Troublemakers

Meet Dusty Bonner, Senior VP of Distribution and Field Sales at Trupanion, a highly innovative pet insurance company. Trupanion has been shaking up their business sector since 2000. 

Veterinarians didn't open their practices to sell pet insurance. But they know the value Trupanion can bring to ease their clients’ worries when injuries or illness strike. As Dusty points out, Trupanion is continually looking for ways to help Veterinarians help their clients.

Amit Chandarana is Senior Vice President, Sales & Business Development at Roadster, a company that is transforming the automobile sales experience.

Crunchbase says: Roadster is transforming the way that dealerships sell new cars by bringing the end to end car buying process completely online. This is a $1 trillion industry which had yet to be disrupted.

Amit says, "We're laser focused on modernizing the auto industry." But Amit's focus, indeed obsession, is on the entire auto industry ecosystem. He and Roadster want everyone involved to have healthy businesses, in part from modernizing to meet the car buyers' expectations. This includes the experience of the younger, web savvy new generation buying cars.

Business leaders will enjoy Amit's calm, yet focused approach to the business and his own career.

Executives like Brian White, Herschel Supply’s new Senior Vice President of Global Sales, bring a huge amount of experience and energy to the companies they work with. At the same time, the kind of companies who seek out people like Brian give them the freedom to bring their A game. As Brian says, "My job was to represent the brands, but in a lot of ways, they helped to define me. My reputation is really driven by the strong brands that I've worked for."

The fashion industry is notoriously fickle, yet Brian has worked for companies who had incredibly strong brands with a real and lasting sense of themselves:

• Ride Snowboards
• Globe
• Hurley Clothing
• Nixon

Now, he’s joining the hugely successful Herschel Supply based in Vancouver, Canada. Brian said, “It's my perfect scenario - a strong brand widely recognized and positioned for growth. We are already doing amazing things.” Knowing Brian and now getting a good sense of Herschel Supply, I have no doubt they’ll set the bar high as Troublemakers in their industry.

Bridget Molloy is CEO of Bridget's Botanicals. She's selling solutions in a category with standards that range from the highly scientific to the completely fanciful. 

Since 2014, Bridget has formulated and manufactured over 40 products and developed 30 community classes, 2 courses, and an online course portal. Each health product she launches is formulated based on current scientific research combined with traditional global healing practices and manufactured in small batches in Colorado, from sustainably sourced organic botanicals. 

In other words, she’s highly credible and very serious.

In this podcast, you'll hear the challenges she's overcome, a unique way she came to understand the needs of her audience, and some of her brilliant pivots.

Shipping adds millions of dollars to our nation’s growing healthcare costs every year. 

In our latest podcast, Lori Jones, Vice President of Sales and the VPL team are shaking up their industry to change that, and their solution is perfect for these COVID-19 times. 

Hospitals need supplies to do what they do. They order those supplies from vendors. Those vendors add freight charges to get those supplies from their factories and warehouses to the hospitals. But those freight charges often hide substantial profit. 

"Our software solutions provide choice, transparency, and control to the providers,” Jones said.

Lori goes on to say that by using VPL’s software solutions, the providers gain visibility into the movement of products throughout their supply chain network. “We’re capturing millions of data points, enhancing supply chain visibility, while saving them significant dollars.”

Learn how VPL saves hospitals significant money on shipping costs.

Matt Weber, Fit For Work’s National Director of Sales, takes us through a rapid-fire story of a company who’s been innovating in their business sector since 1998. This simple statement is sending shock waves through their business sector:

 “We prevent people from getting injured.”

Here's another: "Fit For Work achieves a 50% reduction in injuries and the accompanying costs." 

 If those statement don’t seem earthshaking to you, it’s because you’re not a Safety Manager, Plant Manager, or a CFO. 

Fit For Work has shaken up their industry by changing the "injury equation," as Matt calls it. The old model is what I call “Break/Fix.” The successful model from Fit For Work is to      forecast the next injury before it happens because they go to the source of the injuries - the work place.

Kirsten Potenza is Co-Creator and CEO of POUND®, a fitness phenomenon taught by over 25,000 instructors in over 100 countries to hundreds of thousands of participants every week. POUND® is the world's first cardio jam session, inspired by the energizing, infectious, sweat-dripping fun of playing the drums! 

This from their YouTube page - "Fusing cardio, Pilates, isometric movements, plyometrics and isometric poses all in a 45-minute session, this workout burns 600-900 cal/hour while rocking to your favorite music!"

This podcast is packed full of gems for entrepreneurs and business leaders. Here's one of my favorites from Kirsten, “You have to be so incredibly passionate about something that a certain type of blinders go up and nothing can stop you."

Dr. Skow, Chief Medical Officer of Avera eCARE, and his colleagues are experts in telemedicine. But not the kind of telemedicine that we've heard about recently in the face of the Coronavirus pandemic. Rather, these practitioners in all fields of medicine are experts in providing myriad services to critical access hospitals and their patients across the country. Avera eCARE has a full virtual hospital that is staffed 24/7 with physicians and other medical professionals who can collaborate with ease.

Avera eCARE makes it easy for those who need the services by removing all of the barriers to connectivity. “Imagine that you’re in a small, critical access hospital; a three-room emergency department. There’s an e-Emergency button on the wall. At the push of the e-CARE button, in about 15 seconds, you’ll see the faces of an emergency medicine physician and a critical care nurse. At that point is when the collaboration starts,” Dr. Skow explains.

Rob Neuner, CEO of Boost Oxygen has a knack for being in the right place at the right time. For entrepreneurs, that's a skill that comes in handy. It certainly helped Rob and his team navigate the many challenges of bringing a new concept to the U.S. market.

You think your startup experienced bumps in the road? One of Rob's first ones was the United States Department of Transportation. They didn't like the canister design Boost Oxygen was shipping and shut things down for about 6 months. The key to handling such setbacks is (1) taking a deep breath, (2) a mix of resilience and possibly good old-fashioned stubbornness. 

Listen in as Rob explains the challenges of selling something in an entirely new category, Boost Oxygen's lucky breaks like meeting Mr. Wonderful, and the importance of believing in yourself.

For Chris Brownridge, the anonymity of the job search process needs to change and he’s working to do just that. Starting simply from a spreadsheet of employee names and qualifications that he shared on LinkedIn, Chis has created a community – Silver Lining – designed to help the recently unemployed know that they’re not alone.

Chris pointed out how dehumanizing it can be for those looking for work, or as he puts it, people are forced to “Throw resumes and applications into the abyss,” and never get any kind of response. Rather than furthering that faceless process, Silver Lining is designed to foster connection.