Raising The Bar on Leadership

Some things never go out of style: collaboration, the importance of sales, and phone booths. Serial entrepreneur Ryan Leavitt, the Co-Founder of Pillar Booth, LearnCore and Catapult Chicago, says there’s one equation that is necessary for a business to succeed. Success = Collaboration + Accountability.

In this episode, Corbett Drummey, the Co-Founder and CEO of Popular Pays, shares his journey in starting a content sharing platform that helps brands generate high-quality content to tell their unique stories through influencer marketing. Drummey started and scaled his business by constantly consuming information and believes that one should always be learning and evolving.

When the business Laura Coe created sold to a Fortune 500 company, Laura took the path less often taken, leaving corporate America to pursue her lifelong passions of philosophy, coaching and spirituality. She wrote her first book, Emotional Obesity and started the popular podcast, The Art of Authenticity. In today's episode, Laura takes us through her journey, sharing how she knew it was time to leave and what life was like for her on the other side. 

Frank Riordan, Founder and CEO of DMC, Inc., has built a company that has consistently been a staple on the “Best Places to Work” lists, with over 170 employees in 8 cities across the US. This happened by building a process to hire the very best people, which takes time. In this episode, Frank takes a dive into their process and criteria for hiring top talent and shares how it has helped fuel DMC’s success and growth over the years.

With 4 successful companies under his belt and over 2,000 employees hired, Jeff Ellman, visionary and co-founder of Humatal, Homescout, Hireology, and UrbanBound, knows something about starting and building a successful business. It’s all about the first ten people you bring into your organization, advises Jeff. They are the foundation of your business. If they align with your company’s values, they’ll also bring in employees that have the same vision and values. But hire the wrong person? It causes the Bozo effect, says Jeff.

Doesn’t it seem that some people are just born with an entrepreneurial gene? Dan Novaes, the co-founder and CEO of Current Media, is one of those born entrepreneurs. He started his first company at the age of 15 with only $1000, bootstrapped it up to over $2M/year and now is on his 10th company, a blockchain enabled multimedia platform that empowers a new generation of media streamers where users are rewarded by streaming music. Novaes talks about his evolution as an entrepreneur and a leader. He describes how focus, empathy and emotional intelligence have helped him take his business to the next level.

Can best buddies also be effective business partners? In the case of Monarch & Company - a creative merchandising agency based in Chicago and Denver - Founder and CEO Yvonne Lyngaas Zeman and her business partner, best friend, and COO Anna Nguyen have made it work. In today’s episode we talk about the realities of working with your best friend, the trials that come along with negotiating equity, a partnership agreement, and leading a company where half of your team works on the other side of the country.

Alex O’Brien, COO of The Cardinal Group, talks about how his 5 years as a Marine were instrumental in helping him grow his company from one single family home development to over 1,000 employees today and how the Marine playbook turned into their company’s core values which guide his team on a daily basis.

Kim Scott, author, entrepreneur, and badass. Prior to writing her best-selling book, Radical Candor, Kim was a senior leader at Google, a faculty member at Apple University and served as a coach to the CEOs of several well-known tech firms. Scott discusses why radical candor with kindness is integral in the workplace, why it’s still hard for her to do, and how fear of retribution can stifle it.

At the age of 16, Dana Gordon sold out her first jewelry collection within 48 hours. Now, nearly 15 years later, her jewelry is worn by countless celebrities and women of all ages and lifestyles. Gordon discusses the difficulty of finding balance as a female founder, mother, wife, and human being!