Kirchick's Korner

Ryan Rich is co-founder & CPO at Accord, YCombinator alum, and proud Canadian.

Jordan Telman has a strong passion for the intersection of technology, operations and experience.  Presently, he is the Director of Call Center Operations for Suited Connector.  He has a diverse background of work experience spanning the last 20 years, including product management, customer and agent experience, military operations, engineering, and ministry.

Jordan currently resides outside of Denver, CO with his wife and four kids.  In his spare time, he enjoys hiking with his family and volunteering with his local church.

For the last 2 decades Aarde's professional experience has been in the Contact Center world, helping businesses support their consumers through cloud-based technologies. He enjoys working with large global customer service teams to increase, customer experience, customer loyalty, operations, customer service.

Lauren Cowher Hill is a seasoned Customer Experience and Operations leader in the technology space and currently the VP of Student Success at Outlier.org.  Outlier, from the co-founder of MasterClass and listed as one of TIME’s Best Inventions 2020, has developed high-quality, university-level and for-credit courses taught online by some of the most celebrated educators in their respective fields.  Their mission is two-fold: (1) increase access to high-quality college education, (2) dramatically reduce student debt.  Prior to Outlier, Lauren was the Senior Director of Global Customer Experience at ClassPass, where she led a team of 150 people (275 at seasonal peak) that supported customers across 2,500 cities, 28 countries, 5 continents and 12 languages.  Lauren has also held leadership roles as the Director of Customer Experience and Ordering Operations at online interior design startup Havenly and Director of Customer Success at the cloud-based content creation platform WriterAccess.  She got her career start in PR at Edelman as a member of the Health team in their NYC HQ, supporting major pharmaceutical companies across a number of medications and disease areas.

Ricky Ghoshroy has been working in the energy space for nearly a decade, primarily focused on the deployment of smart grid technologies. He recently completed his MBA from Boston College and is currently a Data Center Energy Analyst for a large technology company.

Brendan Kelly is a former middle school teacher in Boston who is currently a second year law student at Suffolk Law School.

Together, they form the podcast "A Gentlemen's Disagreement," a political podcast bringing together perspectives from the center-right and the center-left of the political spectrum.

Katlyn began her journey in sales 18 years ago. Today, Katlyn and her team help develop the strategic programs and processes that lead the direct channel and agency channel at Quantum to scale and grow, redefining what agency owners expect out of their insurance opportunity. As an insurtech disrupting the insurance industry, it is Quantum's goal to democratize insurance and empower agents to bring a trusted advisor experience to their clients. The initial growing pains of learning insurance for the first time still mark her passion for sales coaching and taking the mystery out of how to succeed in today's modern insurance market. Katlyn's experiences with growing insurance agency mega-startups enable her to create game-plans for agents who want to transform their insurance office into a sales machine that can compete for the long term.  Katlyn's message is that you can compete in the modern market without losing the heart and soul of your agency. Quality and care can coexist with a high- volume environment, when we approach sales and growth with purpose.

Chris Williams runs Sales Huddle, a group of sales professionals working to elevate sales into an honorable craft. You can find him on Linkedin writing about how to improve our Sales Craft through clarifying our character and dropping our Sales Masks.

Carson Heady is best-selling author of the 4-book "Birth of a Salesman" series and an 8-time CEO/President's Club winner across 6 sales and leadership roles at AT&T and Microsoft. He has been recognized as the #1 social seller globally at Microsoft and currently serves as Sales Director for Microsoft Health & Life Sciences. He lives in St. Louis, MO, with his wife Amy and daughters Madison, Sidonia and Charlotte.

Alec Hanson is a contemporary leader within the Mortgage Industry.  Constantly striving to improve, he began his career in origination in 2004 funding over $85M and was named Rookie of the Year by Scotsman’s Guide. Every subsequent year, Hanson landed on Scotsman’s Top 200 Originator list finishing his best year at $185M. From there, Hanson began coaching and growing a successful branch network in Orange County with his peak year in 2010 funding over $1B at the branch level. Hanson has received Housing Wire’s Rising Star award both in 2017 and 2019 and currently serves as Senior Vice President of Production for loanDepot for the Pacific Southwest Division, overseeing approximately $4B in annual production.  A dynamic coach and thought leader, Hanson believes in leading and coaching within the trenches of the mortgage business.  He is the author of loanDepot’s Modern Lending Playbook: a strategic and tactical tool designed to equip, train, and evolve the traditional mortgage professional’s skill sets into the modern era. Alec is also the author of “Bypassed: A Modern Guide for Local Mortgage Pros Left Behind by the Digital Customer,” which details a systemic approach to help Mortgage Professionals succeed in the digital world. Alec is married to his beautiful wife of 16 years, Erica, and is the proud dad of Phoenix (10 years old) and Scarlett (7 years old).  He can be found on IG rocking the #dadlife hashtag most nights and weekends.

Richard R. Shapiro is Founder and President of The Center For Client Retention (TCFCR) and a leading authority in the areas of customer experience, brand loyalty, and customer retention.  For over 25 years, Richard has spearheaded research conducted with millions of customers from Fortune 1000 companies, compiling the ingredients of customer loyalty and what drives repeat business.  He authored two best-selling books: The Welcomer Edge: Unlocking the Secrets to Repeat Business and The Endangered Customer: Eight Steps to Guarantee Repeat Business.