Evolving Your Workplace

David Barrett is not your typical tech CEO, nor does he want to be. As a talented engineer, David has been part of many failed startups. His own company, Expensify, has gained notoriety because of what it doesn’t do – follow the VC handbook. David initially wasn’t trying to build a business. He only wanted to provide a way for people in his Tenderloin (San Francisco) neighborhood with a way to get a good meal. That eventually led to a fictional expense management company (for explaining to bankers) that led to founding Expensify, a platform managing bills, expenses, invoices and other pre-accounting functions, in 2008.

Although David learned valuable lessons at those failed startups, he still had to fight against the trends, the investors and the naysayers who couldn’t comprehend how a platform that was written before there was an iPhone or an app store would ever work. If they understood how it works.

How it works is brilliant – give it to employees for free. Let them fall in love with it and tell others who also will love it. They, in turn, tell their managers about it and those managers buy it. In building something meaningful that provides long-term value through being profitable, David keeps it simple at Expensify. He runs a flat company that empowers each employee to perform at their best through trust, peer evaluation, and collaboration. Having participated in a certain amount of corporate stupidity at other companies, he follows his instincts in what will and won’t work for Expensify. And David doesn’t let the noise of what other companies are doing or what he’s supposed to be doing drown out his belief in his business model or his high-performing team.

You’ll enjoy hearing this honest, authentic CEO relate how much staying true to his vision has made the difference.

Learn more about DAVID BARRETT and EXPENSIFY

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

Content marketing isn’t a new concept but the struggle to get to that essential number one ranking is an enigma that Christopher Day and his partner Shawn Schwegman are endeavoring to solve. Passionate about marketing tools and content as the foundation, Christopher and his team at DemandJump are disrupting marketing norms through pillar-based strategies.

In this episode, you’ll hear Christopher explain how pillar-based marketing goes way beyond SEO guesswork by letting the math lead the way. Christopher’s theories around aligning marketing messages organically with customer behaviors not only disrupts the standard, but pioneers a whole new approach to marketing based on relationships.

As with many entrepreneurs, Christopher has made mistakes in a variety of areas along the way. After graduating from Purdue where he ran a painting business to pay his way, he got into the brand new broadband business. While he eventually sold the company to Comcast and Time Warner, his tenure wasn’t without the pitfalls and challenges of learning to lead, hire and manage.

Eight companies later, Christopher applies three valuable leadership lessons as he continues to push the envelope in finding interesting ways to solve problems. I know you’ll find those three lessons and Christopher’s take on management as fascinating as I did.

Learn more about Christopher Day and DemandJump

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

Join me in this fascinating discussion with Kathryn, a confessed serial entrepreneur, as she discusses how she’s built several profitable ventures because she kept finding problems that needed solving. During her early career in the burgeoning cable television industry, Kathryn loved how technology made lives better. What she did not love was the negative aspect of working in a culture of constant “stab you in the back” mentality to get ahead.

Even though Kathryn had no experience running companies correctly, she continued learning from her experience and passed that on as an instructor at Chico State, and through earning an MBA.

In 2007, Kathryn was introduced to the transportation industry, and she fell in love with the honest and honorable culture driven by people who embraced her and her considerable talents. Starting a business that catered to a mostly male-dominated sales force, Kathryn spent many of those early years proving herself and her company’s ability to make the lives of those guys easier in buying and selling commercial transportation vehicles. Supported by a husband who never stood in her way, Kathryn was soon raising funds and growing her staff to its present 85. Along the way, she learned three simple and valuable lessons.

Work Truck Solutions is now an integral part of the American trucking industry and Kathryn’s business practices provide a solid foundation for a sustainable and successful niche in that essential transportation space.

Learn more about Kathryn Schifferle and Work Truck Solutions

Work Truck Solutions Commercial Vehicle Business Summit is coming up on May 18 & 19. It's free to join and there's a lot to learn!

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

It all started because he was unemployed, bored, and didn’t want to be a system administrator anymore. Luke Kanies founded Puppet in 2005, raised $87 million in funding, and was then fired from the company for which he sacrificed his health and probably a bit of his sanity in 2014. He then set about developing a personal CRM product through a company called Clickety in 2019, but chose instead to shutter it before the first round of funding due to health issues. Talk about perspective.

Listen to this fascinating story of how Luke, starting his career as a sysadmin, pioneered Puppet that focused on IT DevOps. He wanted to bring sysadmins to the table with developers and sales where they could have a voice in developing the tools they needed to solve problems. Growing up with autism, maneuvering the corporate world meant Luke heard things differently and that required a tremendous amount of adjustment, compromise, and flexibility. It ultimately wore him down to a nub.

Leadership presented a new set of challenges for someone who just wanted to solve the problems that no one else thought were important. He figured out that leading people meant making hundreds of decisions daily around people. He struggled to find executives who put his and the company’s interests ahead of their own. And that led to burnout.

Luke’s take on leadership is refreshing, eye-opening, and flat out revolutionary. While his mission has always been solving problems that impact the world, Luke now understands that the right people, aligned with the right focus and vision, will always make the difference in success.

Learn more about Luke Kanies and Puppet

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

Kevin Price, founder of Accucode, Inc., quit his job at a Denver-based technology company on a Friday afternoon in 1995. By 10 a.m. the following Monday, working out of his basement, he had landed his first client. Since then, Accucode, Inc. has been on Inc. Magazine's fastest growing company list a whopping ten times and his family of companies now posts $100 million dollar revenues generated by a small yet relentless sales team.

It took 3 years for Price and his team to get out of the basement and during that time, his company has stayed out of debt, had some fun, and built a culture of integrity, emotional intelligence, and family that pervades every aspect of the organization. Price attributes this continued success on customer relationships built on trust and producing results by doing it differently than peer competitors in the arena.

Accucode has established itself as a standout IT company that applies technology to solve problems in retail, manufacturing, and logistics. In differentiating his company, Price maintains that if Accucode doesn’t deliver as promised, he’ll absorb the loss. Early customers blanched at this concept, but as the Accucode team produced by working thoughtfully to solve the problems, they earned the trust that forged profitable relationships. Doing it differently has paid off for Price and Accucode, Inc. in a way even he couldn’t have envisioned that long ago Monday morning in his basement.

Learn more about Kevin Price and Accucode

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

When Annie Scranton found herself out of a job, she wasn’t planning to start a public relations company. But that’s what happened when she took a random $500 commission to put a specific client on a specific show. Though she always wanted to be Katie Couric in front of the camera, Annie has now found a sweet niche in the volatile and highly competitive national public relations arena by staying focused on the best possible solution for her clients. That means leveraging a network she built behind the scenes to secure those valuable placements that ultimately translate into higher visibility and credibility for her clients.

The 12-year old company Annie founded and runs today didn’t happen without aches and pains in staffing, strategy and the occasional shift in work-life balance to too much work and not enough life. Annie discusses those aches, pains and successes with a unique and gracious understanding that it all starts and ends with her. As her company has grown, Annie has grown into her role as a leader who includes, inspires and invites a culture of feedback. Through this process, Annie has learned that running a pr firm requires strategy, insight and innovation in an ever-changing media world that runs 24/7.

Learn more about Annie Scranton and Pace Public Relations.

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/.

In this episode, Carol has an in-depth conversation with Emily O’Connor, CEO of ContentWriters, based in the greater New York metropolis.

Founded in 2013, ContentWriters is a full-service content writing agency that puts quality written content at the heart of a company's growth strategy. Their mission is to connect businesses with diverse audiences through powerful content crafted by a supreme network of writing talent - providing dynamic solutions to scale workflows for publishers, agencies, and individual proprietors in dozens of industries.

Emily’s diverse experience and education has her known for being an authentic leader, results-oriented professional, with tenacity and integrity as her foundation.

Take notes! Emily has a lot to share about her journey since the beginning. Enjoy!

Learn more about Emily O'Connor and CONTENTWRITERS at: https://contentwriters.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/.

In this episode, Carol Schultz speaks with Robert Mason aka “Bobby”, CEO and President of SPOC Automation in Birmingham, Alabama.

SPOC is an innovation company and the largest independent artificial lift controls manufacturer in North America, producing world-class variable frequency drive solutions for the oil and gas industry.

As experts in the industry, with over two decades of automation experience, they have been successful at reducing carbon emissions, while increasing production and lowering lifting costs, thus redefining the standard that drives automation in the oilfield.

Bobby shares SPOC’s “Lift Up” culture and why his 100 employees feel like a family unit and remain loyal and happy. Bobby says, “People are what makes companies run -treat them like a family and they go the extra mile”. Bobby goes the extra mile too, creating a team culture with core values at the heart of what’s important in retaining great talent including excellent pay and incentives.

Sit back and listen to this exploratory dialogue and discover how this solution-focused company is disrupting our country’s dependence on foreign sources and preparing for massive expansion.

"Always look for a better way. Innovation is never easy; it only follows mastery. But we are always looking for a better way to do things, and we want your help."

Learn more about Robert Mason and SPOC Automation

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/.

In this episode, Carol Schultz speaks with BD Erickson II, CEO & Founder of Satic USA in Missoula, Montana.

Satic is a US Based Manufacturer of high-quality clean power electricity filters that protect your home and work environment. SATIC is an acronym for sinusoidal-wave-form-technology-incorporated, which means; engineered clean power.

Satic is a company driven by a passionate belief that "dirty electricity" is inefficient, wasteful, damaging to electronics and demonstrated beyond reasonable contestation harmful to the biological natural world including insects, plants, animals, and humans.

Since 2008, they have been recognized repeatedly for building award winning teams and creating an outstanding corporate culture.  Currently holding at 21 employees, the plan for 2022 calls for doubling that and tripling the square footage of their offices. 

Sustaining a high-level team and a culture that promotes fun, happy, and healthy vibes is attracting the necessary expansion for globalizing their unique product line.

BD's personal story is inspiring and empowering to any entrepreneur, professional, and parent.  After life took a turn, BD relocated from Hawaii to Montana.  He soon discovered something that was unnoticed at first then became a real concern for both his property and his family's health.  With a background in clean power manufacturing, he took his leadership skills and teamed up with amazing partners to launch this 13-year-old company that combines innovation, technology, and a heart to serve.

Listen and learn what has BD and Satic embody leadership and continue to thrive in the marketplace.

To learn more about BD Erickson and Satic visit: Satic USA

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/.

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/.