Social Capital

Meet Lucretia Anderson Lucretia Marie Anderson is the founder of Joyful Muse Coaching, a social entrepreneur, educator, and writer. They have been using their background as a theatre artist, mindfulness coach, and team building workshop facilitator to bring creativity, compassion, authenticity, and self-awareness to the forefront of work, school, and home environments. Look out for their contribution as an author to Raising the Global Mindset: Empowering Children to Be World Changers (2020) What led you to begin your coaching business? My business or my foundation is actually in theatre and the performing arts and I began my career as a theatre arts administrator in Washington DC. I just always enjoyed being a part of something that was you know, meant to uplift the human species. So I got into teaching and working, in particular with middle school girls, an all girls middle school here in Richmond, Virginia. I was responsible for helping to evolve a character and leadership curriculum for the girls. And w

Meet Charles Alexander Charles Alexander’s mission in life is to help busy professionals stand out in a crowded marketplace that is filled with “me too” advisors. He does this by creating story-based explainer videos for busy professionals, like Financial Advisors, Insurance Agents, or anyone else that is in an advisory role, that helps them explain what they do and show personality. How do you create the perfect little story? I always work with clients who are usually in an advisory role in some way, shape, form or fashion. One thing I always want to get across to them a lot of the video out there right now is just somebody staring mindlessly into a camera rambling for about 10 minutes hoping to eventually land another point. More than anything we need stories in our videos. In my particular case, I have folks fill out this really simple six question form and from there is where I'll write the story. And what I want people to understand is that the hero of the story is your client or potential customer. T

Meet Amanda Guralski Amanda's career has transformed from her first entrepreneurial pursuit as the co-founder of an online career coaching magazine bizMe.biz, to author of the book I am NOT a Smartie Pants to hosting Tucson’s popular entertainment/lifestyle show, The Morning Blend. She pivoted into becoming a powerhouse account executive for two Fortune 500 companies and currently is working in the technology space. Amanda is also the newest host of Discover Wisconsin. Throughout your career, you've definitely been a big believer in developing a strong personal brand. How has that helped you with your networking? Personal brand, I think is really everything. Setting up who you are as a person and being not only transparent on who that is and what that looks like, but being consistent in that. So if you want to put the persona as a positive, upbeat person that wants to be a voice in the community, that's exactly how you have to show up every single day. And there are times where I don't feel like showing up

Meet Greg Keating Greg Keating is the Director of Sales & Operations for Hangar12. Greg received his undergraduate degree in Marketing & Supply Chain Management from the University of Illinois and received his MBA with a focus in data analytics from the University of St. Thomas in Minneapolis. He brings Fortune 500 experience from Coca-Cola & Ecolab including project management, data analytics, & selling expertise that helps his marketing agency build brand equity, trial, and loyalty for companies of all sizes. I know you're more in the consumer-packaged goods market. Can you tell me a little bit how the consumer-packaged goods market has changed in the last few years, especially as it relates to shopper marketing? In the past, I think shopper marketing was defined as any kind of marketing activation that took place in a retail store. So this might be product sampling or a nice fancy aisle end cap, in store signage, those types of things. Nowadays, well, those things I just mentioned still exist and are ve

Meet Elena Nunez Murdock Elena Murdock is the founder of Ascend Communications, specializing in PR, strategic partnerships, & branding for startups, venture capital, and private equity groups. She managed a 350 million dollar brand, rebranded a 1.5 bil-dollar company in 6 weeks, developed GTM strategies for multi-million dollar tech products, & creates branding strategies for CEOs. Elena is giving a talk at the Stanford Business School titled, "Leveraging Your Brand as a Young Executive." Networking is her superpower. What are some tips that you can share with someone that actually hates networking? My two top tips are, number one, research the event beforehand and the event you go to, now virtual, and just see who's going to be going and then message them on LinkedIn. If you don't have LinkedIn, definitely get a LinkedIn and start messaging them so you have at least five to ten people that you already know before going. Then secondly, I would also go with a friend. So it's just you. If you still feel unco

Meet Violette de Ayala Violette de Ayala is a Cuban-American serial and social Entrepreneur, Founder of FemCity, and virtual mentor to over 20,000 women. She’s also the International best-selling author of The Self-Guided Guru© Life Lessons for the Everyday Human. Violette has been quoted in Success, Forbes, Entrepreneur, CNBC, Fast Company, Thrive Global, Medium, Yahoo Finance, Yahoo Small Business, Authority, Business Insider News as a small business expert overall. Let's talk a little bit about FemCity. You founded this global women's networking organization, just tell us a little bit about that. I started femme city in 2009. I myself was looking for community in my life. And even after going out to many, many networking events here in Miami that are all spectacular and great. I always left feeling a little depleted and like I was missing some sort of connection to others. And after doing that for a couple years, I just decided to start something very small, but it would be just for 20 women here Miami

Meet Janice Porter Janice began her career as a teacher and was a corporate trainer and has now been in business for herself for several years. She found her niche coaching and training business professionals to network at a mastery level and turn their connections into new business. Having an innate curiosity, she has leveraged that into building business relationships, and teaches others how to do the same. Connecting people is a skill that Janice uses when needed, and only when she feels that it will be managed most professionally as she holds her relationships very dearly. LinkedIn training is a huge part of Janice’s business. She believes anyone in business or looking for a new position needs to have a professional LinkedIn profile, and that LinkedIn is a powerful, underutilized online platform for attracting new clients. You can listen to Janice on her relationships, rural podcasts on iTunes, Stitcher and most other podcast platforms. Let's talk about relationships and specifically relationship market

Meet Emerald Mills Emerald was born in Waukegan, Illinois. She’s a business strategist, culture builder and public health professional with almost two decades of cumulative experience. Emerald is also the founder and leader facilitator of Diverse Dining and events educational organization, whose mission is to cultivate courage, compassion and connection through meaningful conversations centered around diverse foods and cultural exploration. Diverse Dining strives to establish and maintain interpersonal and interprofessional relationships among persons of varying culture, economic, ethnic, political, racial, and social backgrounds. As a philanthropic initiative, Diverse Dining, which Emerald is now involved with full time is prominently been featured on Dear Milwaukee, On Milwaukee, The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, Spectrum One, Fox 6, Visit Milwaukee podcast and plenty of other mediums. So why don't you tell our listeners a little bit about why you decided to start Diverse Dining? I lived in Zion, Illinois.

Meet Bill Bice Bill Bice has always been an entrepreneur, starting his first company at age 14, putting on road races with corporate sponsors. At 18, he started ProLaw Software, the first integrated ERP for law firms. After selling the company to Thomson Reuters, Bill became a VC as a founding partner in the Verge Fund, investing in high tech, high growth companies in the Southwest. Bill is the CEO of boomtime, the Word of Mouth marketing company. So you've built and invested a lot of businesses what's been the biggest challenge? It really is that good of market I mean, that's the reason I started Boomtime which was my frustration in getting great marketing for the companies that I started. I mean, it's a tough thing to do really well. And it's really tough as business owners to make the necessary commitment behind marketing because just like always spending money and not getting results, and there's some key reasons for that. What are some of the most common mistakes that you see people making in their m

Meet Ian Moyse Ian has been a sales leader for over 25 years and focused on the cloud computing industry for the past 13 years. Now serving as EMEA sales director for cloud telephony vender Natterbox. He sits as a non exempt on a number of industry bodies and firms and is a social influencer for a growing number of global brands such as Oracle, SAP and Sage. He's a recognized keynote speaker and blogger on cloud, social selling, and personal branding. As a sales leader, what's the landscape of sales looking like right now? How is it changing? So I think it's already changed and it will continue to change. And I think the reason for that is we've all changed ourselves. We now live in a world that's different. And it's different because of mobile smart devices, the internet, the World Wide Web, rather than the internet, the true definition social media. Our behavior as a buyer has inherently changed. So from a sales perspective, the game's changed. And it's changed years ago. And it continues to change both

Meet Ian Reynolds Ian Reynolds is a Partner and Chief Solutions Architect at Zibtek, a software development firm focused on helping businesses of all sizes in the US solve their core problems with software. They empower entrepreneurs, growth companies, enterprises and visionary firms to achieve greater profitability and efficiency, valuation and ultimate success by building the right tools through custom software. What is it that your company is doing to innovate and stay on top of the latest technologies? We have a select group of engineers who are just looking at a sort of smattering of the biggest and sort of most available trends and technology, mostly AI and these sorts of things. Just dedicated research to see if they can come up with any sort of projects that are going to be interesting, going to solve problems for our clients that we can then turn around and present research. We see the market going this way, here is something that we really feel will be of benefit to you and hopefully, of course,

Meet Dr. Matthew Waro Dr. Matt Waro is a family practice chiropractor that specializes in athletes. He works with his practice members to reach their goals by championing them through chiropractic care. Dr. Matt uses functional movement assessments to determine how best to correct the spine, arms, and legs to increase athletic performance, prevent future injury, and rehab current or old injuries. He loves working with people of all ages and levels of activity at Core Chiropractic, his practice in Oconomowoc. What exactly is a chiropractor doing? A lot of people think that I'm a bad doctor that you come to me when you have low back pain or headaches or neck pain, but what I treat is the nervous system. So the brain It's up top and sends down the nerves in the spinal cord. And when a bone in your back comes out of place your body braces out with inflammation. And that inflammation can sometimes irritate that nerve root, which causes the back pain, hence why people come to see me with back pain. But I'm not a

Meet Rylee Meek Riley is the founder and CEO of the Social Dynamic Selling System, which turns dinner seminar marketing into a science. After responding to a small add on crisis in 2009, Riley was introduced to a new concept of selling, one in which radically changed his life forever. Having just $673 in his bank account, but more importantly, a burning desire for more, Riley went on to produce over $80 million in sales over the past eight years. Now that he has perfected his model, through continual trial and error, he is sharing this learned wisdom and is on a mission to help other entrepreneurs and business owners achieve their revenue goals that they have to live the lifestyle they desire. Everything he teaches, is tried, tested, refined, and proven to create a predictable, sustainable and scalable selling system. Can you just explain what Social Dynamic Selling is? At the core of what it what it is, is it's gathering a group of people in person in which there is a social dynamic happening. No differen

Meet Steve Fry Co-founder of a number of businesses, including two that have made the Inc. 500 and Inc. 5000 Lists. Today, Steve spends his time matchmaking organizations that genuinely want to grow or increase collaboration with a team of experts in E-Commerce, M365/SharePoint and Digital Marketing. Steve serves on a number of boards where he gets to see up close how non-profits work. Having been to about 70 countries, Steve loves to travel with his wife, Jan. They have two grown daughters and live in suburban Des Moines. Tell us a little bit about your company and what exactly it is that you do and introduce the company in general? We have a couple of companies, but they're all under the banner of spindustry. And we're based in the suburbs of Des Moines, Iowa. And we do really two major things. The first would be large scale web application development. And as a part of that would be replacement parts e-commerce. We do a lot of that. And then the other side of our business is Microsoft Office 365. And as

Meet Brian Weaver Brian serves as CEO of Torch.AI and has more than 20 years of experience leading mission driven high growth technology focused companies. Torch.AI helps leading organizations leverage artificial intelligence in a unique way via proprietary enterprise data management software solution. Today Torch.AI supports clients like H&R Block with fraud detection and mitigation. And the US Department of Defense with machine learning enabled background investigations for all federal employees, supporting the determination of an individual's trustworthiness and security credentialing. So how did you end up starting your first company? So I was sort of a serial entrepreneur even an employee. I got out of college and I conned to this guy to hire me, no experience, I was the youngest employee that they'd hired a company called the Kansas City Star. I had a normal day job and I've always considered myself someone that really enjoyed working with others and trying to solve problems for others and in a busin

Meet Tim Fulton Tim owned and operated several small retail businesses in Miami. He also taught as an adjunct professor and served as the interim director of the Family Business Institute at Florida International University. Tim was a Vistage chair for 16 years, retired from Vistage in December 2018 and currently enjoys chair Emeritus status. In 1992, he started his own small business consulting firm, Small Business Matters. He has an award-winning newsletter and has self-published two different books and co-hosts a popular podcast. He also hosts one of the largest annual events in Atlanta for small business owners. What are some of the entrepreneurial myths that you're aware of? There are some myths about entrepreneurship that just tend to pervade no matter what. And so, an example, many of your listeners may be familiar with the book, The E-Myth, one of my favorite books of all time, written by Michael Gerber. We tend to think that most small businesses are started by entrepreneurs, you know, people with

Meet Peter Yawitz Peter Yawitz is a management communication consultant helping individuals and groups at global companies communicate more effectively. His website someoneelsesdad.com has videos, an ask-dad column, and a podcast, giving tons of practical and humorous advice on how to manage life at work. His book, Flip-Flops & Microwaved Fish: Navigating the Dos & Don’ts of Workplace Culture, is full of advice and humor for young professionals and anyone else whose questions are rarely answered in the workplace. So let's talk about your book little bit. Why did you write it and who exactly is it for? It's for young professionals entering the workforce, but it's also for anyone who feels a little bit disenfranchised, going into a work and feeling they don't fit in. I just found that over the years people would start asking me questions that they were not getting answered from the HR department or of any kind of orientation session. And these were just things that no one had ever told them. And it could be

Meet Dr. Wayne Baker Dr. Wayne Baker is the author of All You Have To Do Is Ask: How to Master the Most Important Skill for Success (Jan 14, 2020). He is the Robert P. Thome (“Toe-May”) Professor of Business Administration at the University of Michigan Ross School of Business, as well as Faculty Director of the Center for Positive Organizations. Wayne is a co-founder and board member of Give and Take, Inc., which develops technologies based on the principles in his new book. Why is asking for what you need such an important skill for success? We found that people tend to be very generous at work and in their lives and they're very well regarded for that. Most people want to be helpful and will help when they can. But they don't ask for what they need. And because they don't ask, they don't get the inflow of all the resources you need to be successful. It could be knowledge, information, referrals, ideas, contacts, Any kind of resource that you need to be productive and to do well at work. So why is it so

Meet Drew McLellan Drew has worked in advertising for over 30 years, and he has started his own agency McLellan Marketing Group in 1995 after a five year stint at Y&R and still actively runs his agency. He also owns and runs Agency Management Institute, which serves over 250 agencies small to mid size covering advertising, digital marketing, media and PR. He helps them increase their AGI, attract better clients and employees, mitigate the risk of being self employed in such a volatile business. And best of all, letting the agency owner actually enjoy the perks of agency ownership. Drew often appears in publications like Entrepreneur Magazine, New York Times, Washington Post, Agency Post, CNN, Businessweek, and many others. The Wall Street Journal calls him one of 10 bloggers, every entrepreneur should read. Can you share how running your own marketing agency transitioned to the success and helping you advise other agency owners? I started my own agency like most agency owners do, kind of by the seat of my

Meet Lori Mendelsohn Lori Mendelsohn is an intuitive matchmaker whose purpose is to introduce people who were meant to meet each other. Her company is SmartFunnySingle. She has introduced 15 couples who have said "I do." Lori had a successful 33 year career as a fashion designer in LA and NYC as well as founding, building and selling Wisconsin's largest and highest awarded pet sitting and dog walking business, Wisconsin Pet Care. Tell our listeners how you got started as a matchmaker? So I started it when, when I was 19 years old. I had a feeling when I met someone that I knew someone who would be perfect for them. And then I introduced them and long story short, they got married. And then this kept happening over and over and over again until we got to the number 15. I think it's time for me really to look into this and figure out if this is something that I should be doing for a living? So the answer was yes.  How is networking a part of your business? I am networking all the time, as a matchmaker, I