion dollars recovered for clients. A bestselling book called Fireproof. A coaching program that now serves 180 law firms across the country. In this episode, Mike shared to me how he learned what a leadership team could actually do for him. Then he found a coach for 19 years. Along the way he started giving away backpack...

Rob Dube sold candy out of his high school locker before he ever sold anything else. That locker turned into imageOne, a company he ran for over 25 years, and imageOne turned into a life spent teaching other driven people how to slow down. Rob shares the story of the last twenty minutes with his mother, and the question one of his own students asked that he hasn't stopped thinking about since....

Matt Elliott has spent thirty-five years in banking; fourteen at Bank of America, where he ended up running the whole state of Michigan. One morning he woke up sure he was having a heart attack… it ended up being the moment he realized he was completely out of capacity. Not only to run his business, but to run himself. He stepped back and wrote his book Overloaded, and built a framework around the...

Carrie Schochet has spent almost 20 years finding perfect fit hires for companies. But because of Purple Squirrel Advisors rapid success, Carrie found her personal identity tethered to her business. Only when life threw new challenges at her did she realize this. But with new pursuits, Carrie untangled her identity and grew into an entrepreneur rooted in a deeper passion for solving problems. On t...

Joe Caruso has spent his life studying one question: “Why do we believe what we believe about ourselves, and what does that belief cost us?” At 18 he was diagnosed with cancer doctors said had no cure. But when a nurse heard him talking about his death, she told him he'd already decided it couldn't be him, a comment that changed Joe’s life. That moment became the seed of a career. Joe went on to w...

Kelly Knight is the President and Integrator of EOS Worldwide, but her path there didn't look like a plan. On a trip to Vancouver she had dislocated her shoulder, but on the flight home (still on narcotics) she took a call from a recruiter about becoming the Integrator of EOS Worldwide. At the time, she barely knew what that meant. Years later, she'd watch the company grow so fast it nearl...

Bill Green built Vibe Optimizer to help leaders close the gap between the business they say they want and the truth they've been avoiding. Bill remembers sitting in a room the night before a meeting with headquarters, rehearsing what he was allowed to say. The irony: though he was smart enough to lead the team, he wasn’t trusted enough to speak openly in front of it. He built his whole practic...

Carla Walker-Miller spent eighteen years as a sales engineer, working hard for a company that never once made her feel like the obvious choice for a promotion. She calls it being undervalued and overmanaged. Most people would have stayed. She didn't. She built Walker-Miller Energy Services from nothing into one of the country's leading clean energy companies. Her company runs energy effici...

Nicole Parker runs Lifeline Global Consulting in Detroit, helping entrepreneurs, especially women and economically disadvantaged founders. She's known online as the Business Doctor. She spent years homeless, went through three divorces, and once had to rebuild a business from nothing during the pandemic. Entrepreneurship found her at 26, and she calls it an invitation into another life. One ni...

Brian Katz grew up in Detroit, graduated high school with a 1.8 GPA, and told a job interviewer at 23 that he wanted to be a movie producer. He didn't get the job. What followed was two decades of winding roads - AmeriCorps, tech sales, a failed business partnership, a move to LA that didn't work out, and a film deal in New Mexico that nearly came apart at the seams and cost a trusted frie...

Terra Csotty walked into an awards ceremony still in a fog. Minutes earlier, her car had rolled three times on a Chicago expressway. Everyone lived. And standing on that stage, collecting an award she barely registered, she had one thought. I could have died and nobody knows who I am. That moment didn't break her. It aimed her. Terra owns four Real Producers publications across Michigan. She b...

Jocelyn Ho didn't plan to start a business. She planned to keep her plants by the window. She was a new immigrant. Covid hit. No jobs, no path forward, and a south-facing window full of rare tropical plants her husband kept complaining about. So she sold them. Made $1,000 in a weekend. Kept going. What we covered: How she went from accidental plant seller to running a full-scale rare plant ope...

Mark Winter has been in PR for 30 years. He started Identity in 1998 with a one-year-old at home, no money in the bank, and his wife's 401k funding the whole thing. The harder story came later. Mark told me he had built something real, 40 people, offices in Michigan and Tampa, a client list most agencies would envy. And he almost broke it by staying too deep inside it. Letting go of the day-to-day...

Dr. Mark Young has a PhD in psychology and neuroscience, holds a Guinness World Record in pro racing, runs a leading consumer packaged goods agency, and has built over 250 brands. He's a lot of things. But what struck me most was how he got there. Mark grew up in a blue collar town. His dad was a plumber. And if he had told anyone at 18 what his life would eventually look like, he said they&#3...

Bob Thomas has been at the Michigan Chamber of Commerce for nearly 30 years. Along the way, Bob had to figure out who he actually was as a leader. He realized he was an Integrator. Good at execution, process, and holding things together. What he didn't expect was to find genuine visionary tendencies underneath all of that. Working inside a framework that gave him permission to think bigger cha...

Rich Homberg has spent nearly 50 years in broadcasting. He worked his way up through all-news radio in New York, Pittsburgh, and eventually Detroit. Then he got fired. He was 33, running sales for one of the top radio stations in the country, left to chase ownership, and two years later it was over. At 50, he walked away from a VP role at CBS Radio and took over Detroit PBS. He hasn't looked b...

Kelly Siegel grew up on the east side of Eight Mile and Van Dyke in Detroit, with a childhood FAR from easy. But instead of letting that freeze him, he built and scaled NTM into a multi-million dollar IT and cybersecurity firm. He’s written two books and started a podcast. But most important of all… Joy, the thing he pushed down as a child just to survive, has started to come back after all these...

Ivan Katz has been in the service business since he was 10 years old. Paper routes. Food service. And then at 23, a landscaping company he would grow for the next 37 years. But somewhere between nearly tripling his revenue and building a team that could finally run without him, Ivan hit a wall. He'd spent two decades being the top sales guy and visionary, but when he finally started stepping b...

Dave Feidner grew a family business into a global operation doing hundreds of millions in revenue. He launched a dozen companies and built something most people only dream about... Then investors called and he had to hand it all over. But that didn't break him. He moved back to the US, started consulting with EOS, and built a new chapter helping visionaries do what he had to learn the hard way...

In this episode, Dan Corrigan, a visionary health expert, shares his journey from health struggles to founding a supplement company focused on natural, high-quality products. The conversation dives into the importance of natural foods, sustainable community practices, and redefining what it means to be a visionary with purpose beyond profit. Dan’s insights emphasize natural health, community build...

In this episode, Coach Bob and David Meyer explore the role of visionaries in driving innovation, building culture, and navigating change. They discuss practical insights on how visionaries can leverage their strengths, embrace technology, and foster growth both personally and professionally. Timestamps: (00:00) - Introduction to the episode and guest David Meyer (01:09) - The purpose of visionari...