Many of us have Executive Assistants, many of us would like an EA, many of us may think of this job as a low-level task person, some of us may want to start with someone part time and see how it goes, and many of us may not know the value of a great EA. Gina Cotner, Founder & CEO of Athena Executive Services, knows all too well the ins and outs of this business. Gina stumbled into the business five years ago and has been very successful in representing and placing virtual EAs with busy executives. She was a resistant entrepreneur because of past mixed results.

Her focus is on high-caliber EAs who build powerful partnerships with their executives. This is no small task, so what goes on behind the scenes before a CXO even meets their potential EA is nothing short of brilliant matchmaking. One might think of Athena as a search firm or staffing firm, but Gina looks at her company as a contracting firm. Athena coaches and trains the EAs, and matches them to executives. Having grown the business to North of 500k may not seem like a lot, but her business is thriving and there is a waiting list of executives anxious to get a high-quality EA from her.

We speak about what's preventing her from taking on a co-founder and really growing the business. After all, she's providing an important service that many busy executives desperately need. We also discuss the differences between what Athena does and cheap VAs overseas. What's important to realize is that Gina sees her organization as one that places Virtual Executive Assistants, so listen in and learn what there is to know about this industry.

Learn more about Gina and Athena Executive Services

You can find more information on all our episodes at verticalelevation.com/podcasts, and you can find Carol on Twitter @carolbschultz or LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/carolbschultz/.

If you have an interest in innovation and/or your organization needs to work through dense, complicated contracts, this episode is for you. Street Diligence Founder & CEO, Stephen Hazelton, talks to Carol about how the idea came about. Founded in 2012, the Street Diligence platform is able to extract numeric and textual information around the terms and conditions and obligations of the contract and deliver the information back to their clients so they can understand the contract and do due diligence in order to negotiate better terms for themselves.

Stephen is a second-time founder and he's not shy about discussing what he did in his first venture that didn't work as he expected and what he changed the second time around. He also talks candidly about hiring challenges and mistakes he's made and what he's doing to improve hiring success.

Learn more about Stephen and Street Diligence here: https://streetdiligence.com/

You can find more information on all our episodes at verticalelevation.com/podcasts, and you can find Carol on Twitter @carolbschultz or LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/carolbschultz/.

One of the common denominators among the most successful startups is that they are solving a problem that needs solving. Allstacks is on a mission to disrupt the value stream management category. This category of business looks at how people in an organization work and then map this by using machine learning to understand what may happen in the future. The value stream intelligence market, where the Allstacks platform is focused, helps engineering teams predict and quantify team productivity, thus predicting outcomes.

There are 25 million developers globally, which is expected to double in the next 10 years. This makes the market for Allstacks and platforms like it immense. This massive market is very attractive to investors because any company that employs software engineers really needs this problem solved.

In this conversation, Carol and Hersh talk about all this plus Hersh's journey from IBM to where he is now and his discovery of the importance of doing work that makes a real impact for him and the people he employs. We look at who the Allstacks ideal client is, which tends to be companies with a pressing need to get their product out the door, company size (250-10K employees), marketing strategies, hiring strategies, culture, and the very low turnover they have experienced.

Learn more about Hersh and Allstacks at: https://www.allstacks.com/

You can find more information on all our episodes at verticalelevation.com/podcasts, and you can find Carol on Twitter @carolbschultz or LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/carolbschultz/.

F2000 brands are investing hundreds of millions (or billions) of dollars a year on experiences in order to build brand love, and Jonathan Yaffe, Co-founder & CEO of AnyRoad, is on a mission to solve this problem. Having gotten his first job out of college 22 years ago with Red Bull's marketing department, he was awed by the fact that Red Bull was investing over a billion dollars a year on experiences. The problem was that there was no data to determine if, or how well, this was changing brand perception and consumption habits of their customers.

Jonathan Co-founded AnyRoad with his brother Daniel in 2013. Daniel was the founder/publisher of the premier lifestyle magazine about alcohol culture. In addition, he wrote a book called Drink More Whiskey, and the research for this book took him all over the world to sample different whiskeys and visit amazing distilleries. This research provided him with experiences and brand loyalty he will never forget. Given the impact of these experiences, it seemed the logical next choice for Johathan and Daniel to move into this business full time and solve the data problem.

They discovered that companies investing in experiential marketing were winning the race for loyal customers and those who didn't invest in experiences were left on the sidelines. Brands are spending inordinate sums of money on experiences and have no data to determine if what they're doing is working.

Jonathan talks to Carol about pivoting from calling on small businesses to the F2000 and what wasn't working with small businesses. The pivot came four years after their founding in 2013 when they were close to shutting down the business. It was brought to their attention that enterprises desperately needed the data that AnyRoad supplied and the pivot has been extremely successful. It's also important to note that pivoting is not uncommon with first-time tech founders, but what's important is their commitment to the company.

With rapid revenue growth, AnyRoad is increasing its headcount and has to determine the best way to do that as the company doubles in size without ruining its culture. This is the age-old challenge with high-growth companies.

Learn more about Jonathan and AnyRoad: https://www.anyroad.com/

You can find more information on all our episodes at verticalelevation.com/podcasts, and you can find Carol on Twitter @carolbschultz or LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/carolbschultz/.

A former fighter pilot in the Israeli Air Force, Gal Oron is no stranger to a challenge. He has extensive experience as an entrepreneur and began his career as a QA engineer with Orsus where he moved up the ranks and became President until its acquisition by Nice Systems in 2009. After his successful experience with M&A, he went to Verint as an M&A specialist and then became a partner at Trigger Partners, a Venture Capital firm focused primarily on the Healthcare Sector. Gal Co-founded Zoomin in 2016 and has been building the company ever since.

When it comes to building a talent-centric organization, Gal really walks the walk. Having grown the organization to approximately 150 employees, 53% of his workforce is female and diversity is important to him.

Carol and Gal talk about how to use content in a way that works for businesses without causing "brain damage". Zoomin is making it easier for companies to self-serve and get problems solved. In the first year of doing business Gal and his team closed business with McAfee and ServiceNow just to name two. They discuss product-market fit, investors and why they are so excited about Zoomin, company culture, what it means to be open and authentic as a leader and as a company, bootstrapping, what it means to be a category builder, and his commitment to a diverse workforce.

The company began in Israel and Gal tells Carol why they moved the headquarters to the US and chose NY rather than Silicon Valley and why they should have done it sooner. There were challenges with hiring from Israel and their go-to-market strategy. Additionally, they've grown so fast and there have been challenges with hiring so many employees in just one year.

To learn more about Zoomin: https://www.zoominsoftware.com/

You can find more information on all our episodes at verticalelevation.com/podcasts, and you can find Carol on Twitter @carolbschultz or LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/carolbschultz/.

Real estate investment can be very complicated if you don't clearly know what you're doing. I'm sure you get spammed via email and LinkedIn from companies that want you to invest. But how do you know who's the real deal? There are many challenges that make it hard for even the most successful hotel companies. They have to staff, retain staff, market, provide great customer service, and more.

Carol speaks to Stephen Nally, Founder & President of Black Briar Hotel Group, about choosing the right hotels and resorts to invest in, how to find and retain great employees in a low-wage industry, developing leaders from within, and all the other challenges that this industry presents.

To learn more about Black Briar, click on the link: https://blackbriarus.com/

You can find more information on all our episodes at verticalelevation.com/podcasts, and you can find Carol on Twitter @carolbschultz or LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/carolbschultz/.

When it comes to flood risk, Brad Hubbard, Founder & President of National Flood Experts is the go-to guy. National Flood Experts looks at properties from an engineering standpoint as well as how national flood models rate the flood risk and can tell whether or not a building really is a flood risk and, if so, what the risk truly is. They have frequently been successful at moving buildings from high to low risk, saving their clients considerable money on insurance.

They have an unusual business model where they don't charge their clients to do this research. The client only pays when National Flood Experts is able to save them money. It is this model that had them skyrocket from $600k-$5M, with no end in sight.

In this conversation, Carol and Brad talk about bootstrapping, mistakes, epiphanies, learning how to hire for fit rather than how he originally did it by how much he thought he liked someone, which didn't often turn out how he thought it would, and the great successes Brad and National Flood Experts have had.

Learn more at: https://nationalfloodexperts.com/

You can find more information for all our episodes at verticalelevation.com/podcasts, and you can find Carol on Twitter @carolbschultz or LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/carolbschultz/.

In this episode, host Carol Schultz speaks with Tim Kachuriak, Founder and Chief Innovation and Optimization Officer for NextAfter, a fundraising research lab consultancy and training institute that works with charities, nonprofits, and NGOs to help them grow their resource capacity. 

Tim had dedicated his life to non-profit work and is a fundraising thought leader and has realized that the true experts in this field are the donors; he's found a way to ask the right questions to determine why people donate to charities.

Listen to Tim's story of bootstrapping NextAfter and how it morphed into what it is today. Learn more at: https://www.nextafter.com/

You can find more information for all our episodes at verticalelevation.com/podcasts, and you can find Carol on Twitter @carolbschultz or LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/carolbschultz/.

In this episode, host Carol Schultz speaks with Camille Grade, CMO at Bushel. Hear about their pivot from mobile custom software development, a services company, to building a technology company focused on agribusiness. When looking at the physical infrastructure built in the US hundreds of years ago, this gave the US a huge competitive advantage in selling commodities overseas. Bushel believes that building digital will add another competitive advantage in the market.

We often speak about how the most successful companies are solving real problems that need to be solved, and in Bushel's case, local farmers were having great difficulty seeing their account information with their local grain facility. They can now see their scale tickets, how they are fulfilling contracts, if they still need to deliver product, how much they still need to deliver, and how much have they been paid, etc.

Learn more at bushelpowered.com

You can find more information for all our episodes at verticalelevation.com/podcasts, and you can find Carol on Twitter @carolbschultz or LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/carolbschultz/.

In this episode, your host Carol Schultz talks to Brian Adams, Founder & President of Excelsior Capital, a real estate private equity firm primarily focusing on stabilized income and capital preservation. Brian began his career as an attorney in criminal law before moving into the real estate market and founding Excelsior in 2019. Hear about his journey, as a young entrepreneur, the mistakes he made, rapid growth, and the changes he made to get to where he is today.

Brian is not shy about discussing his mistakes and failures, which is a common denominator among the most successful, authentic entrepreneurs.

You can learn more about them at excelsiorgrp.com

You can find more information for all our episodes at verticalelevation.com/podcasts, and you can find Carol on Twitter @carolbschultz or LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/carolbschultz/.