Thursday CEO Group

Thursday, December 17, 2026— David Braun

Program Description:

Mergers & Acquisitions expert David Braun presents an interactive, practical program centered on helping companies grow.

David implores CEOs to take a proactive approach to external growth, aggressively planning future growth by anticipating customer demand. His proven system helps CEOs remove subjectivity in acquisition decisions, basing their choices on demand-based research and the use of objective tools to increase the likelihood of success.

In this presentation, the group will analyze current market conditions and learn practical insights on how to position their companies for successful growth. David Braun makes a point of asking in advance about specific growth challenges members are facing. David has also incorporated the theme of planning for post-pandemic business, identifying opportunities to strategically recalibrate one’s business to succeed.

The presentation covers:

• How the M&A process works
• Current market conditions
• The New Normal
• The five growth options for any company
• Why external growth could be the best option
• The current state of the M&A market
• Developing a step-by-step M&A process for your company
• Deal experiences/stories including best practices & lessons learned
• Tips and action items

Value To Members:

Members will leave with a clear understanding of the entire M&A process and take away proprietary tools to increase their likelihood of success. Receive insights that you can apply to your business immediately.

Speaker Biography:

David Braun is the founder and CEO of Capstone Strategic, Inc., which he established in 1995 to meet the unique growth needs of mid-market companies. The firm’s clients include small and family-owned businesses (some going back six generations), as well as Fortune 500 and multinational companies. David has more than 25 years’ experience formulating growth strategies in a wide range of manufacturing and service industries.

A sought-after speaker, David has been a featured faculty member for the American Management Association (AMA) for over three decades. He regularly leads a multi-day course on mergers and acquisitions and has delivered lectures to more than 40,000 senior executives through organizations such as the AMA, the National Center for Continuing Education, Vistage International, and various industry trade associations.

David’s thought leadership extends to his prolific writing. He is the author of the highly acclaimed book “Successful Acquisitions: A Proven Plan for Strategic Growth,” which outlines his comprehensive “Roadmap to Acquisitions” strategy for acquiring companies.  He has contributed to domestic and international publications, including “The CFO’s Changing Role in Acquisitions and Divestitures” for Strategy & Leadership, a U.K.-based journal. He also authored “How to Make Gains from M&A Activity” for a book published by The Global-Investor. His articles have appeared in industry publications like The Journal of the Adhesives and Sealants Council and Cabling Installation & Maintenance magazine.

He earned a Bachelor of Business Administration degree from The College of William & Mary.

Thursday, November 19, 2026— Ryan Walter

Program Description:

Ryan’s experience as a professional athlete + coach and position as the President and CEO of a professional hockey team has taught him that the genesis of personal and cultural high performance is always formed in the mind.

Ryan starts each session by guiding members to develop an awareness and deeper understanding of their cultural mindset – “where it is now and where do you want to shift it.” This exploration is facilitated using Ryan’s unique Thinking Tendencies Model.

Following this discovery, we will spend the remainder of our time identifying best practices on how to practically shift the mindset of our team. Each of these four processes are interactive and will generate a stimulating debrief.

1. Activating the Personal Shift

Helping your people develop an awareness of their best qualities

Interactive process: The Hero Exercise.

Helping executive self-identify critical qualities that are important for each individual person to stay “above the line” is exhilarating.

2. Activating the Leader’s Shift

Understanding the 4 qualities that people universally want in their leaders.

Interactive process: Characteristics of an Admired Leader (Posner & Kouzes) This exercise guides leaders towards an understanding of what core leadership characteristics their culture desires from them.

3. Activating the Cultural Shift

Discussing why “prioritizing people, in process” increases cultural engagement.

Interactive process: The VALUE acronym, Roland/Jones conflict.

The acronym Validate Relationships, ask great Questions, Listen, Understand and Empower is experienced as we pair up your leaders, give them a case study each (that puts them in conflict) and recommend that they utilize the acronym to create the solution.

4. Activating the Communication Shift

Increasing the quality and efficiency of Team Communication

Interactive process: Architect Builder

We play this communication game world-wide to develop a deep understanding around how to increase the quality and efficiency of team communication… debriefing this session brings multiple insights that can be implemented immediately.

Value To Members:

Members will develop a deeper understanding of their team’s mindset and how these 5 states of mind influence cultural results.

You will work through Ryan’s new Thinking Tendencies Model to create a deeper awareness of your people’s thinking. The rest of our session will interactively explore 4 different engagement processes to shift people’s personal and cultural mindset.

Specific take-aways will arise as we interactively explore how to SHIFT Individual, leadership and cultural Mindset.

• Your people will self-identify the Qualities that they prioritize and how focusing on these strengths brings their thinking “above the line”
• They will take away a foundational understanding of the Leadership Characteristics that their culture desires from them.
• The VALUE acronym will solidify how leaders can do “conflict” and keep their people’s performance mindset activated.

Finally, huge cultural discoveries will emerge as we interactively explore how our teams should increase the quality and efficiency of our communication to positively SHIFT our cultural mindset.

Speaker Biography:

Ryan Walter played and coached more than 1100 games over 17 seasons in the National Hockey League. Drafted second overall by the Washington Capitals, Ryan was named the youngest NHL captain, won a Stanley Cup with the Montreal Canadiens, and finished his playing career with his hometown Vancouver Canucks. Ryan was an NHL All-Star and 3-time Team Canada member, World Junior Captain, Vice-President of the National Hockey League Players Association, BC Hockey Hall of Fame inductee and NHL Man of the Year. Ryan won a Gold Medal as Head Coach of Canada’s National Women’s Hockey Team, has been the founding partner in 2 start-up companies, a TV hockey analyst, hockey expert and actor, and the President of a Professional Hockey Team. Ryan has a master’s degree in leadership/business and is the author of 6 books. With an interactive training focus, Ryan has been developing leadership capacity, team energy and high-performance in corporate leadership executives and teams for over 25 years.

Thursday, August 20, 2026— Larry Olsen

Leaders will learn that to achieve exponential growth, not just a small percentage in incremental improvement, requires a change in how they’re thinking. As a result of moving from what to how they think, they now think differently and can accomplish more with their people than they once thought possible.  Since 95% of people think about what’s ever on their minds and less than 5% know how they think, the presentation unlocks the key Brain Hacks to move to the 5%.

3 key areas are covered:

1. Understanding the key role our attitudes play in performance and bridging the gap between what we think about and how we think.

*An experiential exercise is done with the entire group, followed by debrief.

2. How our minds work as leaders to identify blind spots holding back organizational growth.

*A booklet is handed out to each participant to answer questions based on their new learnings and exercises to assimilate it. Booklet used through the full workshop.

*An experiential exercise is done with the entire group, followed by debrief.

3. Just what is the difference between goals and visions and how understanding the difference opens us up to exponential growth.

*An individual exercise is completed with small group discussion.

Value To Members:

Each member will:

1. Discover new opportunities for maximizing employee potential and where and with whom they can upgrade their attitude for optimal performance.
2. Learn how to identify blind spots in their thinking, transferring limiting beliefs into new opportunities.
3. Rethink the importance of their organizational alignment for growth, through clear understanding and articulating vision.
4. Implement a ‘Purpose Driven Engagement Moment’ and identify where and when they will use it within their business for maximum impact.

Through the learnings of this workshop, combined with their real-life experiences, participants will be able to immediately take this upgraded thinking to their teams and business. The results generate increased engagement to the company’s vision and goals and reclaimed profits, by learning to think differently about people and their day-to-day circumstances through a new and re-energized growth mindset.

Speaker Biography:

Larry has been awarded the Vistage Top New Speaker award as one of 12 out of 400 presenters to receive this illustrious award for his presentations in 2024. A little of his background includes Larry working as a Performance Driven Neurology specialist since 1983 and started his own company, Aperneo LLC, a New Perspective, in May of 1995. Larry, a CEO, thought leader, author, and podcast host has over 40 years of expertise in shaping Fortune 500 company cultures as well as entrepreneurs, small businesses, and athletes. His focus is on assisting leaders and their employees in understanding the key brain hacks of neuroscience unlocking the innate power within themselves and their associates. Once they become engaged at that core individual level, then they discover that their results can be as unlimited as the human imagination itself, and most importantly. . . sustainable.

He has assisted in creating outstanding results in iconic companies like PepsiCo, Lexus, Starbucks, State Farm, Akron University, Washington Mutual Bank, United Airlines, and many others.

Larry was born and raised in the Seattle area and currently lives in Scottsdale AZ. He and his wife and business partner Diane have 5 grown, successful children living in the US and abroad.

Thursday, June 18, 2026—Rena Somersan

What the HECK is going on with Compensation!?!  Getting Pay right is always tricky business but in this economy what do you need to know?  In this presentation we will cover the reasons behind the craziness in compensation and address the 3Ps for Key Employees. We’ll cover Philosophy – how to craft an executive or workforce comp philosophy that helps you attract, motivate and retain top talent; Pay Levels – how to ensure that you are paying competitively in YOUR market for talent; and Plan Design – how to make sure that your short- and long-term incentive plan designs drive organizational performance.  Make no mistake, the economy notwithstanding, you still need to pay attention to pay!  Somersan will walk through several live examples from her clients to showcase the critical decision-making that goes into formulating, benchmarking and designing the Executive and Workforce Compensation Packages.

Value To Members:

After seeing the examples, participants will explore insights into crafting their own Compensation Philosophy statements and, as a result, will be well on their way to ensuring that their pay packages will allow them to attract, motivate and retain their top talent.  They will have insights into market compensation benchmarking and how that can help them stay competitive on salaries in the marketplace.  They will see various examples of short- and long-term incentive programs and will talk through how to determine which type of program is right for their company at its current size/scope.

Speaker Biography:

Rena Somersan is a Managing Principal with Newport’s Compensation Consulting team. She has over twenty-five years of consulting and industry experience assisting clients in executing their strategic human resources and compensation initiatives. Rena is often invited to speak at conferences in the areas of her focus which has been in workforce and executive compensation, performance management initiatives, talent motivation and retention. She has a bachelor’s degree from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and an MBA from Koc University in Istanbul, Turkey, where she lived and worked for 13 years after working in Japan for 3 years.

Thursday, March 19, 2026— Jessica Pierce

While modern medicine may extend our lifespan, it falls short in enhancing the quality of those extra years. With obesity and chronic disease at record highs, the medical system is an industry that thrives on treating illness rather than preventing it.

Many believe that longevity is simply a matter of luck or genetics, something over which we have little control. However, nothing could be further from the truth. The reality is we have significant control over our future health—it’s up to us to take charge.

Longevity is a choice. It’s a choice to reject the conventional notion that disease and decline are inevitable parts of aging. We have the power to forge a better path. Affordable, simple screenings can reveal early indicators of potential disease or dysfunction decades before diagnosis.

By using this data to make small, sustainable adjustments to our lifestyle, nutrition, and habits today, we can stop these risks from progressing to disease. Best of all, the actions that prevent future disease also result in a more vibrant, energized, and purposeful life today. There’s no reason to settle for anything less than an extraordinary future.

Value To Members:

Executives, especially CEOs, typically work over 100,000 hours by age 65,  sacrificing their health to lead successful companies and provide for their families. Looking toward the future, the question becomes: How do you want to spend it? After all, wealth means little without health. In this presentation, you’ll learn how to take charge and become the CEO of your health.

You’ll discover how to approach long-term health with the no-nonsense precision and urgency of an intelligence analyst—identifying critical risks before they turn into diseases.  Takeaways include actionable steps to collect critical data, take decisive action, and ultimately, secure the peace of mind that comes with a limitless future.

Speaker Biography:

CEO/Founder The Longevity Architects LLC

A former U.S. intelligence officer, Jessica brings over two decades of expertise in analyzing complex human networks to her work optimizing human health. She applies the same analytical rigor to deciphering the function of the biochemical networks that influence aging and wellness.

Specializing in helping high-performing CEOs and executives achieve optimal health, Jessica analyzes clients’ habits, lifestyles, and biomarkers to identify health risks and vulnerabilities before they progress to disease. As a coach, she empowers clients to prevent—and even reverse—the decline often considered part of “normal” aging.
Her innovative, data-driven, and human-centered approach empowers clients with the knowledge, strategy, and tools to live longer, happier, and healthier lives,
A national board-certified health and wellness coach (NBHWC) and Functional Diagnostic Nutrition Practitioner (FDN-P), Jessica blends a unique background in quantitative analysis with action steps to enhance longevity. She brings a root-cause, system-based approach to health, wellness, and longevity. Her methods often achieve what conventional medicine alone cannot, offering a comprehensive path to vitality and unleashing longevity.
A North Carolina native, Jessica holds a BA from UNC-Chapel Hill and an MA from Columbia University. In her spare time, she enjoys spending time with her daughter Vera, caring for her two foster-failure dogs, and advocating for San Antonio’s homeless and unwanted animals.

Thursday, February 19, 2026— Eric Coryell

Conventional wisdom says that teams outperform a group of individuals. Reality, however, has proven that this is the case only if the team is functional and accountable. The truth is that most teams, left to their own devices, are dysfunctional and therefore fail to meet our performance expectations. As a result, many leaders and organizations get frustrated with teams and find themselves struggling to manage accountability in their organization.

Content highlights include:

1) Four characteristics common to all highly functional teams and the one that gets them to become accountable,

2) Understanding of how fear of separation drives all individual behavior in a group setting and how to minimize fear of separation by learning to appropriately deal with real issues,

3) Sources of all real issues,

4) How to get your team out of “non-work” mode and stop bringing their problems to your doorstep, and

5) The secret to getting people to actually speak for themselves and how to build the trust levels necessary to make that possible.

Value To Members:

Members will be instructed on:

• How to keep from carrying the load for your team
• How to make it safe for your team to share what they really feel in a group setting
• A new perspective on what accountability really is and how to put people in position to be accountable
• Next steps to take to create functional teams in your organization
• Changes that you as a leader will have to be ready to make to allow all of this to happen
• How to engage your employees in your organization

Speaker Biography:

Eric now dedicates his working life to helping other leaders engage their employees through strategic alignment and the creation of functional and accountable teams. He learned the importance and impact of achieving meaningful levels of trust and accountability in organizations during his “working career” which spanned over twenty years across three different manufacturing organizations. During this time, he was blessed in holding a variety of positions, including two stints as President, during which he failed in every way imaginable but escaped unscathed and having learned a lot about the promises and pitfalls of leadership and leading teams.

Thursday, December 18, 2025 — Sam Richter, CSP, CPAE

In today’s information-saturated market, the key to business growth is your ability to connect genuinely and authentically with your audience. Yet at the same time, “speed wins” when it comes to discovering opportunities and decision makers. How can you effectively and efficiently manage both? In this dynamic program, you will discover…

• The power of online intel and AI-powered resources to improve sales, communication, marketing, and operations in ways most never thought possible.
• A mathematically proven formula for revenue growth that reveals your best opportunities, decision-makers, and ways to connect that generate positive responses.
• The “how-to” tactics of online search, AI, and Generative AI, along with the ethical dimensions involved in using these tools in a fast-paced and evolving business landscape.
• How to transform the “R” in CRM into Relevance, to get past gatekeepers, make a great impression, and highly personalize your messages based on what others care about. 

Value To Members:

This high impact, engaging, and interactive program is packed with relevant examples and step-by-step instructions. All attendees receive access to Sam Richter’s custom AI-powered Intel Resources, ensuring you can immediately implement the new skills you learned in your business.

Speaker Biography:

Considered a leading authority on sales intelligence and digital reputation management, bestselling author and National Hall of Fame speaker Sam Richter, CSP, CPAE delivers his top-rated, incredibly dynamic, highly entertaining, and extremely high-content keynote presentations and workshop sessions to audiences worldwide. Sam was named one of the World’s Top 50 Sales Keynote Speakers, one of the Top 15 Virtual Presenters, and one of the Top 25 Most Influential Sales Leaders.

In addition to his speaking, Sam is a technology entrepreneur, and he has developed numerous search-related programs used by thousands of top organizations and business executives around the globe.

For his work, Sam has won numerous awards including a Gold Award at the International Film Festival and a Codie Award, the ‘Oscars’ of the software industry. He has been featured in thousands of news programs and publications including CNN, USA Today, and Forbes. He serves on the Board of Directors for numerous technology companies, and he is a past finalist for Inc. Magazine’s Entrepreneur of the Year.

Learn more about Sam at https://www.samrichter.com

Thursday, November 20, 2025 — Gair Maxwell

Program Description:

Is there something to be learned from the origin of legends that explains why certain brands become larger-than-life icons? So much so that they never beg for customers, have no trouble attracting top-notch talent and are welcomed with open arms whenever they walk through the door or call for an appointment. What if a profoundly simple, yet powerful idea could inspire any organization – big or small – to stand out as an undisputed, unrivalled, “Category of One” with a magnetically irresistible brand identity; a foundation for creating modern-day legacy in the Age of Disruption?

You will see with uncommon clarity the invisible forces that entice millions of visitors to take selfies before a single painting at the Louvre in Paris are astonishingly similar to what inspires more than 4,000 people to queue each day at a Las Vegas pawn shop, swarm a New Orleans coffee shop or flock to a Seattle fish market. Exploring how legends are created in the first place, Gair reveals how anyone in any business or non-profit category, can create a brand reputation that makes them so top-of-mind iconic, they become the equivalent to being the “Apple”, “Disney” or “NIKE” of their competitive space.

BIG LITTLE LEGENDS challenges conventional marketing truisms and rejects short-sighted, decades-old “spray and pray” practices aimed at short-term results. This program dares to venture on a different path and challenge leaders on key issues such as their Brand Voice and how much it’s being heard in a noisy, competitive market. Leaders will also be forced to confront the brutal facts about the relevance and effectiveness of the vehicles currently used to communicate their Brand Story and whether they are thinking far enough forward with their overall business and brand strategy to create Long-Term Impact in a short-term world.

Value To Members:

In this highly experiential, high-level program you will discover:

• Why there is a new sense of urgency for organization to challenge accepted notions of how long-term brand-building really works these days; especially as it relates to the role of leadership, vision and creating modern-day legacy built on enduring values.
• Four Common Characteristics shared by legends from Einstein to Edison; from legendary brands such as Harvard and Harley-Davidson and how they can be adapted by any business of any size regardless of geography, category or industry sector.
• How the ancient art of storytelling can help any organization that struggles with its message; explaining what they do and getting their people aligned with their mission and purpose.
• The #1 Key Ingredient that makes any business or personal brand legend from Lombardi to Lulu Lemon and Led Zeppelin remarkably and disruptively different.
• How new digital platforms have crushed the traditional media-industrial complex and leveled the marketing playing field, in a way that opens the door for your customers to spread your unique message on your behalf.

Biography:

Endlessly curious about the origin of legends and their timeless impact, Gair Maxwell is an internationally recognized, best-selling Author, Keynote Speaker and Brand Strategist. His original, market-tested ideas have inspired some companies to grow 15-30 TIMES while creating an irresistible “Category of One”. Recognized as a 3-time Vistage Top Performer and “Speaker of the Year” by TEC Canada, he is also a fully accredited Tennessee Squire, lifelong fan of the NFL’s Pittsburgh Steelers and 5-Time Runner-up on the prestigious M.G.A. Golf Tour.

Gair has worked with some of the world’s most dynamic organizations, including Apple Specialist Marketing Group, Caterpillar, NAPA, Leo Burnett (Taiwan), Virginia Tech and others, while sharing conference stages with business icons such as Sir Richard Branson and Gene Simmons.

Thursday, August 21, 2025 — Matt George

Program Description:

Imagine speaking about your company’s products or services and being  ABSOLUTELY CERTAIN you are engaging your customers or clients in the most compelling way possible.

Imagine communicating with your team and employees and being  SURE that you are motivating and inspiring them to reach their full potential.

Veteran researcher, social scientist, and executive coach Matt George guides you through The Communications Equation – an easy-to-remember formula to ensure that your messages are as persuasive and compelling as possible.

The program is a workshop where participants will learn how to craft their perfect “WHY” statements, analyze their own unique communication styles, and receive concrete and personalized recommendations for how to improve. Members will walk away understanding how to communicate, engage clients, and inspire their team more effectively.

Value To Members:

Members will view REAL research results that provide insight on specific word choice and connotations.

Members will gain awareness of their UNIQUE speaking style, including tone, body language, intonation, and delivery. Members will see their own “About Us” statements from their corporate websites analyzed with suggestions on how to improve.

Biography:

As a social scientist, researcher, focus group moderator and executive coach, Matt has a deep understanding of the impact that message can play in your company’s reputation.  His track record of success includes the most impactful messaging strategies, creative concepts, and contextual audience segmentation analysis available on the market. His clients include Fortune 500 companies, education non-profits, entertainment creators, tech CEO’s and trade associations. He’s perhaps best-known for his work with HBO’s ground-breaking communications and market research. He has collaborated with The College Board, Facebook, AARP, Google, The Fred Rogers Company, UFC, Netflix, and many, more.  Matt’s research approach is grounded in attention-to-detail and a focus on understanding the context of why consumers behave the way that they do. His ability to create compelling narratives from data analysis and his love of quantitative research has constructed the strong strategic framework upon which many creative campaigns are built.

Matt attended the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, where he received dual bachelor’s degrees in film / video studies and political science, and has a Masters of International Security Policy Studies from The George Washington University.

Thursday, May 22, 2025 — Michael Brody-Waite

Program Description:

In this workshop participants learn how to detect and overcome the 4 Leader Addictions that are costing employees 10 hours per week and the ability to exceed their growth goals:

• Saying Yes When You Could Say No
• Hiding A Weakness
• Avoiding Difficult Conversations
• Holding Back Your Unique Perspective

Overcoming these addictions enables 3 Key Decisions:

• Preparing to scale company culture and connection in a virtualized world
• How to develop key leadership talent from within
• Identifying which priorities to eliminate or enhance to achieve more with less

Brody-Waite takes the system that millions of drugs addicts use to recover and uniquely applies it as a leadership system that allows any person and organization to unlock their full potential. From senior executives at Fortune 10 companies to front line managers at small businesses, this system enables participants to achieve something they deemed impossible within 28 days of the workshop. 

Value To Members:

Using a simple and proven step by step system, participants will diagnose which leadership addiction is impacting them the most, calculate it’s cost and develop a simple and specific 28 Day Action Plan to overcome it. Over the next 28 days they will execute their action plan for only 1 minute per day and easily teach their team how to do the same.  After 28 days imagine an entire team that has reclaimed 10 hours per week, increased team connectivity and enabled the organization to achieve its growth goals faster.  

Speaker Biography:

At the age of 23, Michael was a full-blown drug addict. He was kicked out of college, fired from his job, and evicted from his apartment. He had no money and no home, was throwing up blood, and believed he would be dead before his 30th birthday. Then, on September 1, 2002, after running out of options and fearing death, he checked into rehab, entered recovery, and has been transforming himself every day since. In 2010, Michael left a Fortune 50 company at the height of the recession to cofound and lead InQuicker, a healthcare SaaS company that under his leadership landed on the Inc 500 list by growing 20,000% in less than six years.  InQuicker and Michael were given numerous awards including “Best Place to Work,” Healthcare Company of the Year, Entrepreneur of the Year and Most Admired CEO.

After selling InQuicker to a publicly traded company in 2015, Michael led a 501C3 that helped over 2,000 entrepreneurs start or grow a business each year. He then gave a TEDx talk that went viral and has over 2.2M views in over 25 countries which inspired the #1 new release book “Great Leaders Live Like Drug Addicts: How to Lead Like Your Life Depends On It” endorsed by thought leaders like Daniel Pink, Greg McKewon and Cordia Harrington. Now Michael is on a mission to Revolutionize the Rules of Leadership.

Thursday, February 20, 2025 — Becky Sharpe

Program Description:

Every person has a best version of themselves. Some are fortunate to get to know and be this person for many years, enjoying a professional and personal life full of activities that feed their natural gifts and talents and brings them joy; others only see glimpses of their best self and never fully evolve. This workshop introduces participants to 8 areas of focus, that when prioritized will show participants simple and effective ways to sharpen their skills and focus on what brings them the most positive energy. These eight to great are: Mindset, Physical, Entourage, Fiscal, Nature, Community, Family and Timeline. Workshop participants will evaluate their ‘three words and their shadows or opposites.

Value To Members:

During and following the workshop, Vistage members will identify from where and with whom they will benefit from spending energy and what or who they need to avoid. Once they have identified the three words that describe them at their most evolved and happiest, they will naturally begin to choose activities and people who support these words. Mine are fit, fun and focused.

Biography:

A Vistage member for 17 years, Becky Sharpe’s passion is to help people grow.  She is the CEO and Owner of International Scholarship and Tuition Services where her focus is on effective leadership and innovation through the lens of continuous growth. When she joined the company in 2002, their revenues were $3.5M. She credits her mentors and Vistage Chairs for helping her implement an intentional delegation plan that has resulted in growth to over $150M. Becky holds a Bachelor of Arts degree in German and French from Vanderbilt University and an MBA in international marketing from Owen Graduate School of Management at Vanderbilt University. She sits on several boards and in her spare time, she enjoys hiking, cycling, gardening, and international travel.  Becky is married to Michael and is the proud mother to three young adults to whom she regularly speaks in German. Her go-to karaoke song is Patsy Cline’s Walking After Midnight.

Thursday, January 16, 2025 — John Mautner

Program Description:

At the age of 26 and starting with only $10,000, no connections or zero entrepreneurial experience, John will take the group into an interactive hands-on experience like no other. Discover step-by-step how he built one of Americas 500 fastest growing companies. Learn how in just 7 years, John grew the company to $100,000,000 in systemwide sales.

Discover the painful and tough lessons John learned along the way and how to avoid the most common pitfalls that slow growth and erode valuation.

John will share is formula:

“The 10 Critical Questions” that uncovers dozens of great opportunities for growth inside the company.

“The Process Map” How To identify speedbumps in any business model that slows growth.

“The 7M Analysis” How to Identify the “select few” that gives you 80% of the results.

“Tiger Teams” how John empowered his people to leverage their knowledge and creativity to drive success faster, enhance retention and create a winning workforce.

Value To Members:

Attendees will go on an interactive hands-on experience to find their hidden million.

1. Learn step-by-step how you can find millions of dollars of untapped opportunities inside your business.
2. John will show you the right way to empower your people to work in Tiger-Teams that drives profitable growth 3 times faster and greatly enhances employee retention.
3. Discover valuable lessons on “What to Do” and “What Not to Do” that can save you a substantial amount of time, frustration and money.

Members will work ON their businesses, find out what holding them back from rapid growth and get inspired to empower everyone to achieve goals right now, no matter the economic landscape.

Attendees will apply John’s unique approach and the proven business tools that any company can utilize to build a more profitable and valuable company.

 Biography:

After 20 years of business success, including founding five multi-million-dollar companies before turning 40, John Mautner founded the Cycle of Success Institute in 2001. Cosi is the first and only business school in the U.S. that teaches small and mid-sized companies how to implement and rapidly turnaround, rebuild and restructure into emerging industry leaders.

Mautner hosts a live talk radio show in Chicago, “Small Business Talk.” He has been featured on MSNBC, Yahoo Finance, and many others. He is a profit improvement columnist for Entrepreneur Magazine, a member of the USA Today Small Business Panel, the Illinois Honorary Chairman for the U.S. Department of Commerce Small Business Committee, and a columnist for industry trade journals.

Thursday, December 19, 2024 — Matt Zaun

Program Description:

This engaging and interactive session gives Vistage Members the tools they need to influence their employees and customers through the right messages. During the workshop, Members will create a “story bank” that harnesses the psychology of inspiration to motivate those around them to action. This proven, story-based process improves employee and client conversations to get outstanding results.

Value To Members:

Using their own stories, Members will identify powerful messages that they can immediately utilize in business and their lives.  The result: creating a “story bank” that will inspire teams and increase sales.

 Biography:

Matt Zaun is an award-winning speaker and storyteller who empowers business leaders to inspire their teams and clients to action through the art of strategic storytelling. Matt’s past engagements in the private sector have catalyzed radical sales increases for over 300 organizations that range from financial institutions to the health and wellness industry. In addition to his work in the private sector, Matt has worked with hundreds of politicians to improve the quality and reach of their engagement. Matt worked closely with these clients on their media and communication strategies, including speeches and campaign messages at the local, state, and national level, to achieve remarkable results. Matt shares his expertise in persuasion with CEOs, executives, and sales professionals, who he coaches on the art of influence and how to leverage this for profits and impact. When he’s not speaking, Matt can usually be found in his home in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, spending time with his family – his wife Courtney, and their three kids, Elliot, JL, and Roman.

Thursay, November 21, 2024 — Irina Baranov

Program Description:

Leaders serve many roles – visionary, motivator, manager, problem solver… but what about the role of coach?

Sometimes this one’s the hardest. We’re not naturally inclined to do some of the counterintuitive-but-so-valuable work of coaching. It’s much easier to answer, solve and move on. But that doesn’t help people grow and develop. It doesn’t move them forward. It doesn’t expand their thinking and ability, and in the long run, doesn’t build your company, family or community.

Here’s where the art and science of coaching can help. Ready to help people become genuinely better at what they do? Ready to have significant impact? Ready to see better results than ever before? Get ready to coach.

Value To Members:

In this fun and highly interactive workshop, participants will learn how coaching is different from other forms of leading and managing, and the key elements of coaching well.

They will learn and practice techniques that they will be able to use immediately themselves, as well as teach them to others on their team.

5 Keys to the art and science of coaching:

• The coaching state
• Powerful questions
• Creating new possibilities

Taking action:

• Creating an accountability and feedback loop

This presentation will amplify your group’s connection to each other. This will be an experiential, fun, eye-opening and deeply bonding session for the members and the chair. Everyone will leave with better coaching skills and better connection to each other.

Biography:

As a certified executive coach, Vistage Master Chair, faculty member and speaker, Irina Baranov works with CEO’s, leaders, and organizations – taking them from good to great. In her 1-on-1 work with the top 1%, as well as with groups and audiences around the world, she helps create awareness and lasting/meaningful change in how leaders communicate, and specifically in how they coach others to greatness.

In her workshops, keynote presentations and corporate training seminars, Irina delivers a blend of warmth, wisdom, and humor. Her stories and exercises are designed to inspire insight, real learning, and sustained action. Her expertise has been featured on CBS, NBC and ABC, as well as in numerous print and online publications. Get ready for an unforgettable workshop of learning, laughing and building some new coaching muscles!

Thursday, August 22, 2024 — Yoav Suprun

Program Description:

Lower back and neck pain has cost billions of dollars in workers compensation and reduced productivity. These days it is a true epidemic requiring the corporate culture to shift to prevention strategies. Activities of daily living whether at home, work or even while traveling have been linked to lower back pain, sciatica, neck pain and stiffness. Key discussion points in this talk will be:

• The true reason many suffer from back pain and how to self-treat and prevent it.
• Neck pain and stiffness are very prevalent. What should one know to treat and prevent it?
• What is the secret to aging with perfect posture?

The audience will learn and practice how to recognize, treat and prevent these common aches and pains. Often these mechanical pains can be resolved quickly and efficiently by utilizing specific exercises. In addition, they will learn the key points of spine care while at work, home or traveling to keep their spine healthy and maintain a perfect posture for life. Group work and problem-solving sessions will allow for an immediate opportunity to apply specific exercises on each other to practice these unique self-healing strategies.

The cost savings for any organization that invests in executives and employee’s education on prevention of common musculo-skeletal orthopedic problems are substantial. In my workshops, I educate on the reasons many suffer from back pain or sciatica, neck pain and stiffness. The participants learn and practice how to deal with real life scenarios. By utilizing group work they practice how to treat their own spine but also, most importantly, how to prevent pain. Fortune 500 companies and business groups have invited Yoav to provide these informative workshops and learn the secrets of self-healing and prevention strategies. As an international speaker on the field of prevention of musculoskeletal orthopedic problems, I enjoy helping clients with tips and techniques on self-care and how to avoid medications, injections and of course surgeries.

Value To Members:

Practice sessions with real life scenarios will allow for members education on mechanical pain as well as immediate implementation of specific exercises to abolish and prevent it. The members will understand the benefit and opportunity for cost reduction of musculo-skeletal injuries at the workplace.

Biography:

After serving in the Israeli Air Force for 4 years, Dr. Yoav Suprun earned his clinical Doctorate in Physical Therapy (DPT) from New York University in 2003. He continued his post graduate education and received his Diploma in Mechanical Diagnosis and Therapy (MDT) in 2007. As a TEDx Speaker and an “Orthopedic Clinical Specialist” (OCS), Dr. Yoav is highly sought after for his expertise and innovation on self-healing and prevention strategies by consulting corporations, executives, dealing with loss of employees and reduced productivity due to common back or neck pain. He is the president of “South Beach Spine” (SoBe Spine), a concierge physical therapy practice in Miami Beach, FL, and a faculty member with the McKenzie Institute USA, where, as a continuing education provider, he trains healthcare professionals in the McKenzie Method of Mechanical Diagnosis and Therapy (MDT).

Dr. Yoav’s simple, yet highly effective tips to treat and prevent mechanical back or neck or extremity pain have created a strong following of devotees among corporations, executives, athletes, and the public. His finely-honed, engaging speaking skills enable him to explain in an easy-to-understand manner these mechanical problems as well as workplace ergonomics. He educates (while entertaining) his executives and their employees on how they can often self-treat and prevent common orthopedic problems, without medications, injections, or invasive procedures.

Thursday, June 20, 2024 — Klyn Elsbury

Everyone faces “circumstances” that stand between them and their best life. It doesn’t matter how smart or how successful you are. We all believe we have internal and external factors that “limit” our options. Wouldn’t it be great if there was a simple internal process you could apply anytime, anywhere to remove these constraints, freeing you to have and do the things you always wanted but never thought possible?

Klyn Elsbury was born with cystic fibrosis and given 14 years to live. Today, at 34, she has overcome more than 70 hospitalizations (more than 100,000 hours in wards). Klyn used her 100,000 hours to master nlp and how to respond during life’s difficult moments. The workshop focuses on leveraging the lessons she learned from facing life, when, at any moment, she might be just days away from death.  Although originally designed to help sales teams increase performance; this can and has been successfully created to appeal to leadership teams.

Klyn studied worldwide religions, societies, and human psychology, condensing what she learned into 3 simple steps anyone can put into practice. She applied this knowledge to her own situation, transcending her circumstances, and now helps leaders and high-performance (sales) teams overcome limiting beliefs and behaviors resulting in greater ROI.

Klyn has two best-selling books and a thriving consulting/speaking practice where she writes sales playbooks using neuroscience tactics to help teams not only improve their ability to close deals but strategically scale their organizations.

 Value To Members:

In her workshop, you’ll learn how to:

Unstuck Your Self

• Your current best stuff
• Potentially including unstucking your biases and expired beliefs about yourself and your employees.
• Reprioritize and better articulate your personal life goals, core values, and mission statement.
• Create a roadmap for how to accelerate and drive peak performance.

UnStuck Your Company

• Developing a mentally tough team.
• How individual grit becomes company grit.
• How sustainability translates into productivity.
• How CEOs drive sustainability (Golden Rule vs Platinum Rule).
• How employees learn to be responsible for their own contribution and balance.

Biography:

My name is Klyn Elsbury. I am a business owner, and 2x author, who happens to host workshops and training on all things relating to sales tips and mindset shifts. I am also an athlete, love country music, go to church regularly, giggle a lot, have too much energy, and take up to 40 medications a day to manage my cystic fibrosis and diabetes.

I started school wanting to be a lawyer, but the doctors said I wouldn’t live long enough. I switched to wanting to be a high school teacher until my advisor said I wasn’t in the right major. Now I teach adults business strategies (mostly for the legal field).

During my 20th hospitalization (70+ total), I would read Selling Power Magazine, and there was a quote on one of the pages I’ve never forgotten,

“In life, you don’t get what you deserve, you get what you can negotiate.”

Watching my mom negotiate medical bills, and my dad negotiate throughout his career in sales; I became fascinated with helping others learn negotiation tactics to afford a higher quality of life for their loved ones (just like my family did for me).

And in 2019; I left the world of recruiting to write my 2nd book on sales & negotiation and built my business, MK Foundation.

I loved working in groups and being around high achievers who can admit that some days, they just want MORE. More success, more time with family, more love… You get the point. And knowing we’re all just one negotiation away from more…

WHICH brings me to today. I knew it then and know it even more now. You all are HIGH ACHIEVERS. But life got hard, and you didn’t get what you deserved. So THE RESET workshop was born for those who just seem to be having a really bad day, sometimes for years at a time.

Eventually, I figured out how to blend the neuroscience tactics of THE RESET program with the negotiation tactics and sales operations behind SCALE YOUR SALESFORCE and well… here we are folks!

I’m on tour in 72 cities in 2024; mostly helping business owners within the legal field, recruiting field, and healthcare learn that sales isn’t a bad word…and that even when times are hard; we are one negotiation away from a higher quality business, life, and purpose on the planet.

Thursday, April 18, 2024 — Chris Czarnik

Program Description:

This workshop is unique in that it provides logical, actionable instructions on how to recruit, engage and develop talent for an organization that are low to no cost solutions.

Workshop framework includes:

• Are people UNWILLING or UNABLE to come to work for you?
• Why are your current employees not actively recruiting talent into your organization?
• What if your employees could create an internal career map within your organization to drive their own development and increase retention…with no extra work for HR or managers?
• The big idea is to turn HR into a proactive talent finding organization using many ideas that are already used within your sales organization.

Participants will be able to answer the following:

• If people are ABLE but UNWILLING to come to work for us, what do we do next?
• What is your reputation in the community as an employer and why are people going elsewhere?
• Employees driving and guiding their own growth inside the organization is possible.

Value To Members:

An entirely new but logical way to evaluate and react to the talent shortage inside their organization that is actionable and able to be implemented the next day. A new way to recruit, engage, retain, and develop talent inside their organization.

Biography:

Chris Czarnik is a subject matter expert with over 20 years of job search counseling, training, and coaching. Speaker, author, and coach on the topics of talent recruiting , engagement, and retention. Chris is the architect of critical theory, processes and books designed to transform hiring and employee development efforts.  His style is like no other. You will not only be energized and delighted but will walk away with actionable strategies they can put to work right away to become hunters of talent.  Two books: “Winning the War for Talent” and “The Human Search Engine” have served thousands of companies and individuals. International speaker whose processes are actively used by the U.S. Congress and major universities.  Chris has spent over 20 years analyzing hiring from every angle and knows the frustrations and joys of trying to find people that truly fit an organization’s culture and values.  Subject matter expert on career choice and job changes for Pearson Publishing the largest publisher in the U.S.  Former military officer, HR manager, career services manager and job search adviser.

The Human Search Engine was introduced to the 113th United States Congress as a national job search and workforce development model in 2013. In Sept. 2016, The US House of Representatives adopted his process as the outplacement tool for their EAP program.

Thursday, February 22, 2024 — Ross Hartman

Program Description:

Discover the competitive advantage that Artificial Intelligence (AI) can bring to your organization in this strategy-focused presentation. As a forward-thinking CEO, you’ll uncover the secrets of AI and learn how to tap into its potential to drive business success across various domains.

Key Decisions:

• Understanding the rapidly emerging market trend of Artificial Intelligence (AI).
• Identifying practical applications of AI across your workforce for cost reduction, productivity enhancement, and improved competitive edge.
• Preparing your organization for a swiftly approaching AI-first business landscape.

We’ll demystify AI, exploring its strengths and limitations, and reveal how it can revolutionize your business by optimizing operations, enhancing decision-making, and delivering an unparalleled customer experience.

You’ll gain invaluable insights into the transformative impact of AI on cost reduction, productivity enhancement, and sharpening your organization’s competitive edge as we guide you through a list of practical applications of AI across various departments and roles within your organization.

In an exploration of how to transform your company into an AI-ready organization, you’ll learn the essentials of implementing AI, assessing ROI potential, upskilling your workforce, and optimizing AI performance. Together, we’ll explore the future of AI as the driving force behind your company’s brain, envisioning a world where untapped data becomes the fuel for unprecedented growth and intelligent decision-making.

Value To Members:

• Cutting-Edge Insights: Gain a competitive advantage by staying ahead of the curve with the latest knowledge on AI applications, strategies, and emerging trends. Empower yourself to make informed decisions that can shape the future of your organization.
• Actionable Strategies: Equip yourself with practical, action-oriented guidance on how to successfully implement AI within your organization, from developing an AI strategy to monitoring and optimizing its performance.
• Workforce Development: Understand the importance of upskilling and reskilling your workforce to adapt to the evolving AI-driven landscape. Foster a culture of continuous learning and adaptability to future-proof your organization.
• Future-Proof Your Organization: By understanding the potential of AI as your company’s brain, you’ll be better equipped to harness its power to drive growth, streamline operations, and make data-driven decisions that can elevate your business to new heights.
• Comprehensive AI Overview: Obtain a thorough understanding of how AI can lead to cost reduction, increased productivity, improved competitiveness, enhanced customer experience, and better decision-making. Gain a solid foundation for leveraging AI to transform your business.

By the end of this session, you’ll be able to answer:

• What are the strengths and limitations of AI?
• How can AI be applied to various roles within my organization?
• How will knowledge work change?
• How do I get my organization ready for an AI-powered future?

Biography:

Ross Hartmann is an expert at integrating the latest AI technology in businesses as well as navigating the rapidly evolving tech industry. He’s worked with businesses from $2m to $500m to design and implement an AI roadmap and strategy. He has been a tech lead and developer in the AI industry for over 10 years. He has a background as both a Technology Director at an AI company and a coach at Dale Carnegie of Orange County. Having received the Highest Award for Achievement, Effective Communication & Human Relations/Skills for Success from Dale Carnegie, he is honored to bring his passion and expertise in AI to Vistage members.

Thursday, December 14, 2023 — Scott Fritz

Program Description:

Every so often a presentation comes along that captures the attention of the hard-working entrepreneur and literally changes the paradigm of how they view their business. You will experience Scott Fritz’s entrepreneurial journey firsthand, as he shares with you the business tools, action focused exercises and mindset philosophy that allowed him to achieve The 40 Hour Work YEAR.

From the startup years with no pay, through the challenges and thrills of growing a multi-million-dollar company and positioning it for sale, Scott shares his vast business experience using a matter of fact, TAKE ACTION NOW approach.

Value To Members:

• Members will learn how to:
• Build an asset, not just a business
• Remove unprofitable clients and maximize margins
• Build owner wealth and company value at the same time
• Develop simple performance metrics that maximize results
• Create decision and alignment filters for your entire organization
• Position your company to acquire other businesses or create an exit
• Develop the confidence to shift your mindset at precisely the right moment
• Create a culture where everyone is accountable for your company’s success
• Transition from working in and on your business to a passive investor

Speaker Biography:

In 2010 Scott authored the 40 Hour Work YEAR. The book chronicles Scott’s entrepreneurial journey firsthand, as he shares strategic business methods, action focused exercises and the mindset philosophy that allowed him to achieve the 40 Hour Work YEAR and become a passive investor in his own business.

Scott founded Growth Connect in 2008. By leveraging business coaching services, advisory board development and angel investment resources, Growth Connect specializes in transforming businesses into assets.

As an active angel investor since 2001, Scott has invested in multiple ventures. His involvement with these companies ranges from passive investor to business coach and advisory board member.

In 2010 Scott acquired Atlantic Insurance Agency and re-branded the company as Century 1. He sold the agency in December 2012.

Scott founded Human Capital in 1997. He grew the company into a nationwide player with 2007 annual revenues of $170 million dollars. This hyper growth landed Human Capital and its affiliate division on the INC. 500 list in 2003 and 2004 with growth rates more than 1,000 percent. Human Capital was sold to a nationwide staffing firm in 2007.

A Cambridge-educated economist and a long-time member of Vistage, Adrian has lent his insight to Vistage members and audiences across the country. In 2020 Vistage recognized Adrian as a Top New Speaker of the Year. His favorite advice to share with CEOs during these sessions is that the secret to predicting the future is to become a student of capital markets, and that managing your business is different from managing your wealth.

Thursday, November 16 , 2023 — Michael Brody-Waite

Program Description:

In this workshop participants learn how to detect and overcome the 4 Leader Addictions that are costing employees 10 hours per week and the ability to exceed their growth goals:

• Saying Yes When You Could Say No
• Hiding A Weakness
• Avoiding Difficult Conversations
• Holding Back Your Unique Perspective

Overcoming these addictions enables 3 Key Decisions:

• Preparing to scale company culture and connection in a virtualized world
• How to develop key leadership talent from within
• Identifying which priorities to eliminate or enhance to achieve more with less

Brody-Waite takes the system that millions of drugs addicts use to recover and uniquely applies it as a leadership system that allows any person and organization to unlock their full potential. From senior executives at Fortune 10 companies to front line managers at small businesses, this system enables participants to achieve something they deemed impossible within 28 days of the workshop.

Value To Members:

Using a simple and proven step by step system, participants will diagnose which leadership addiction is impacting them the most, calculate it’s cost and develop a simple and specific 28 Day Action Plan to overcome it. Over the next 28 days they will execute their action plan for only 1 minute per day and easily teach their team how to do the same.  After 28 days imagine an entire team that has reclaimed 10 hours per week, increased team connectivity and enabled the organization to achieve its growth goals faster.

Speaker Biography:

At the age of 23, Michael was a full-blown drug addict. He was kicked out of college, fired from his job, and evicted from his apartment. He had no money and no home, was throwing up blood, and believed he would be dead before his 30th birthday. Then, on September 1, 2002, after running out of options and fearing death, he checked into rehab, entered recovery, and has been transforming himself every day since. In 2010, Michael left a Fortune 50 company at the height of the recession to cofound and lead InQuicker, a healthcare SaaS company that under his leadership landed on the Inc 500 list by growing 20,000% in less than six years.  InQuicker and Michael were given numerous awards including “Best Place to Work,” Healthcare Company of the Year, Entrepreneur of the Year and Most Admired CEO.

After selling InQuicker to a publicly traded company in 2015, Michael led a 501C3 that helped over 2,000 entrepreneurs start or grow a business each year. He then gave a TEDx talk that went viral and has over 2.2M views in over 25 countries which inspired the #1 new release book “Great Leaders Live Like Drug Addicts: How to Lead Like Your Life Depends On It” endorsed by thought leaders like Daniel Pink, Greg McKewon and Cordia Harrington. Now Michael is on a mission to Revolutionize the Rules of Leadership.

Thursday, June 22 , 2023 — Adrian Cronje

Program Description:

In this highly rated, interactive session, Dr. Adrian Cronje, CFA, explains how to parse the messages capital markets send about the future environment. Dr. Cronje makes senses of the many “topics du jour”—helping the audience distinguish noisy headlines from news that truly has meaning—and provides members with the tools they need to judge how markets will affect both the broad economy and their specific industries and businesses. After all, capital markets lead the economy, not the other way around.

Value To Members:

In addition to learning tools CEOs and management teams can use to interpret the capital markets and the messages they send about the future economic environment, this session highlights specific implications for how their businesses should be run within their industries today.

• Learn whether the current economic cycle has more room to run and how to prepare your business accordingly.
• Become empowered with tools you can use to monitor the messages that capital. markets send about the future economic environment.
• Learn how those messages may affect your business’s strategic plan.
• Distinguish noisy headlines from news that truly has meaning.
• Help business owners and entrepreneurs plan for a transition event.

Speaker Biography:

Adrian Cronje, Ph.D., CFA is chief executive officer and chief investment officer of the Atlanta-based financial management firm Balentine, which offers comprehensive wealth management services for business owners and global asset allocation strategies for institutions. Adrian and his firm focus on giving advice and counsel to entrepreneurs through the many transitions of owning a business, with the unique vantage point of being entrepreneurs themselves.

A Cambridge-educated economist and a long-time member of Vistage, Adrian has lent his insight to Vistage members and audiences across the country. In 2020 Vistage recognized Adrian as a Top New Speaker of the Year. His favorite advice to share with CEOs during these sessions is that the secret to predicting the future is to become a student of capital markets, and that managing your business is different from managing your wealth.

Tuesday, May 18 , 2023 — Ken Clark

Program Description:

Almost everything you’ve been taught about effective conflict resolution is WRONG.

Think about it. All those relationship experts on TV, books on nightstands, and lunchtime trainings and most of us still struggle to get along as people. We’re repeating our complaints over and over, claim that we’re largely unheard and constantly feel misunderstood when we’re only trying to fix it.

It’s not just us though… Interpersonal drama is just as prevalent in the workplace as it ever has been. The divorce rate hasn’t changed in any significant way throughout the decades. And politics, religion and sports team affiliations divide families just as much at the holidays as it ever has.

Of course, technology that allows to instantly unfriend someone, downvote their thoughts, or remind them of something “per my last email,” has only made it worse. It’s become so bad in fact, that many feel like there is no choice but to ignore conflict if possible until they have no choice but to quit a job, leave a relationship or even permanently cut people out of their lives.

In the face of this grim reality, Ken Clark has assembled a simple set of conflict resolution tools that time and again, have proven their ability to restore peace, connection, joy and productivity to families and workplaces. As one the country’s leading marriage and family therapists focused on “C-Suite couples,” as well as the CEO of a 4x Inc. 5000 company, Ken will transform the way you understand conflict and how you go about trying to restore harmony in your most valuable relationships.

Value To Members:

In Ken Clark’s “Solving Without Sorry” workshop, your group will learn about:

• Why communication is NOT actually the problem in most conflicts.
• How neurobiology impedes our ability to solve conflict and the simple steps to take back control.
• Ken’s incredibly effective MVEP method for restoring connection, even when you still disagree.
• Rules for collaborative problem solving that will de-stress your work and home life.
• How to boost every KPI with a “Solving Without Sorry” campaign at your company.

Speaker Biography:

Ken Clark is a raving fan of Vistage and has been a 5+ year member.

He’s the founder of a 4x Inc. 5000 company, a Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist, and a lifelong entrepreneur who’s passionate about the overlap of the human experience, the leader’s role, and a company’s bottom line.

As a founder who has scaled to 200+ employees, his company has served as a laboratory and proving ground for his innovative ideas on conflict resolution, collaborative innovation, and the power of gratitude in the workplace and among teams.

In addition to being named to the Inc 5000 list multiple years in a row, his company has been nominated for or won statewide awards including Business of the Year, Best Place to Work, and Best Mental Health Clinics, as well as Ken being named “Mentor of the Year” by the Investment News.

Thursday, March 23 , 2023 — Steve Heroux

Program Description:

Steve Heroux, founder of The Sales Collective, will teach you how to motivate and inspire your sales team which is of the utmost importance in today’s ever-changing marketplace. We’ll be intertwining several categories in the Vistage Decision Model in this workshop, which will impact mostly financials and talent.

The Pandemic, supply chain issues, and inflation have all played major roles in the futures of our companies and more importantly, the performance of our sales teams. It’s been quite simple to make sales over the past few years, because when the economy is humming, it’s easy. But when things slow down, and salespeople must become more than just glorified order takers, you’ve got to do more than just shove quotas down their throats or put them on performance improvement plans.

In this valuable and timely workshop, you’re going to learn exactly how get the results you’re looking for from your sales team, and you’ll most definitely hear things you’ve never heard before. You’ll learn how your Sales Capabilities Index may be hurting your bottom line, how to recruit, hire, and retain top-performing salespeople, and lastly, how to include Daily Performance Indicators to make your Key Performance indicators even more valuable.

Not only will you leave this workshop with an entirely new perspective on selling you’ve probably never heard before, but you’ll also learn real, tangible strategies to take back to your organization to start increasing sales immediately.

Value To Members:

You will enjoy an interactive, memorable, engaging, and dynamic workshop that will not only teach brand new and relevant ideas when it comes to sales but will also give actionable items, solid takeaways, and effective strategies to start implementing in their business right away.

They’ll learn:

• Three specific motivation styles that inspire salespeople to achieve excellence.
• Why having quotas is antiquated and will decrease sales results.
• Compensation & incentive plans to drive higher performance.
• How detaching from outcomes will lead to massive amounts of success.
• The four factors inside our Sales DNA responsible for our success or failure in sales.
• How to consistently find, recruit, hire, and retain top-level sales talent.
• Exactly how to get people to change by revealing the true cost of inaction.

Speaker Biography:

Steve Heroux is the CEO & Founder of Dallas-based Victory Selling, where he’s committed to changing the way, we look at sales and sales leadership. Quick-witted, highly engaged, and especially authentic, Steve is a Sales Development Expert, Professional Trainer & Keynote Speaker, and a leading authority in providing cutting-edge strategies on selling in today’s marketplace.  He was the Vistage Top Performer Award winner in 2021.  With his no-nonsense attitude, thought-provoking content, mixed with a hint of stand-up comedy, Steve will have you engaged from minute one.  Whether it’s empowering you with fresh ideas on sales in today’s marketplace, sharing valuable insights on hiring top-performing salespeople, or inspiring you to make a paradigm shift in your role as a leader, Steve will transform your entire outlook on sales in one short session.

Thursday, February 16 , 2023 — Ann Rhoades

Program Description:

Ann Rhoades has spent her career building people-centric organizations. She will share her creative approach to developing unique cultures and her firsthand experiences in launching successful start-up companies, blending post-merger cultures, and creating a legacy of people-centric organizations. A self-described “rule breaker,” Ann is adamant about standing up for what she believes in, regardless of the consequences. Her candor around the mistakes she’s made and the lessons she’s learned is the driving force behind her desire to inspire organizations to:

• Build sustainable cultures based on values unique to the environment
• Select and retain “A” players
• Treat employees fairly, not equally
• Deliver extraordinary customer-centric service levels
• Focus on the metrics!
• Move from just being a good organization to being a great values-centric one!!

 Value To Members:

Member will discover how to build sustainable cultures based on valued unique to their organization’s environment as well as how to recruit and retain top talent to attain strategic goals.

Speaker Biography:

Ann Rhoades is a human resources executive with more than 25 years’ experience in a variety of service-based industries. She held the position of Vice President of the People Department for Southwest Airlines and Executive Vice President of Team Services for Promus Hotel Corporation and, most recently, the Executive Vice President of People for JetBlue Airways, where she currently remains as a board member as well as president of People Ink, her human resources consulting company.

Ann has a respected reputation in the industry for her creative approach to creating cultures around fun and for blending cultures in merger situations. During her tenure with Doubletree Hotels – later Promus Hotel Corporation – she built a service culture focused on delivering outstanding service to guests. During the time Ann headed the People Department at Southwest Airlines, she solidified Southwest’s reputation of retaining and hiring the best people in the airline business despite Southwest’s rapid growth during that time. Also, Ann took responsibility for the creation of JetBlue Airways Corporation’s People Team in New York.

Ann is a popular speaker about customer service and how to build a strong service culture. She has great passion for certain industries, such as healthcare, where she is making a great contribution to revitalizing the workforce and culture of our nation’s hospitals. Ann currently serves on the boards of JetBlue Airways Corporation, P.F. Chang’s China Bistro, HireVue, Inc., Executive Council and Brigham & Women’s Hospital Harvard Medical School.

Ann has an MBA in management from the University of New Mexico and released her book, Built on VALUES.

Thursday, April 21, 2022 — Luke Carlson

Program Description:

There is nothing in our day that we do that is so foundationally important to all aspects of our health and performance as exercise; yet there is nothing we do all day long that we tend to do less intelligently than exercise. During this presentation, Luke will cut through the fitness myths and misconceptions that even smart exercisers are guilty of and share an evidence-based approach to exercise for the busy executive.  

Learning Objectives:

• Challenge our paradigm from which we view exercise and fitness
• Understand the pervasive myths and misconceptions that we cling to
• Introduce the evidence-based benefits of exercise on health and fitness
• Introduce the workplace performance benefits of exercise that make us better at our jobs and improve our leadership potential
• Outline an evidence-based and time efficient exercise prescription that maximizes health, fitness, appearance, and executive performance.  
• Provide specific take-home strategies for strength training and cardio-respiratory exercise

Value To Members:

Most executives think they need to spend a lot more time exercising than they do.  In this presentation, Carlson cuts through the fitness myths and misconceptions as he educates and inspires executives to take an evidence-based and time-efficient approach to exercise.

Speaker Biography:

Luke Carlson is the founder and CEO of Discover Strength based in Minneapolis, Minnesota, USA. Discover Strength’s personal training studios are among the highest volume and revenue boutique fitness studios in North America. Luke speaks around the world on evidence-based exercise, leadership, and management. He is an American College of Sports Medicine Certified Exercise Physiologist, Certified Cancer Exercise Specialist and has a BS and MS in Kinesiology from the University of Minnesota and graduated from the Executive Leadership, Strategy, and Innovation program at Stanford University. He received an Honorary PhD from Solent University in Southhampton, England.

Tuesday, December 15, 2022 — Tim McCarthy

Program Description:

The very concept of Vistage is to build our businesses and enhance our lives. This is most effectively done using a Life Plan – in addition to a Business Plan. Since hearing Walt Sutton and a few other great Vistage speakers present such concepts in the late 1990s, I have dedicated the fourth quarter of every year to planning my life, then planning my business. There are now seven top executives in our organizations who follow this practice with us (the owner/partners) each year at our annual retreat.

“DREAM SKETCH” includes my own life plans from past years as samples along with templates for each participant to use in designing their own life and business. Since every life and each of our goals are different the entire focus of “Dream Sketch” is easy-to-use disciplines to encourage more effective self-development.

McCarthy allows each member to reflect for three or four hours on their own life and business. After a few minutes of introduction, McCarthy asks members to share their current methods of planning. Then McCarthy shares samples of four planning tools he learned over time, mostly from Vistage speakers including his current actual plans. For the rest of the morning, members will:

1. Start by filling out a simple three part life plan – then sharing one by one with other members. This is very generally to discern what each member wants to accomplish during their lifetime
2. Vision their life 10 years from now, 5 years from now
3. Finally, connecting their dream lives over ten years, each member works to plug in what they might do in the next twelve months to assure their path forward

Value To Members: 

In my 18 years in Vistage, I was both fascinated and frustrated that each of us had our own blind spots. My chairs, our speakers and my fellow members gave me the courage to:

1. See my weaknesses as they are
2. Deal with them in a healthy manner
3. Aim higher with my business and my life through effective planning

“Dream Sketch” has been used by hundreds of people in our organizations to consistently plan and modify their lives and businesses, a practice we too often fail to do because of “busyness”.

Each member will leave this session with:

• Their own self-written and reflected “Dream Sketch Profile”
• Actual Samples of mine and others’ life plans
• Several formats and options for KPIs and follow up disciplines
• A free copy of my own life’s journey book: “Empty Abundance”
• Free email access to the speaker for questions and any follow up needed

Biography:

Tim received a Bachelor of Arts in Political Science from Ohio State University in March of 1975 then received his Masters of Business Administration from Ohio State (Fisher Business School) in June of 2007. In 2008, he received Fisher Alumnae Community Service Award and became an Ernst and Young regional Entrepreneur of the Year.

McCarthy opened his first business in 1988. Over time, this company developed a permissioned database of 700,000 employers delivering incentives for their national advertising clients such as Coca-Cola, Lenscrafters and McDonalds to 70 million consumers. WorkPlace Media now Workplace Impact  www.WorkplaceImpact.com, was sold to the Riverside Company in 2007 and then repurchased from Riverside in October, 2013.

In 2003, in partnership with his son, Tim Patrick, McCarthy opened the first chicken finger restaurant north of the Mason-Dixon Line. Raising Cane’s of Ohio now has 25 restaurants, another five under construction and did $70 million revenue in 2017.

Throughout his adult life, McCarthy has been engaged in non-profit work. Since 2000, when WorkPlace Media achieved consistent profitability, he’s diverted more than 20% of that profit each year to a foundation he formed called The Business of Good www.theBusinessofGood.org.

His foundation invests in socially conscious businesses and scalable non-profit concepts from its corpus of $50 million.

The mission of The Business of Good is focused on “serving those who serve the poor” by helping non-profits use business disciplines to grow their mission. McCarthy says, “In all cases, our focus is to build capacity to serve. I mean, what good is a great mission if it’s unsustainable?”

Thursday, November 17, 2022 — Larry O’Toole

Program Description:

Our purpose as business leaders and executives is to create value.  Essential to building this value is robust planning and execution.  But to many, it’s a source of frustration as they face the uncertainty of how to tackle strategic planning effectively.  With the right mindset and process, a leader can drive a new level of vitality and momentum into their organization.  Hear from a career CEO of manufacturing and service organizations how to take away the planning process uncertainty and elevate your planning in a way that creates a direct bridge to growing long term company value.  Come prepared to leave the session with actionable insights and templates that can be used at any type of business to help inject new energy in to your planning and overall value growth.

Value To Members: 

Participants gain new thinking as it relates to moving their strategic planning up to a level that helps them build long term value.  They will receive practical, actionable insights on a more effective process for developing and implementing a strategic plan.  The session includes proven planning templates that can help a leader facilitate new, more productive dialog with their team and deliver a stronger planning outcome.

Biography:

Larry O’Toole has long been obsessed with the challenge of navigating uncertainty to create growth. Business growth, and growth in business worth. By identifying the superfluous to help leaders focus on what’s important, rather than what is not, to bank desired results. His experience spans 20 years as CEO of manufacturing and service companies across a range of industries. These include leadership roles with Black & Decker Corporation [NYSE: SWR] and Ingersoll-Rand Corporation [NYSE:IR], to CEO roles with privately held businesses such as Protection Service Industries, and DORMA Group Americas. In his most recent CEO role, Larry led a privately held manufacturing and engineering company through a campaign preparing for an owner exit. Larry and his team exceeded owner expectations, successfully delivering several hundred million dollars at time of exit. 

Tuesday, August 16, 2022 — Jon Colby

Program Description:

Improv performers are taught to look for agreement, problem solve, make decisions, listen carefully, think creatively, and encourage each other. Jon Colby offers workshop participants an opportunity to play various improv exercises and games. Each game is debriefed and has a powerful takeaway which can be put into practice with clients, employees, and even friends and family members. Everyone is participating during each exercise, so no one is put on the spot.

Value To Members: 

According the World Economic Forum, the top four skills that employers are looking for in their staff are complex problem solving, critical thinking, creativity, and people management. This improv-based workshop will give members an opportunity to improve all of these skills.  Members participate in various activities and leave motivated with actionable takeaways that they put into effect immediately.

Biography:

Jon Colby has been empowering people with improv for over 20 years. From presenting to performing, his engaging, interactive approach has successfully helped audiences across the US to be better communicators, co-workers, teammates, salespeople, and doctors. Jon combines his master’s in education and his background in theatre to craft a meaningful and interactive experience where audiences have the opportunity to apply what they learn. As a graduate from the world-famous Second City Conservatory comedy program and an educator with 15 years of classroom experience, he is able to keep an audience laughing while sharing practical knowledge that they can put to use right away.  He has motivated and entertained hundreds of clients, including some of the nation’s top companies and organizations.

Thursday, June 16, 2022 — Tom Thibodeau

Program Description:

Servant Leadership is both timely and timeless. Its origins are present throughout human history. In 1970 Robert K. Greenleaf, Vice President at AT&T Corporation, wrote the “Servant as Leader.” 

This presentation will engage participants in the process of understanding the positive power of service and leadership in our personal and organizational lives. The process does not include power point. Rather it is interactive, emphasizing conversations, presence, character, and energy in serving and leading. “Leadership is who we are, management is what we do. Through research, reflection, and dialogue we will experience Servant Leadership as Meaningful, Ethical, and Practical.

Value To Members: 

• Understand the power of service to positively impact the lives of co-workers, customers, and our communities
• To rediscover the power of language in holding meaningful and critical conversations
• To understand that all of leadership development is character development and the practice which leads to the development of both.

Biography:

Tom is the Distinguished Professor of Servant Leadership at Viterbo University where he has taught for thirty-three years.  He is the founder of the Master of Arts in Servant Leadership degree at Viterbo, the only master’s degree of its kind in the nation. He is a founding member of the Place of Grace hospitality house which had been serving meals and human dignity for twenty years. He regularly speaks to national audiences on the developing servant leadership movement. Tom is a husband, father, grandfather, teacher, active community member and part owner of a country tavern.

Thursday, February 17, 2022 — Jimmy Blackmon

Program Description:

Strategic leaders determine the azimuth for the organization – actually chart the path. To that end they primarily do four things:

1. Provide vision – get the big ideas right,
2. Communicate the big ideas effectively throughout the breadth and depth of the organization,
3. Oversee the implementation of the big ideas,
4. Determine how the big ideas need to be refined, changed, augmented, and then repeat the process over and over again.

In this interactive, engaging, and insightful program, executives will see the power of casting an organizational vision, shaping culture, and the importance of climate to ensure success. Jimmy Blackmon will discuss how he effectively prepared an Army aviation task force to deploy to eastern Afghanistan, to the valleys where the attacks of 9-11 were planned and rehearsed. He will discuss how a culture of innovation and initiative, based on a climate of trust and empowerment, ensured success in a situation where the stakes were life and death. Furthermore, he will provide practical, pragmatic ways in which to shape organizational behavior that are certain to translate to success.

Value To Members: 

Offers innovative leadership tools that have immediate, practical application for increasing performance and productivity levels in individuals and teams. After participating in this program, participants will understand how to:

• Cast and manifest a vision
• Shape organizational culture
• Create a climate for success
• The importance of trust and empowerment to achieve innovation
• Understand the importance of personal relationships – how to truly connect with your people
• Effective interview techniques that will help you hire and integrate the right people to support your desire organizational culture and climate

Biography:

Jimmy Blackmon is a retired Army Colonel, speaker, author, and Managing Partner at Exactus Advisors. Jimmy spent 30 years leading soldiers in the U.S. Army. He has six operational deployments including two tours in the Balkans, two tours in Iraq, and two tours in Afghanistan.

Jimmy was the air mission commander on the mission that killed Saddam Hussein’s sons, the #2 and #3 most wanted during the invasion of Iraq. He was also involved in the battles in which five Congressional Medals of Honor were earned. Jimmy is the author of three books.

He is also a three-time archery world champion, and he was a member of the 1998 U.S. Armed Forces World Cross Country team. Some of Jimmy’s awards include the Defense Superior Service Medal, the Legion of Merit, four Bronze Star Medals, four Air Medals, and he is a recipient of the General Douglas MacArthur Leadership Award.

Thursday, December 16, 2021 — John Baker

Program Description:

The Asking Formula is a one-of-a-kind program that teaches leaders and sales professionals how to more effectively ask for what they want through a simple and accessible six-step process that can be practiced, repeated and mastered. As a result of learning this methodology, people will ask with more confidence, more influence and with more self-assurance and they will get the outcomes they desire. Using The Asking Formula creates a culture that empowers people to get things done. Its simplicity drives clear and consistent communications that gain alignment from all departments including C-suite, sales, marketing, project management, operations, etc. It allows for leaders to communicate with a purpose that generates buy-in and action. Sales professionals use The Asking Formula to proactively move a deal through the sales progression shortening sales cycles and accelerating growth. During the workshop we analyze how professionals detract from their effectiveness by practicing bad asking behaviors and we eliminate these habits from daily habit.

How many times during the day – on a sales call, in a meeting, conducting a presentation, running a project, at work or at home – is it vital for you or someone on your team to ask for something that you need in order to achieve important goals? The cost of poor “asking” is measured in protracted sales cycles, non-ending meetings, decisions not getting made, avoidable misunderstandings and issues that are re-hashed over and again. What a waste of time, energy and money.

This is a highly interactive program (individual “asking situations” are examined and role-played during the session) that teaches effective asking – a skill that leads to confident communications, influence and a heightened professional image. Effectively asking for what you want is a skill that can hardly be over-emphasized.

Value To Members: 

In addition to learning the 6 steps of The Asking Formula, Members will be expected to demonstrate their learning by role-playing their “asking situation” in front of their Vistage team and John Baker. They will receive direct and constructive coaching. The aim of the program is to generate an immediate ROI: Members will apply The Asking Formula immediately against a key business driver. Members will leave the session able to immediately:

• Implement The Asking Formula: an effective, straightforward and high-impact inductive pattern for structuring best-in-class persuasive communications.
• Instill into their organization a culture of productive, clear and forthright communications that provoke action and gets things done.
• Use best-practice techniques that enhance communication effectiveness, build strong and effective teams, and accomplish goals.
• Avoid common communication pitfalls that sabotage success and image. 

Biography:

John Baker is the creator of The Asking Formula™, an author, business owner and entrepreneur. As senior vice president and chief operating officer at such leading firms as American Express and Ameriprise Financial, John led global teams in sales, customer service and operations. Under his leadership his division grew by 30 percent CAGR. He achieved annual sales levels exceeding $1 billion. Today John is CEO of READY Thinking, LLC, an organizational and leadership development firm based in the Twin Cities.

John specializes in helping CEOs get their teams to cut through the unnecessary and deliver persuasive and influential communications that get things done. Whether it be sales or non-sales leaders, John is an expert on getting people to ask effectively for what they want. Clients are drawn to his programs because of his unique ability to cut through complexity and deliver clear and engaging content that produces immediate results. His wit and insight make him one of the country’s most sought speakers.

John has brought his message to hundreds of organizations including the Department of Defense, the U.S. Army, Fortune 500 companies, national associations and trade groups, and non-profits. John is the author of the award-winning book, READY Thinking – Primed for Change. His second book, The Asking Formula – Ask For What You Want…And Get It!, was published in October of 2012.

Thursday, November 18, 2021 — Eric Kish

Program Description:

Scalability is not about resources, it’s about a mindset. An adaptability mindset. Organizations are complex organic living systems that can adapt and grow. Developing and sustaining adaptive capacity in organizations is the main job of a leader preparing to scale. Eric Kish was on the front lines of developing adaptive capacity, continuously experimenting with methods to create scalable organizations. Intent Driven Management™ is a methodology to build and sustain scalability in any organization. It is based on a leadership philosophy inspired from a 200 years old military leadership style, practiced with great success by the IDF.

After serving 10 years in the Israeli Armored Corps, Eric developed the methodology while leading 12 companies across 7 industries and 3 continents over 22 years. Two of them scaled from millions to billions in revenue and valuation.

The program introduces Intent Driven Management™ philosophy and its implementation methodology.

Value to Members:

Field tested methodology to build and run scalable organizations

Biography:

Eric Kish is a Turnaround CEO with 20 years of experience in transforming organizations at various levels of distress. To date he has run 12 turnarounds and scaled organizations from millions to billions in revenue and valuation. Throughout his life and career Eric lived and worked in 11 countries and speaks fluently 6 languages. Eric is the author of Everyday Turnaround, The Art and Science of Daily Business Transformation, a book that introduces groundbreaking business execution methods and tools that are backed by scientific research in organizational dynamics.

Eric was born in Eastern Europe and emigrated to Israel in 1988. Upon completion of his military service in the Israeli Armored Corps, Eric started his career in the Israeli Defense Industry while also serving in the Israeli Reserves. He started his first turnaround in 1999, a bankrupt oil refinery, taking it private at $7m market cap and relisting it 3 years later at $450 million market cap. The refinery received the award of the Best Refinery in South Central Europe and the turnaround was considered the most successful turnaround in the history of the region, being subject of a full article in Wall Street Journal Europe. That turnaround was followed by 6 additional acquisitions/turnarounds that created the largest oil company in South Eastern Europe and was acquired in 2008 for $3.8Bn. In the last 20 years Eric led 12 turnarounds across 7 industries on 3 continents. He is a leading member of the US Association of Interim Executives and their Rapid Executive Deployment (RED) Team.

Eric is principal and partner at Kish and Partners Consulting, a Boulder CO – based Consulting firm that specializes In Business Execution education and Interim CxO services. He still runs or advises on turnarounds.

Eric earned his M.Sc. in Business from Stanford Business School and his M.Sc. in Electrical Engineering from the Polytechnics University of Bucharest. He also has a post graduate Advanced Certificate in Strategy and Innovation from MIT Sloan School of Business, an Executive Certificate in Industrial Administration from Carnegie Mellon University – Tepper School of Business and a Certificate in IP and Business Strategy from Harvard Business School.

Thursday, August 17, 2021 — Scott Wozniak

Program Description:

Magic happens when you pair consistent excellence with unexpected delight. Some companies have figured out how to make this the normal experience for their customers. This workshop will teach you a system so you can make this your “normal” too. This goes beyond a marketing message or a script for phone reps. I will teach you exactly how great organizations, such as Chick-fil-A and Disney Theme Parks, actually operate their businesses. This workshop includes specific methods and practical tools. It’s a how-to workshop, not a you-should workshop. If you are ready to have highly-engaged employees, generate more sales, and build a community of brand ambassadors who can’t stop talking about you, you need to build a Raving Fans Engine.

Value to Members:

Leaders will learn what is required to build a Raving Fans Engine and, as a part of the workshop, use that to do an initial assessment of how their organization is doing. They will learn specific ways that other companies have set up their systems and the principles behind those specifics so they can create their own systems. They will walk away with a comprehensive system for running a great organization, a system that comes from insider knowledge on how the best are actually doing this.

Biography:

Scott Wozniak, CEO of Swoz Leadership, has worked with leaders on six continents to help them thrive. He has been a speaker and consultant for senior leaders at multi-billion dollar global companies, city governments, software startups, Ivy League universities, and healthcare facilities. Scott spent eight years as a full-time employee at the Chick-fil-A Corporate Headquarters, consulting directly with the founding family and executive team to design leadership development programs, set strategy, and lead company-wide initiatives. In addition to career work, he has started four organizations (two non-profits/two for-profits) and written three books. In his spare time, he enjoys adventures with his wife and four kids, designs board games with his fellow Mensa members, and pushes the limits in a variety of extreme sports.

Thursday, June 15, 2021 — Severin Sorensen

Program Description 

Consistently attracting and capturing top game-changing talent – aka, the “difference makers” — for your business is a critical life skill for business owners and senior executives to master for sustainable company growth and business success. Difference makers are game-changing impact players and include key executive talent and much needed technical employee utility players that great businesses and teams are built upon. Unfortunately, knowing that you need and want employee “difference makers” does not make them magically appear, nor help you retain them.

Severin Sorensen, a successful serial entrepreneur, executive headhunter, and former Vistage Chair (2010-2018), has long focused on “high growth” companies and the “difference makers” that lead them. Informed by over 85 years of scholarly research on selecting talent, Severin has developed a consistent and reliable behavioral characteristics Talent Capture Management system that focuses on the business processes of identifying, recruiting, screening, hiring, onboarding and retaining top game-changing talent. The presentation begins by exploring typical and member “hiring fumbles” and misjudgments that occur in the hiring process; a session called “Hiring Bad.” These oversights frequently cripple organizations, waste resources, delay progress and cause mindshare distraction for firms. Severin argues that the root causes of many of these hiring fumbles are detectable flaws and frequently overlooked during the traditional hiring process. He also argues that candidate selection is not just about asking questions: It is knowing what to ask and what to observe.

Having identified the typical hiring problems, Severin next turns to the creation of a systemic process for greatly increasing the probability and success of hiring great hires every time. He explores the use of Ten (10) Talent Capture Management Tools that he uses regularly to consistently identify, attract, recruit, screen, hiring, and onboard for performance difference-maker success. Severin’s Top 10 Tools of Talent Capture Management shared in the presentation include Behavioral Job Analysis; Behavioral Job Description; Candidate Sourcing, Attraction, and Recruiting Plans; Employment Application Intake Process and the ATS; Applicant Funnel creation and first screening process; Phone Interviews of Top Candidates; Psychometric testing of top candidates in preparation for Panel Interviews; Candidate work samples and homework; cognitive tests; panel interviews; structured interviews and candidate ranking; job try-outs, integrity tests, and other pre-employment tests. Severin also reviews the stages of candidate warming, from candidate attracting, website career pages, outreach, and contact during the screening and selection process. Examples of questions for various stages of the review process are explored, along with setups strategies for phone screening interviews, panel interviews, and final interviews. Additional insights include tips for background checks and screenings, reference checks, and compensation negotiation. This session provides a watershed of concepts, theory, tips, and tools to enlarge the CEO and executive toolbox of Vistage members and their companies.

Biography:

Severin Sorensen is CEO of ePraxis LLC, a premier level executive headhunting, talent selection, and executive coaching company. As an executive coach, Severin has provided over 7,000 hours of paid executive coaching sessions to business executives from companies large and small, such as fast growing INC 5000 companies, and large publicly traded multinational corporations. As an executive headhunter, Severin is frequently called on to help companies identify, screen, test, and select top talent for businesses looking to place ‘difference makers’ in the CEO, President, and key executive positions. Severin leverages over 85 years of scholarly talent selection research to consistently find, screen, test, and select difference making top talent for his clients.

Severin earned a graduate degree (M.Phil.) in economics from King’s College, Cambridge, University, England, and two undergraduate degrees in economics and political science from the University of Utah.

Thursday, March 18, 2021 — Charles Scott

Program Description:

Charles R. Scott, a 14-year veteran of Intel Corporation and co-founder of Team See Possibilities, explores how to create a meaningful life that encompasses more than just a professional title. Charles believes the answer to the question, “What do you want to be when you grow up?” is the work of a lifetime. The workshop is structured around three modules, each with an interactive exercise:

Module 1 – Obstacles and Growth: sharing anecdotes from cycling over 7,000 miles with his young children across Japan, Iceland, Europe and the U.S., and from guiding the first blind runner to cross the Grand Canyon and back nonstop, Charles offers a unique perspective on leadership, naysayers and the sometimes unexpected benefits that can come from loss.

Module 2 – The Secret to Optimal Performance: Charles shares the hard-won secrets of success from a world-renowned professional marathoner and, in a unique and provocative twist, applies those principles to the workplace. This module often stimulates lively discussion about practical actions business people can take to work more efficiently and with greater satisfaction.

Module 3 – What Do You Want to Be When You Grow Up? Charles builds on this age-old question, guiding participants through creative exercises intended to identify opportunities to inject vitality into their professional lives.

Value to Members:

Members receive tips on effective leadership skills, handling naysayers, and developing healthy work environments. They are also guided through three interactive exercises designed to:

– Offer insights on ways to grow from loss

– Improve workplace performance while simultaneously increasing leisure time, and

– Identify and harness the sparks of vitality that live within each of us. 

Biography:

Charles R. Scott is an adventurer, author of two books, co-founder of the nonprofit organization Team See Possibilities, and a 14-year veteran of Intel Corporation. He serves as a mentor to CEOs and senior executives, helping ambitious people work more efficiently and offering tools to craft a meaningful life. He gives conference keynotes and developed an executive workshop called “What Do You Want to Be When You Grow Up?” He has delivered this popular workshop to thousands of CEOs and senior executives across North America and was named Speaker of the Year by the CEO peer group TEC Canada. Charles has spoken at Uber, Intel, The World Bank, Harvard Business School and many others. His adventures have been featured in press around the world, including The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, FOX News, National Geographic and Outside Magazine. He also gives talks at schools and to parent groups about raising resilient children. Mixing in anecdotes from cycling over 7,000 miles with his young children across Japan, Iceland, Europe and the U.S., and from guiding the first blind runner to cross the Grand Canyon and back nonstop, he helps people achieve ambitious goals while prioritizing their personal health.

Thursday, May 20, 2021 — Zane Tarance

Program Description

Zane Tarence outlines 17 issues business owners face that impact both the likelihood of selling their companies and the valuation potential acquirers assign to them. These issues span a broad range of topics from company size and market share to competitive differentiation and customer diversification, and are accompanied by real world examples pulled from Tarence’s 18 years of experience participating in and advising on M&A transactions. In addition to explaining how these issues impact private company valuations, Tarence provides practical action items to tackle each one and describes the ideal qualities acquirers and institutional investors look for, giving participants benchmarks to aim for prior to pursuing a capital raise or exit. As an entrepreneur turned investor and investment banker, Tarence has unique insight into the problems that can arise during the sale of a company. Prior to becoming an investment banker, Tarence built and sold two technology businesses to publicly traded companies, providing him with firsthand experience with the challenges operators face when growing and selling their businesses. Throughout the over 80 transactions he has advised on, Tarence has witnessed a multitude of complications diminish valuation or even prevent a transaction from occurring at all.

Value to Members

From the program, members will gain the ability to view their companies from an institutional acquirer’s perspective, thus enabling them to better prepare their businesses for a successful transaction/exit. Members will be equipped to identify issues that may hinder their ability to sell and subsequently implement measures to resolve any problem areas. They will also be provided with helpful worksheets and questionnaires to better isolate specific areas where they can rationalize their case for outsized market valuations.

Biography:

Zane Tarence, Managing Director of Founders Investment Banking’s Technology Practice, is an experienced investment banker, entrepreneur and recognized expert on the growth and monetization of privately owned companies. Over the past 15 years, Tarence has led and completed more than 80 technology deals, including facilitating the sale of some of the largest lead gen Internet businesses in the United States.

Before joining Founders, Tarence independently and successfully created and sold two technology businesses to publicly-traded companies, resulting in a keen understanding of the traits necessary to build a valuable company and close an exceptional deal. He has more than 24 years of experience as an operator, investor and dealmaker in the technology arena. Prior to becoming an entrepreneur, Tarence began his career at IBM, where he learned the intricate workings of the company’s technology ecosystems and ultimately managed its Internet consulting practice in the Southeast. Tarence is a noted speaker at many national conferences, focusing primarily on product commercialization and private company value optimization. He has authored numerous articles on how private companies raise growth capital and how they are bought and sold. Tarence is also the co-founder of InnerCircleSessions.com, an e-learning portal educating entrepreneurs on institutional capital.

Tarence has a Masters in Organizational Management from Southern Christian University and received his Bachelors of Science in Business Administration from Auburn University in Montgomery. He also holds Series 79 and 63 securities licenses.  A native of Montgomery, Alabama, Zane lives in Birmingham with his wife, Jamie, and his three daughters, Ellie, Mary Judson and Emma.

Thursday, July 23, 2020 — Andrea Simon

In this presentation, Andrea Simon, Ph.D., anthropologist and corporate consultant working with companies that need to change, takes you through a discussion and exercise to help you: Think about your business in new ways Think like a customer might Visualize new opportunities that you might not see otherwise. Using materials from the highly popular book by Rene Maubourgne and W. Chan Kim — “Blue Ocean Strategy” — Dr. Simon is interested in taking you into the model that other companies have used to successfully find new ways to serve and solve customer needs.

What is so interesting and important about the Blue Ocean Strategy model and the research behind it, is how it offers a way of thinking about customers and non-customers to open up new “market spaces.”

What will you learn from this workshop on Blue Ocean Strategy?

• Forget the competition
• Re-think your own strategy
• Really begin to see the unsolved needs of customers and non-customers in a new ways

So you can reignite change in your company so it can sustain its growth in these changing times.

In this workshop we will engage the attendees in active learning so they can experience the tools of Blue Ocean Strategic thinking. We know that the two of the hardest things are 1) for a customer to see something that isn’t there yet and 2) for you to get out of the office and begin to really see, feel and think like your customers and even those you would like to be your customers. These tools are crafted to help you do both.
The workshop is about how to see new opportunities by listening better within your own company, challenging the assumptions that drive your present strategy and finding ways to really “see, feel and think” in new ways. Call it innovation, or adaptation or change. The speed of change in our business environment today requires a new approach to strategy and execution so you can move quickly into new markets, shape them and soar to new heights.

Value to members

The approach for the presentation will help members leave with a set of ideas and techniques on how to experience new market opportunities. We like to leave members with specific tools that they can apply and chairs can work with. They will be able to better see, feel and think like a non-customer or a current customer. In the end, members may be able to create new market spaces to change their business strategy and grow their company in new ways.

Speaker Biography

Andrea J. Simon, Ph.D. is a corporate anthropologist and founder of Simon Associates Management Consultants, a consulting firm specializing in helping companies change. Dr. Simon is a trained Blue Ocean Strategist as well as a certified Innovation Games practitioner. She is a consultant affiliated with an organization in the Netherlands that enables her to use the Organizational Cultural Assessment Instrument (www.ocai-online.com) to help companies diagnose and change their cultures.

Simon has been a professor of Anthropology and American Studies, a visiting professor at Washington University teaching on the subject and a senior executive in management, marketing and branding at financial services companies and healthcare institutions, all of which needed to change. Since 2002, her consulting firm serves clients in healthcare, colleges and universities, manufacturing companies and those in service industries all of whom share a common need to sustain their growth strategies by finding new customers, building better solutions, designing new innovative customer experiences, seeking clever ways to beat the way to new “market spaces.”

Thursday, December 17, 2020 — Mike Foster

Every minute of every day, someone is trying to exploit the security systems that protect a company’s information technology systems. Do you know how to keep your organization and data safe?

In this eye-opening session, Mike Foster will help CEOs understand the threats that lurk, as well as give them the tools and information they need to make positive changes in their organization’s IT practices. Members will learn how to protect their companies from various threats, including:

• Being held hostage by ransomware
• Keeping the trust of their customers
• Avoid legal fees for lawsuits and legal battles
• Losses related to wiring money to wrong accounts
• Exposing sensitive data that can result in enormous fines
• Leaking of trade secrets and intellectual property to competitors
• Avoid losing future business because of brand devaluation after a breach
• Having their systems locked, preventing them from delivering products or services
• Credit card breaches that can result in massive fines and the inability to process card payments

Entire organizations, from the emails that crisscross a company’s communications infrastructure, to private information stored in the cloud, to the documents that convey confidential information, to the data that protects the integrity of their R&D investment, are all dependent on the organization’s cyber security.

Value to members:

Mike Foster delivers maximum results in the form of actionable steps that prompt members to make positive change. Members will leave this session with notepads full of personalized, concrete, and understandable ACTION items to immediately implement at work and home so they can sleep better at night.

• Members will watch a live hacking demonstration, revealing how easy it is to lose over one million dollars in 90 seconds and the role of management to prevent this.
• Members will gain an understanding of the enormous risks they and their employees unknowingly take each day and how to stop them.
• Members will receive a personal checklist of simple, valuable action steps that can cost little to no money to implement to help ensure their IT investments are pulling their weight and delivering results.
• Members will receive a list of action steps that can save their organizations millions of dollars by avoiding a hacker attack that could destroy their reputation and company.

Speaker Biography:

Mike Foster he has delivered more than 1,500 presentations, including keynotes across the United States plus Canada, Australia, England, Scotland, Ireland, New Zealand, and South Africa. Multiple international organizations dub him their Number 1 Technology Speaker.

Mike is also the founder and CEO of The Foster Institute. Since 1987 he has helped executives and CEOs with solutions to their high-tech issues. He has earned numerous certifications, including Cisco Certified Network Associate, Microsoft Certified Systems Engineer, Microsoft Certified Professional + Internet, Microsoft Certified Trainer, CEH® (Certified Ethical Hacker), CISA® (Certified Information Systems Auditor), CISSP® (Certified Information Systems Security Professional), and PCI QSA (Payment Card Industry Qualified Security Assessor).

Mike has consulted with and empowered hundreds of CEOs and business owners on best practices for protecting their computer systems. From performing security audits to helping organizations build their strategic plans, Mike helps leaders better understand their IT infrastructure and how it can lead to improved productivity without sacrificing security.

Mike is the author of The Secure CEO: How to Protect Your Computer Systems, Your Company, and Your Job. He has been featured in major media outlets including USA Today, Forbes Magazine, Kiplinger Letter, Entrepreneur Magazine, Insight Magazine, and Atlanta Business Monthly, to name a few.

Thursday, November 19, 2020 — Ark Rozental

In the past decade, the discipline of reaching, persuading, and engaging people had changed forever. The old economy where goods, services, and information were sold, is giving way to a new flat-world economy where goods, services, and information are bought. We buy what we want, when and where we want it, armed with knowledge and using the screen that is most convenient for us at that moment. This change requires a major transformation of all sales-oriented organizations’ thinking to survive and thrive.

In this high-level and highly interactive presentation designed specifically for business owners and C-level executives, Ark Rozental utilizes information gathered from Members prior to the meeting to demonstrate that no matter how the march of technology goes on, fundamentally we’re all human, and being human has limits and presents opportunity.

Value to members:

It really doesn’t matter what business or industry you are in, how big or small your company is, how long you’ve been around, how successful you are, or how you feel about technology. This is not a conversation about technology or what our kids and employees know and we don’t, or the current “buzz”. It is a big-picture look into how to use the Internet to evolve your sales organization and effect sustainable growth.

Key takeaways for members include:

• Internet is not simply another sales and marketing channel; it is all about gathering, analyzing and leveraging data to improve all aspects of your business.
• A profound and conscious awareness of why past experiences and patterns of success that got us here are not going to protect where we are – let along get us to where we aspire to go.
• Evidence-based decision making approach to achieve optimal marketing results.

Speaker Biography:

Chief Behavioral Analytics Officer at Aprio – the largest CPA-led advisory firm in Georgia. Ark Rozental is internationally-acclaimed speaker, marketing adviser, inventor, and better data use advocate.

Ark’s thought leadership on leveraging data for growth was cited in “Entering the Shift Age: The End of the Information Age and the New Era of Transformation” (#1 Bestseller on Amazon in Business Planning and Forecasting), and “Brand Shift: The Future of Brands and Marketing” (selected as one of the top five best marketing books published in the world in 2014 by Marketing & Sales Books annual Marketing Book of the Year contest – one of the most prestigious awards in business publishing).

Thursday, August 20, 2020 — Rob Teschner

Many organizations struggle with implementing system-wide accountability. Holding people accountable for their decisions is a challenging prospect for anyone, especially those who lack experience in this field. An additional pressure point is the prospect of accountable leadership in a rapidly-changing environment, in an age where disruptors are constantly emerging, challenging “the old way” of doing business. Organizations that thrive in this age of rapid change are those that have built processes and employ methodologies focusing on human interactions. Critically, they’ve adopted cultures that embrace improvement and value accountability in ALL aspects of their operations. Either by design or chance they are following the approach high-performing military teams take to enable success in complex environments the world-over. Learning from these high-performing military teams is a powerful option for any organization that intends to win despite disruptive change.

In his interactive program, Mr. Teschner will provide participants clear insight into how high-performing military teams teach leadership, practice accountability and deal with complexity in a program that includes the following:

• A brief history of the development of popular systems that promote innovation
• An outline of the core elements of The Debrief-Focused Approach™
• A case study of accountable leadership in action
• The steps for creating an Accountable Leadership process

Value to members:

Participants will leave with a clear understanding of how high-performing military teams organize and prepare for operations in Volatile, Uncertain, Complex and Ambiguous (VUCA) environments. They will gain a foundational understanding of the high-performing team Debrief model, to include an appreciation for the cultural requirements necessary for successful implementation. The backbone of the high-performing team model, The Debrief-Focused Approach™, will be presented in a readily-accessible format such that participants can immediately implement the most essential components in their own organizations.

Speaker Biography:

Mr. Robert “Cujo” Teschner is a retired F-15 / F-22 fighter pilot. He is also a former F-15 Weapons School Instructor, F-22 Squadron Commander, senior Joint Staff officer and combat veteran. He holds advanced degrees in Operational Art and Science and National Security Strategy, and has extensive experience in tactical planning and execution as well as organizational leadership. From 2004 – 2006 he served as the US Air Force’s expert in post-mission debriefing, the methodology used by high-performing military teams to self-correct and improve continuously. He retired immediately after pinning-on full Colonel due to complications from cancer-related care and started an international business consulting practice based in St. Louis, MO called VMax Group. VMax Group’s mission is to teach businesses how to thrive in a complex world by practicing Accountable Leadership and building high-performing teams. Mr. Teschner is a multiple award-winning fighter aviator, an award-winning writer and author of the national bestselling book, “Debrief to Win”.

Wednesday, June 17, 2020 — Steve Yastrow

In this latest update to Steve Yastrow’s Vistage Brand Harmony workshop, Steve leads Vistage members through action-oriented steps to inspire their teams, motivate their customers and create lasting impact. This highly-interactive workshop translates Steve’s breakthrough marketing, branding, sales, customer relationship and employee engagement ideas into a learning experience that introduces Vistage members to the Commitment-Driven Impact System and provides exercises, tools and resources to bring these revolutionary concepts into their businesses.

The workshop consists of 3 parts, each focusing on one of the following Success Factors:

• Create Lasting Impact: help each member focus on creating lasting impact on their company, their future and the world by developing the dedicated commitment of their customers and employees. In this section, each member will identify their most lucrative new business opportunities and define incremental, results-oriented milestones that will enable them to build long-term business value.
• Motivate Committed Customers: help each member focus on motivating their customers to commit to their company and give the company a substantial share of the customer’s love, loyalty and purchases. In this section, each member will determine their desired customer actions that will unleash the potential of new opportunities, articulate their ideal customer beliefs that will motivate customers to act with commitment and define customer experience enhancements that will lead to Brand Harmony and encourage compelling customer beliefs.
• Inspire a Committed Team: help each member focus on inspiring their team to commit to their company and motivate customers through engaging customer experiences each and every day. In this section, each member will explore the shared employee behaviors that deliver engaging customer experiences, clarify the shared beliefs that will inspire their team to act with commitment and determine the employee experience that will engage their team, nurture their culture and encourage compelling shared beliefs.

Value to members

Vistage members will take home concrete tools to generate next-level business results and create lasting impact by motivating and inspiring customer and employee commitment.

Speaker Biography

Steve Yastrow is a non-stop idea generator, business advisor and best-selling author of three books: Brand Harmony, We and Ditch the Pitch. He has guided hundreds of executives and businesses of all types to generate results through the Success Factors in his Commitment-Driven Impact System.

The Commitment-Driven Impact System encompasses Steve’s breakthrough marketing, branding, sales, customer relationship and employee engagement ideas from his decades of consulting experience. Prior to starting Yastrow & Company, Steve was Vice President of Resort Marketing for Hyatt Hotels & Resorts. Steve earned his MBA from the J.L. Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University and his B.A. from Indiana University.

Thursday, January 23, 2020 — Linda Schwefel

Linda Schwefel teaches how the Insights Discovery System, developed in 1988 and now experienced by more than five million people, can be applied to improving leadership effectiveness, developing better managers, improving teams and increasing sales performance. Using personal preference data collected in advance of the session, Linda Schwefel will help Vistage members to identify their own personal communications style using the Insights Discovery Profile.

This session begins with an introduction of Jungian psychology, starting with perception, and key exercises that enable CEOs, leaders, managers to realize that most of their work environment is a function of their perception. Participants will then experience an increase in awareness of their own conscious and less conscious states, and begin to differentiate between the behaviors associated with both. Each participant will then receive a 22-page individual Insights Discovery Profile created from online responses gathered in advance of the session. Participants then engage actively with each other to put their knowledge of self, combined with their new understanding of others, through various personal and workplace scenarios.

Value to members

They then learn how to leverage this knowledge to:

• Better lead their organizations
• Better manage stress and improve personal wellness
• Quickly develop their emerging managers
• Improve team performance
• Increase sales
• Improve their personal relationships

Speaker Biography

Linda Schwefel, Managing Partner of Discover Yourself, brings over 20 years of training, keynote speaking, coaching, and professional selling experience to her role as speaker, facilitator and Vistage presenter. She has been a Sales Manager, and Top Salesperson with Xerox, where she was the Marketing Representative of the Year Nationwide for her first year. Linda later worked as an Account Manager for Versyss Corporation (OEM for IBM), where she was ranked 2nd nationally out of 700 Sales Representative 5 years in a row. Today she delivers keynotes, teaches and coaches using the Insights Discovery System. Linda delivers and engaging and informative session. She lives in Excelsior, MN with her husband and their three children.

Thursday, December 19, 2019 — Tim McCarthy

Did you ever think half your marketing is working…but you didn’t know which half?

Do you sometimes feel overwhelmed when your team tells you the cost and complexity of your marketing plan?

Have you avoided creating a marketing plan and budget because you feel like you don’t understand it?

Have you been told marketing should always pay out or never pay out? (Hint: neither is true)

Tim McCarthy, veteran of Madison Avenue and a former Chief Marketing Officer of a 650 restaurant chain demystifies marketing in this three hour presentation for Vistage CEOs by teaching the five immutable laws of marketing that apply to every company and every sales, marketing and advertising challenge. 

McCarthy confirms that aggressive promise by offering to:

• Work with live ammo – before each presentation, McCarthy invites your members to share up to specific sales or marketing issues members feel are chronic.

• Provide free follow up contact(McCarthy does not consult) for members wishing to share problems and successes they experience by using the disciplines he teaches Note: McCarthy does NOT consult or sell anything. 

Full contact – due to short presentation and working with your members’ “live ammo” McCarthy offers a fully interactive and engaged experience for your members

Vistage born, Vistage bred – McCarthy became a Vistage member in 1995 when his start-up marketing company www.workplaceimpact.com was seven years old. A free copy of his mini-book “Everything I Ever Needed to Know I Learned in Vistage” is provided with leave behinds.

Materially successful experience – McCarthy sold his first company into private equity in 2007 (and bought it back in 2013) and currently owns and oversees companies with over 1,200 employees doing north of $100 million annual sales

Individually fulfilling experience – McCarthy’s foundation www.thebusinessofgood.org is engaged in “serving those who serve the poor” since 1997 investing thousands of hours and millions of dollars to teaching non-profits how to build their missions through sound business practices. 

Value to members

Members will leave with valuable tools, a greater understanding of the Vistage process, and how it will work for them through simple, actionable and interactive exercises demonstrated in the meeting. They will acquire a booklet that outlines 20 years of experiential Vistage knowledge and practical steps in disciplines proven to grow business. Program leave-behind includes all slides presented. Members will also receive free copy of Tim’s book, “My Path to Engaged Philanthropy“.

Speaker Biography

Tim received a Bachelor of Arts in Political Science from Ohio State University in March of 1975 then received his Masters of Business Administration from Ohio State (Fisher Business School) in June of 2007. In 2008, he received Fisher Alumnae Community Service Award and became an Ernst and Young regional Entrepreneur of the Year.

McCarthy opened his first business in 1988. Over time, this company developed a permissioned database of 700,000 employers delivering incentives for their national advertising clients such as Coca-Cola, Lenscrafters and McDonalds to 70 million consumers. WorkPlace Media now Workplace Impact www.WorkplaceImpact.com, was sold to the Riverside Company in 2007 and then repurchased from Riverside in October, 2013.

In 2003, in partnership with his son, Tim Patrick, McCarthy opened the first chicken finger restaurant north of the Mason-Dixon Line. Raising Cane’s of Ohio now has 25 restaurants, another five under construction and did $70 million revenue in 2017.

Throughout his adult life, McCarthy has been engaged in non-profit work. Since 2000, when WorkPlace Media achieved consistent profitability, he’s diverted more than 20% of that profit each year to a foundation he formed called The Business of Good www.theBusinessofGood.org.

His foundation invests in socially conscious businesses and scalable non-profit concepts from its corpus of $50 million.

The mission of The Business of Good is focused on “serving those who serve the poor” by helping non-profits use business disciplines to grow their mission. McCarthy says, “In all cases, our focus is to build capacity to serve. I mean, what good is a great mission if it’s unsustainable?”

Thursday, November 21, 2019 — Richard Reinis

In 1998, Richard G. Reinis co-founded Great Circle Family Foods, the exclusive franchisee of Krispy Kreme doughnuts in Southern California. By the end of 2004, GCFF owned and operated 31 Krispy Kreme stores and sold doughnuts to 800 grocery stores in Southern California, making it the largest franchisee in the Krispy Kreme system. Then disaster struck.This presentation is a colorful, real-life case study of how business executives make decisions under the pressures of expansion and sudden, extreme contraction. From formation to nationally acclaimed success, and then to and through a reorganization, the CEO at the center of the storm will tell you what choices were made and how those decisions and strategic partners, employees, customers, financial sources and others, along with uncontrollable events, impacted the business and its owners. This is a story with enormous impact, often called the best presentation group members have ever had.

Value to members

You will learn how to prepare for and respond to a number of dramatic events, including unanticipated meteoric success, rapid expansion, confrontations with a NYSE strategic partner, sudden national calamity, evaporating sales and cash, and the struggle for survival. You will learn to deal with partners, employees, lenders, your Board, and others in a way that may be more productive. You will see how the unanticipated consequences of your own decisions and the decisions of others can move your business. The true meaning of vision and how articulating it can save more than just your business is made evident in this presentation. The content applies to every business and every executive.

Speaker Biography

Mr. Reinis is a partner with the national law firm Thompson Coburn. His legal practice involves transactional and litigation work representing businesses of every type. In 2016, the practice included restructuring of a number of companies, representing debtors, litigating trust issues, resolving disputes between franchisors and franchisees, assisting businesses in creation of strategic partnerships, repulsing media attacks on a client, defending executives sued by creditors and businesses sued by employees, and many more business matters. He has first chaired numerous jury trials, organized restaurant finances, assisted in fundraising for new ventures, and negotiated countless ground and building leases. Over 40 years, Mr. Reinis has represented clients in virtually every area of business law. He is the father of 5, grandfather of 14, with one on the way, and an avid reader. Mr. Reinis is a graduate of Princeton University and the USC School of Law, where he served on Law Review and was Chief Justice of the Moot Court. In 1964-65 he played on the last undefeated Princeton football team and was named first team All-Ivy League tackle.

Tuesday, August 20, 2019 — Jim McCormick

Leaders know their organizations need to be innovative and agile.  Decisions have to be timely and correct.  Their people need to take ownership of their actions and outcomes.

Jim McCormick helps leaders advance their organizations in all these areas by facilitating the discussion on where risk fits in their culture.  For two decades, McCormick has helped companies improve their performance by intentionally and thoughtfully addressing risk.  His insights center on the value of targeting then incentivizing the desired risk posture for each team, department and division.

For Vistage groups, this program is a discussion and not a presentation.  McCormick steers the discussion based on the elements the members desire to pursue.

Overarching elements of the discussion include the extent to which:

• Members’ business success is determined by their ability to take risks successfully.
• Members’ ability to utilize and manage risk differs from their employees.
• An awareness of their employee’s Risk Quotients (RQs) will help to create more successful teams.
• Members’ companies are seeking innovation and initiative but may be giving mixed messages about whether they are truly valued.

Uniqueness:

The discussion focuses on the value of utilizing risk as opposed to the more common approach of minimizing risk.

Value to members

• Awareness – An informed discussion on the desired risk posture of each member’s organization and how to achieve it.
• RQ – All members will have an opportunity to determine their personal Risk Quotient using McCormick’s proprietary Personal Risk Profile.  With this information in mind, they can then discuss the significance of RQs and group socialization in forming teams and staffing.
• Risk/Judgment Imbalance – A discussion of legacy factors in personal risk tolerance.
• ORP – An introduction to the concept of Organizational Risk Postures and a discussion of how to determine then incentivize them.
• IRT – An overview of the six steps of Intelligent Risk-Taking and how each member’s teams can use them to evaluate initiatives and improve the chances of a successful implementation.
• RASE – Members will be introduced to McCormick’s proprietary Risk Assessment/Success Enhancement tool that can be used by their people to guide them through the Intelligent Risk-Taking process. 

Speaker Biography

Jim McCormick is the founder and president of the Research Institute for Risk Intelligence and the author of Business Lessons from the Edge (McGraw-Hill), The Power of Risk (Maxwell Press) and The First-Time Manager (AMACOM). Jim has lived this vision in settings as diverse as The White House as a member of a Presidential administration; various executive level positions in the real estate, construction, and architecture industries; and as a holder of seven skydiving World Records.  Jim earned a degree in engineering from the University of Southern California and an MBA from the University of California, Irvine.  McCormick travels from Denver, Colorado.

Thursday, May 23, 2019 – Jeff Blackman

In this high-energy, interactive and information-loaded results-session, Jeff Blackman shows you how to skillfully convert sales obstacles into opportunities, results and profits. Immediately!

This content-rich results-session can include:

• how to create long-term, loyal, profitable relationships
• the VINe philosophy: a value-driven, integrity based and non-manipulative approach to enhanced revenue generation
• the 6 crucial steps in the Opportunity $elling business-development process
• listening for profits
• value selling and ways to increase your value barometer
• how to sell to other c-class decision makers
• improved questioning/probing skills (Jeff gives you a jumpstart, with his proven list of “power probes”)
• tested, practical, profit-producing strategies to overcome objections and delays
• referrals and lead generation
• creating your differential competitive advantage and more

Key outcomes, results and benefits:

• transforming sales slumps into winning ways
• reducing employee turnover, replacement and lost opportunity costs
• increasing personal and professional success and fulfillment
• converting “possibilities” into “realities”
• discovering if your team handles each sales opportunity, the way “top producers” do
• creating renewed sales focus and discipline that generates the right results
• building confidence and a winning team
• boosting sales, profits and growth

 Biography: As a “business-growth specialist” Jeff shares his profit-producing strategies with numerous CEOs, Presidents, entrepreneurs and their people. He’s a speaker, author, success coach, broadcaster and lawyer. He’s also a contributing columnist to numerous magazines and newspapers. His books and business-growth tools include; Opportunity $elling, RESULT$, Peak Your Profits, Carpe A.M. o Carpe P.M., Stop Whining! Start Selling! – an Amazon Bestseller, Opportunity $elling – Six Profit-Producing Steps to Multiply Your Earnings, Profitable Customer Service and How to Set and Really Achieve Your Goals. On June 5th, 2008, Vistage named Jeff Fast Track Speaker of the Year. And in August, 2008, he was inducted into the National Speakers Association’s, Speaker Hall of Fame.

Thursday, March 21, 2019 — David Friedman

World-class organizations have long recognized the powerful influence their cultures have on the performance of their people, and by extension, the performance of their companies. Not surprisingly, while most organizations allow their cultures to evolve naturally, top-performing ones don’t leave this to chance. Instead, they’re amazingly intentional about how they create and drive the culture they want to have. How they do it is the topic of this program.

This is not your standard abstract or theoretical program about the importance of creating a vision or mission statement. Rather, it’s a practical, actionable, no nonsense program designed to give participants the tools to leverage their corporate culture as a distinct competitive advantage. As a former award-winning CEO, David Friedman knows firsthand what it takes to build a high-performance culture, and more importantly, he knows the impact it can have on the bottom line. Delivered with his down-to-earth, yet passionate style, and filled with lots of examples from his 27 years of personal leadership experience, David’s program covers such topics as:

• The difference between a good culture and a high-performance culture
• Why values are less important than behaviors
• Why vision and mission statements are often a mistake
• Critical mistakes most leaders make in defining their culture, and how to avoid them
• The role of ritual in sustaining a focus on culture over the long run 

Value to Participants: While the content of this program is thought-provoking, and even inspiring, the real value is in the ability to take the concepts and immediately implement them at work. Most participants will describe this as the most practical and actionable program they’ve ever heard on how to build a high-performance culture; and every participant will leave with a specific game plan to better leverage the power of their own corporate culture. 

Biography: David Friedman is the retired President of RSI, an employee benefits consulting firm headquartered in Mt. Laurel, NJ. Under his leadership and direction, RSI grew from 2 employees to a staff of more than 100 professionals and annual revenues in excess of $16 million. The firm won numerous awards including being named one of the Best Places to Work in the Philadelphia region 3 times and one of the Best Places to Work in NJ 4 times. In 2006 RSI earned the NJ Governor’s Award for Performance Excellence – Gold Level, the highest award for total quality available in the state. In 2008, RSI became a division of Arthur J. Gallagher & Associates (AJG), one of the largest insurance brokers in the world. David served as the Area President for Gallagher until his retirement in July of 2010.

In 2011, David published his first book, Fundamentally Different, based on the insights he learned and taught during his leadership career. Today, he’s a frequent guest speaker and seminar leader (more than 80 talks per year) on leadership, organizational culture, and building high performance teams. He also serves as a consultant to dozens of companies around the country. David is a 1983 graduate of the College of William & Mary with a degree in philosophy.