Upside: The Business Growth Podcast

An empowering and proven leader, Carla Moore currently serves as Vice President of Sales Strategy and Education for Home Box Office (HBO) in New York. She began her career with HBO as an entry-level sales trainer 20 years ago and worked her way up, working in multiple departments. Before taking on her current role, Carla was Vice President of Domestic Network Distribution, leading a sales and marketing team that served millions of subscribers.

Now Carla and her team are helping to redefine the company’s brand training narrative, discover new sales approach strategies and develop specialized sales training curriculum and continuous education programs for sales brand ambassadors. She is constantly pushing for her team to bring themselves forward, think higher, more critically and globally in order to find new and innovative approaches to help better achieve these goals.

Carla is an active public speaker, delivering conference keynotes and facilitating workshops on a variety of subjects, including her passion– activating personal power. She has been featured in the Chicago Tribune, Forbes, Cosmopolitan Magazine, Channel 4 News, and other outlets and has also served as a panelist at leadership summits and career management events. Carla is an active member in the media industry and currently sits on the national board of National Association of Multi-Ethnicity in Communications (NAMIC.) She holds an MBA from Keller Graduate School of Business in Chicago and is a graduate of two leading industry programs, CTAM-U at Harvard Business School and NAMIC’s ELDP at Darden School of Business at UVA. She is the author of CRASH! Leading Through The Wreckage: Using Personal Power to Transform Your Leadership.

Shawn C. Jones, MD is an ear, nose and throat physician and head and neck surgeon who was board certified in Otolaryngology in 1994. He is the senior and founding member of his specialty group, Purchase ENT, in Paducah, KY and is a member of the gratis faculty of the University of Louisville School of Medicine in the Department of Otolaryngology. He is the Author of the book Find The Heart In Art: A Surgeon’s Renaissance Approach to Healing Modern Medical Burnout.

Service has always been important to Dr. Jones. He joined the U.S. Army Reserve 1983 and served on Active Duty in Operation Desert Shield/Desert Storm in 1991 as a Captain in the Medical Corps. He has also given back on overseas medical mission trips to Romania, Kenya, and Honduras.

Rob Ristagno is the founder and CEO of Sterling Woods Group and an author and keynote speaker focused on sharing new ways to use data to drive business results. 

He combines his expertise in data science with proven sales and marketing strategies to help established middle-market companies quickly generate new revenue by improving the way they gather and utilize data.

At the helm of Sterling Woods Group, Ristagno leads his team to provide practical, actionable analysis and strategies that organically grow sales for clients across a variety of industries, including business services, software, media, retail/e-commerce and manufacturing. Sterling Woods team members possess extensive operational experience and superior analytical skills, having begun their careers in organizations such as McKinsey, Y&R, McDonald’s, Pepsi, Johnson & Johnson, Kimberly Clark, Pfizer, Visa, AT&T and Comcast.

Ristagno shares his expertise at conferences around the world as an in-demand keynote speaker on data-driven leadership and growth strategies. He has spoken at the Digital Innovators Summit, Business Media Leadership Summit, Mega-Conference, AAMP Annual Conference, Specialized Information Publishers Association Conference, Strategic Fulfillment Group Partner Conference, Super Niche Conference, Niche CEO Summit, Business Information and Media Summit and Niche Digital Summit.

Ristagno earned his bachelor's degree in economics from Dartmouth College and his Master of Business Administration in general management from Harvard Business School. He currently lives in Newton, Mass., with his wife, Kate, his daughter, Leni, and his black lab, Royce. For more information, please visit www.sterlingwoods.com.

Johnny Merritt, an equity partner of Hajjar Peters, LLP, is an attorney with over three decades of experience in complex corporate and real estate matters. For the majority of his career, he has also served as outside general counsel for billion dollar companies involved with interstate commerce. Merritt began his legal career as a litigation attorney, gaining proficiency in attention to detail and effective client communication. He has been a transactional attorney for more than 20 years, concentrating in ongoing business operations, business acquisitions and developments, real estate purchases, sales and development and structuring business organizations.

Merritt expanded his legal career to Austin, becoming a partner at the full-service business law firm Hajjar Peters LLP, where he oversees a variety of legal matters. He utilizes this in-depth look at high-trust relationships to direct and connect with his clients. In addition to his legal work, Merritt is also a founder and board member of Keystone Bank, an Austin-based community bank obsessed with delivering the latest in banking technology and first-class customer service. He also serves as the ambassador of The Bless Foundation, a faith-based organization mobilizing people and resources to reach the unreached throughout the world. 

Jim Guilkey, Ph.D. is an expert in instructional design and has more than 20 years’ experience in leading the design, development, and implementation of web-based training solutions. As a co-founder of S4 NetQuest, Jim has led all client partnering relationships and design of innovative learning solutions for the medical/healthcare industry, financial industry, retail industry, and other top fortune 500 companies.

-Published author and highly sought-after national speaker

-Developed FAA National Safety Program – teaching pilots to be better problem-solvers

-Assistant Director of Flight Education – The Ohio State University

Jim received his B.S. in Aviation from Ohio State University. He then went on to complete his M.A. and Ph.D. in Instructional Design and Technology at Ohio State University

He is the author of  M-Pact Learning: The New Competitive Advantage; : What All Executives Need To Know.

Sharon Hulce is President/CEO of Employment Resource Group, Inc. (ERG) and a 24 year veteran of Executive Search industry. Sharon is known in her industry as an innovation leader and works tirelessly on not only finding the right talent for her clients; she also works diligently on the empowerment and retention of that talent. Sharon clearly understands the emotional intelligence, competencies, knowledge and social interaction necessary to integrate new hires into a corporate culture for success. 

Pinnacle Talent, a division of ERG provides consulting services in areas of values alignment, retention strategies, innovation summits for high performing and high potential employees, talent planning from strategic plan and succession planning.

Sharon is a frequent speaker at national conferences. She has received many awards for her work, is also a ForbesBooks author - her new book is title A Well Done Professional Midlife Crisis.

Bill is the “Culture King” and is known for building and transforming cultures and improving lives. He is the author of Culture Code Champions: 7 Steps to Scaling and Succeeding in Business as well as other articles, podcasts and his first book, The Mustang Story.  Bill and his co-founders at Mustang Engineering did what six in a million startups do - they grew the business to over $1 billion in revenue and the company continues today. This success was directly a result of a people oriented culture.  In an industry of cutthroat competition, employee apathy and gastly cost overruns, Bill and his co-founders set out on a remarkable journey that changed the global face of capital projects.

Today’s guest is Joel Louis, founder and CEO of Integrator and Co., a digital marketing agency that helps experts reach more people, scale their business and increase online sales. Joel and his team specialize in funnel strategy, funnel design, funnel repair, and funnel building. In addition to generating millions of dollars and thousands of leads for his clients, Joel is a father of three and is passionate about the intersection of fatherhood and entrepreneurship.

Ande has made it her mission to break down the emotional, behavioral and societal barriers that stand between women and strong financial foundations. Early in her more than 25 year career she rejected traditional planning methods that didn’t account for how emotions factor into financial decision making. Wanting to do things differently, she developed an expertise in behavioral finance.

In the years to follow, she saw again and again that conventional wisdom about women and money was flawed: It’s not women’s finances that determine their self-worth. It’s women’s sense of self-worth that determines their finances. And like that, a new philosophy was born.

In late 2018, Ande launched myWorth, a media community that’s inspiring a financial awakening among women who are eager to take control of their financial journeys. She built myWorth on two core beliefs: Traditional approaches to speaking to women about money are broken. And conversations about money must align directly with women’s
personal values and goals.

Ande rose to the top of the primarily male-dominated insurance world as the former head of a multi-million-dollar fintech company and VP at Penn Mutual. She is now widely recognized as a driving force in the financial community, holding multiple finance and insurance designations including a CFP®, CLU, ChFC, RICP, BFATM and ChSNC. She regularly appears on top national media outlets to speak about topics at the intersection of women and finance And she has been named one of the “Top 100 in Finance” in 2019 and “Top 50 Women of 2019” by Top 100 Magazine, as well as one of Bristol’s “Who’s Who Among Distinguished Professionals and Executives.” In addition, she is a Gold Stevie Award winner for Female Executive of the Year (Consumer Services 10 employees or less) for 2019. Her book Financially Free: 11 Conversations To Have With Yourself About Life, Money, And Worth was released on March 10, 2020. Ande lives in New York and is married with two children. For more information about Ande, go www.andefrazier.com.

Steve Palmer is the managing partner and founder of The Indigo Road Hospitality Group which operates twenty-four restaurants in six states. Steve has been recognized by the New York Times, L.A. Times, NPR, Southern Living, Food & Wine and Forbes Small Business Giants for his growing presence in the hospitality industry, as well as his charitable and community efforts. In 2016, Palmer co-founded Ben’s Friends, the food-and-beverage industry support group offering hope, fellowship and a path forward to industry professionals struggling with substance abuse and addiction. He has presented on addiction in the industry at TEDx Charleston and various culinary events. Steve is the author of, Say Grace:  How The Restaurant Business Saved My Life which was released on November 19, 2019.