Vantage Voices

Kim Pelham sells houses she can also fix. Her husband Brian is a general contractor, the two businesses run side by side, and between them they will do a little or a lot: paint the front door, remodel the whole house, or handle the downsizing, the estate sale and the move.

IN THIS EPISODE

Why a free pre-purchase walkthrough with a contractor is the business model, not a perk.
Senior Move Specialist work, where the hurdle is never the house, it is the stuff.
Which repairs a lender actually cares about, and which are money you are about to waste.
Empathy first, achiever second, and why that order matters.
Tulalip: waterfront with a view under nine hundred thousand, on land you own.
Everett, three places she takes people first.

QUOTES

“One of my clients said Brian is my secret weapon.”

“You cannot get a contractor to come out and speculate with you. He will gladly do that, at no charge, for my clients.”

“My number one strength is empathy and number two is achiever. I always lean first to understand.”

“Snohomish County is home. There is more room to breathe, more room to grow.”

WHAT KIM GIVES
Empathy first and action second. A contractor who will walk a house with you before you buy it. Honest budget guidance on which repairs matter to a lender. The whole downsizing handled. Snohomish County knowledge nobody gets from a search portal.

WHO SHE WANTS TO MEET
Subcontractors, and one urgently: a crawl space specialist who works in Granite Falls. More broadly, trades she can trust across Snohomish County, and the estate attorneys, elder-care advisers and senior living communities who meet those families before she does.

CONNECT WITH KIM
The Pelham Group NW: thepelhamgroupnw.com
LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/kimpelham
Instagram: @pelhamgroupnw

LISTEN EVERYWHERE
This episode: joinvantage.co/podcast/kim-pelham
Apple Podcasts: Vantage Voices
Spotify: Vantage Voices

ABOUT VANTAGE
Vantage Voices is the podcast of Vantage, where introductions happen on purpose. Every episode ends with the same two questions: what can you give this room, and who do you want walked up to you. joinvantage.co

Fractional CTO and strategic advisor Bob O'Brien on what actually kills companies, why distribution beats product, and the AI data center problem nobody in local government is planning for.

Bob founded ThirdWave Advisors after a career that ran from mainframes to cloud, including more than twenty years at Microsoft and time at AWS. He helps founders and CEOs get ready for a big change before they have to react to it.

IN THIS EPISODE

The four things an advisor sees that a founder cannot: the plan, the team, the data, the buyer.
Why most founders build a one year plan to survive instead of a five year plan to win, and what five of those in a row does to a company.
First time founders focus on product. Second time founders focus on distribution.
How to tell what business you are actually in. She thinks she runs a cooking app. She runs a store with an app as the front window.
The paperwork nobody reads until an investor asks: the NDA, the noncompete, the contractor who never signed over the code, the privacy promise that limits your data years later.

Empty AI data centers as the new empty steel factories, and who pays for the retrofit.

QUOTES

“First time founders focus on product. Second time founders focus on distribution.”

“It is the classic emperor’s new clothes problem. Everybody can see it, but nobody wants to say it.”

“I only introduce people I have actually worked with. And even then, only if there is a fit. It is not me being picky. It is what makes the intro worth something.”

“You bring the vision and I will bring the blueprint.”

WHAT BOB CAN GIVE
An honest outside read from someone who speaks both tech and business. How a buyer or investor will see you before you walk in. Turning a one year plan into a five year plan. What your data is actually worth.

WHO HE WANTS TO MEET
A leader who can feel a big change coming. A CEO a few years in who has realized they have run five one year plans in a row. And a city council member or planner about to approve a large AI data center.

CONNECT WITH BOB
ThirdWave Advisors: thirdwaveadvisors.com
LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/bobobrien

MENTIONED
Ted Jacob, his mentor at Nordstrom. Roei Ganzarski of magniX on building without constraints. John Maxwell: if you do what you always did, you get what you always got.

LISTEN EVERYWHERE
This episode: joinvantage.co/podcast/bob-obrien
Apple Podcasts: Vantage Voices
Spotify: Vantage Voices

ABOUT VANTAGE
Vantage Voices is the podcast of Vantage, where introductions happen on purpose. Every episode ends with the same two questions: what can you give this room, and who do you want walked up to you. The answers go into the app, and the introductions follow. The directory is free, forever. joinvantage.co

Sarah O'Sell helps entrepreneurs grow their business and reach the right people. Her day title is long: she leads partnerships at the Seattle Climate Innovation Hub and manages the CoMotion Labs Climate Tech Incubator. Her community title is shorter. Startup gardener. She trademarked it.

She started in startups and worked her way up to GE, hired to advise on sustainability solutions. Then the company announced its split and the sustainability work was put on ice. So she used the customer data she had access to, proved customers actually wanted it, and helped bring the budget back for a solution that launched and won an award. Patient is the right word for that. Not quiet. Patient.

Her career took the long way round, and she tells it straight, including the day she needed to stop. Sustainability leaders have an incredibly hard job, she says, and sometimes you are just worn out. What she does now: notice when you are mad, don't dismiss it, and turn it into a path to change. And her tip for everyone else: whatever job you have, even HR, you can move sustainability. It doesn't have to be in your title.

Then the question people fight about. AI or the planet? Sarah has a foot in both. Data centers are a built environment, made of materials, run by algorithms, tied to the grid, using water, and every one of those is a problem we can solve. It is a tool, and we get to choose how we build it. Her incubator just formed a partnership with Microsoft and E8 for a data center incubator program to do exactly that.

What she gives the room: she listens for what you value, and she builds triangles, because the triangle is the strongest shape. If someone is quiet in a corner, she goes and says hi. The introduction she wants is to VC firms, consulting firms and business turnaround firms that need excellent operators and partnership people. Plus: Ghost Alley in Pike Place Market, and a book called Bad Data.

BUILDING A CLIMATE STARTUP?
Sarah runs the CoMotion Labs Climate Tech Incubator at the Seattle Climate Innovation Hub. Its new data center cohort, backed by UW, Microsoft and E8, holds an information session on October 15, and applications close November 15. Details: CoMotion Labs Climate Tech Incubator

CHAPTERS
00:00 The open
00:27 Welcome, Sarah
01:05 Who she helps
01:43 Startup gardener: her two titles
02:28 GE, the split, and the budget she brought back
04:28 What the world gets wrong about emissions
07:31 The long way round
10:26 AI or the planet: data centers
13:29 What she gives: the triangle
14:58 The introduction she wants
16:07 Quick fires: coffee and Ghost Alley
16:41 The book: Bad Data
17:26 Washington's economy and more startup gardeners
18:36 How to connect with Sarah

CONNECT WITH SARAH
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sarahosell
Website: https://www.sarahosell.com
Sarah is a Vantage founding member. Ask for an introduction: joinvantage.co/podcast/sarah-o-sell

ABOUT VANTAGE VOICES
The room behind the room, on the record. Hosted by Rachael Barclay. Vantage is a members-first network in Seattle; the directory is free forever. joinvantage.co

Amanda Armstrong Sava will tell you she is not a talker and not a connector. She is a helper. If you need a service, she knows a person. If she does not know the person, she will find one. And if you need a cat moved from Tokyo to Seattle, she has done that too. (The niece was in town for the Taylor Swift concert. The cat came in a backpack.)

She runs the Seattle branch of Neil Kelly Company, a design-build remodel firm founded in Portland in 1947: four branches, still owned by the Kelly family, and a certified B Corp, which is part of what drew her there. She was a designer for 25 years (kitchens, interiors, interior architecture) and moved into the general manager seat about two years ago. Same job, she says, fulfilling in a different way. She used to bring clients' dreams to reality. Now she helps her team do it.

Her psychology degree sat unused until she went into sales, and design, in her words, is sales. The drawings are not the hard part. The people are always the work. Somebody sees a thing on HGTV that will never fit their space. Somebody sees drywall for the first time and thinks the whole remodel has gone wrong. Amanda's job is to walk them down into the low point and back up the other side, marriage intact.

She is an introvert disguised as an extrovert, and she is honest about what that costs. A room like Homecoming fills her cup and empties it at the same time. Her method for building community anyway: quietly and slowly. Stop, read the room, find the one other person doing the same scan. They are out there. She promises.

And the room everyone gets wrong? The living room. Ninety-nine percent of people put the TV front and center, and the one space in the house where people could gather without electronics never gets built.

What she gives the room: an ear, a shoulder, a wide "I know a person" network, and a very good trivia partner as long as the category is not music. What she is looking for: she has been in Seattle seven years, half of it during COVID, so she is still building her people. A lawyer she can point a client to. A financial planner for her kids. Someone for her retired husband to golf with. And an introduction to Carmen Best. She said it first.

CONNECT WITH AMANDA
Neil Kelly Seattle: neilkelly.com/seattle
LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/amandasava
Instagram: @asavakd
Neil Kelly on Instagram: @neilkellycompany

LISTEN + SHOW NOTES
joinvantage.co/podcast/amanda-armstrong-sava

Vantage Voices is hosted by Rachael Barclay. Two new voices a week. Vantage is a members-first network; the directory is free forever. joinvantage.co

Charles Finkelstein (Finkel-stein, like Einstein, a correction his father delivered when Charles was in high school) grew up in a house that made the part instead of buying it. His father was a tool and die maker. When the kitchen oven shot flames, his brother pulled the eroded gas jet, walked down to the shop, and machined a new one out of brass stock in twenty minutes. Popular Science on the table, a Corvair engine built at twelve, and a first car Charles sanded to bare metal himself, before YouTube existed to show him how.

That instinct became a forty-year career. A computer science degree in the 1980s, work on the internet before most people knew what it was, and then Microsoft in the early 1990s, where he covered Northern California as the technical half of the sales team, specializing in email and connectivity. Eighteen years there, time at Salesforce, and a stack of patents across AI, cloud, and privacy.

Now he is asking the question the industry keeps deferring. He is enthusiastic about the compute, but the data centers are hungry: the power, the cooling water, the land. His own utility bill has doubled in eight years, the heat domes keep coming, and he is blunt that it does not matter who you blame, it costs lives and it costs businesses. So he invested in ChatGPTree, where the price of a latte a month plants trees to offset your burning tokens, and he filed the paperwork for AI for Ecology, now a 501(c)(3) working on efficiency benchmarks, tooling, and the events where like-minded people find each other.

When Rachael said the only way to embrace AI with a clear conscience is to do what he is doing, Charles claimed the line on the spot as his new bottom line. It fits. The Vantage assessment pegged him a meaningful connector, and he agrees: a techie who is also an empath, who feels people in a room and wants their light to shine.

What he needs right now
He is building the AI for Ecology board and needs help: people who know nonprofits, grant writing, and the AI infrastructure supply chain. The work is volunteer until funding lands, and he is explicit that it is a place to build real skills in a hard market.

Connect with Charles
AI for Ecology (learn more, volunteer, or donate): ai4ecology.org
Email: [email protected]
LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/chasf

April Vian spent 15 years working with neurodivergent kids, and kept watching them age into adults the world quietly stopped helping. The assumption is that you either lean on your parents forever or somehow have it all figured out by 22. Most people live in between: independent and capable, but never taught the skills that make work and life click. So April built Bridging the Gap, a social benefit corporation (one that can never put profit above purpose) that teaches those skills to individuals, and coaches the companies that employ them.

In this one: why "we have to be inclusive" is the wrong starting line, the difference between a rule that matters and a rule we just never questioned (everyone needs to be on time, versus you need to meet your deadlines), and why so many capable people get stuck in a contributor-only lane for lack of the soft skills nobody ever taught them. Plus April's favorite reframe for the adults she works with: you might be a normal zebra, not a weird horse.

What she can give the room: connecting people (especially across healthcare and mental health), parenting and IEP advocacy, and adult ADHD and autism clarity assessments. 

The introduction she is looking for: decision-makers and speaking stages, to reach more employers and more neurodivergent adults.

How to work with April

The front door is a Discovery Call, a short exploratory call to find where she can help. From there the paths are:

• Individual coaching: executive functioning, social and leadership skills, the things that actually get people promoted.
• For employers: inclusivity and HR behavioral coaching, plus executive-functioning and social-skills workshops for your team.
• Clarity assessments: for adults wondering if they might be ADHD or autistic. Not a medical diagnosis, a clarifying one.
• Speaking: April speaks to teams and audiences on neurodivergence at work.

As a social benefit corporation, Bridging the Gap also offers discounted or free trainings for small, family, and minority-owned businesses, and accepts donations.

Connect with April
Book a Discovery Call: bridgingthegapwa.com/appointments
Services: bridgingthegapwa.com/services
Speaking: bridgingthegapwa.com/speaking-1
Resources: bridgingthegapwa.com/resources
Website: bridgingthegapwa.com

Book she recommends: The Mastery of Self by don Miguel Ruiz Jr.

Katrina Romatowski is, in her own words, a curious human being, and she has spent 30 years in real estate unable to stop building. Everything she does lives on one continuum: if it involves the dirt under your feet or the roof over your head, she is in it. That continuum is three ventures. 

Katrina Eileen Real Estate, her brokerage. reSpace, her co-homeownership company. And Level Up, a nonprofit she co-founded in 2019 with Frank Shankwitz, a founder of the Make-A-Wish Foundation, that pairs housing with mentorship for men coming out of re-entry and recovery.

reSpace was born from an uncomfortable question. Katrina built two infill homes in a backyard, put one on the market, and watched it sell in days for $950,000. Who can afford that? Around the same time she saw fractional ownership being used to hand wealthy families a slice of multimillion-dollar second homes. Her reaction: who cares about rich people getting a second home, how about the everyday person being able to afford one? reSpace meets people where they already are and turns it into real ownership: every bedroom a private primary suite, the kitchen and living and outdoor spaces shared, and for a fraction of the cost of the whole house you own a piece of it. The first home, a yellow Victorian mansion in Leschi with five suites, is live now.

This is the third episode in a row about doors. Jesse took his off the hinges, Roger held his open, and when Rachael asked Katrina who she builds doors for, Katrina said a door is not what she sees. She sees a big brick wall, and nobody even tells you there is a world on the other side of it. Her answer: stop looking for the door. Either build what you want right where you are, or get some dynamite and blow up the wall. Where she comes from there was no permission to do much of anything, so she never waited for it.

Her north star: a rising tide raises all ships. What she can give the room is connection, she remembers everyone and refuses to gatekeep. What she needs is capital: reSpace is gaining traction and investment is the one thing holding it back, Level Up needs mentors and volunteers and capital to add homes, and Katrina Eileen Real Estate, the brokerage that funds the mission, is ready for anyone buying or selling.

Connect with Katrina
reSpace (co-homeownership: invest, co-own, or live in one): respace.co
Katrina Eileen Real Estate (buy or sell a home): katrinaeileen.com
Level Up Seattle (volunteer, mentor, or donate): www.leveluphome.org
LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/katrinaeileen

Erica Carraway is the CEO and founder of Key Wellness, and Vantage's own strategic partnerships and marketing lead. 

Key Wellness is an umbrella over a whole ecosystem, and every business is named for a key on a keyboard: 
Alt (the herbal coffee alternative she built to reverse her own diabetes), 
Escape (retreats that heal through astrology and the elements), 
Shift (her marketing agency), and 
Control (a creative marketplace where talent trades for equity instead of one-off contracts). The thread is refusal: she will not do one thing forever just because it worked. 

She is a brand developer, and the most important part of that is making square one un-scary, for herself and everyone she builds with. Her superpower is partnership, and she does it give-first: she shows up as a social consumer, supports people first, and lets the business manifest from the relationship. 

The heart of the episode is her daughters, and the one lesson she wants them to inherit: that sharing your spotlight is a power that only ever fuels you. 

CONNECT WITH ERICA CARRAWAY 
Website: https://yourkeywellness.com 
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/amanodior 
Alt (herbal coffee): https://www.instagram.com/alt_xcoffee 
Email: [email protected] 

Every member gets a seat in this chair. Vantage Voices is the podcast of Vantage. 

Learn more at https://www.joinvantage.co

Roger Starkweather is the Chief Experience Officer of ANEWbrand, the branding and marketing agency he built with his best friend of fifteen years, Steven Picanza, for what they call do-good organizations. 

Before that he spent years inside the giants: Nordstrom, Starbucks, REI, L'Oreal. The turn came when two pathways collided. Roger and Steven were frustrated with big-agency models that took advantage of clients, and at the same time Roger was in his own personal transformation: coming out. He chose to be raw and honest about who he is and tie it to what he wanted to do in life, which is give back. Then the club handed him something he never went searching for: the board presidency. 

Five general managers in seven years, COVID, no clear direction. His answer was to consistently show up, so consistently that people called him the mayor. And as the first openly gay chair of the Columbia Tower Club, he became fully visible himself right as he was helping the community do the same. 

Jesse talked in episode two about taking the door off. Roger walked through his, and then held it open. He leaves the episode with the three words he lives by, inspired by his three kids, all artists and creators out in the world: create, learn and love. 

CONNECT WITH ROGER STARKWEATHER 
Website: https://www.anewbrand.co 
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/rogerstarkweather
ANEWbrand on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/anewbrandconsulting 
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/anewbrand.co 
Substack: https://allaboutbranding.substack.com 

The Good Gathering (nonprofit programming Roger chairs at the World Trade Center) is August 12 and open to all. Every member gets a seat in this chair. 

Vantage Voices is the podcast of Vantage. Learn more at https://www.joinvantage.co