Culture Factor, Season 1

Yours Truly DC Hotel is a nimble team housed in a boutique hotel. They opened during Covid. The worst time in history, and yet, they are making aspects of the hotel work. What is the secret sauce? In Part 2 we meet Kristofer Carlson, the General Manager and Max Peña, the Manager of Mercy Me Café.

Yours Truly DC Hotel is a nimble team housed in a boutique hotel. They opened during Covid. The worst time in history, and yet, they are making aspects of the hotel work. What is the secret sauce? In Part 1 we meet Julia Quinn, Director of Sales and Marketing, Justin Weiss, Director of Mercy Me Café and Nick Allen, Director of Operations.

Rishad Tobaccowala has been the chief strategist and the chief growth officer at Publicis Groupe, an advertising and communications firm with 80,000 employees. Businessweek named him a top business leader and Time named him a top five marketing innovator.

Christina Eanes is a Former FBI violent crime analyst and senior manager. Now she is an accomplished author of 3 books: Life is an Escape Room and Secret to Super Productivity. One of her books is also a successful podcast called Quit Bleeping Around that is dedicated to helping individuals achieve more in life, offering tools and strategy to successfully be a super achiever.

Bryan Smith is an ex-pro sports performance coach. In fact, he led the Olympic Sports development in Track & Field representing over 7 countries in the 2016 Rio Olympics. He turned start-up founder at LEON Health Science, an employee performance platform, where he leaned in on his expertise in all things stress, burnout management and high performance. LEON went viral recently with their provocative take on how employees feel and are treated.

Vincent Sharps, is the EVP & Chief Business Officer at Mindgrub. He breaks down for us how to maintain a very strong, an Inc 5000 list strong, company culture. Doing this eight years in a row is not easy, but Mindgrub is leading the way in what it means to be intentional and inclusive about company culture.

In this episode, we dive into the culture of meetings. Douglas helps us understand ways we can create more productive and positive meetings that can transform an organization overnight. He gives us many ideas on collaborative software tools that can be used to run better meetings.

As the Lead of Global Intelligent Automation at Spotify, Sidney Madison Prescott strives to foster a collaborative, open-minded environment. She’s a 2020 “Top 50 Tech Visionaries” award winner. After our last interview, Sidney had some ideas on a topic she wanted to dive into with The Culture Factor listeners.

Jeff Rich is the President of Corebridge Software, which is a SaaS-model enterprise software for small and medium sized businesses. CoreBridge currently has customers in 56 countries and employees in 7 different countries. He joined CoreBridge as President of Global Operations in 2018.

Amanda Geotz hails from the Mid-West and resides in New York with her 3 kids. She is the VP of Marketing at the largest wedding company, The Knot Worldwide. She leads PR, social, brand, partnerships and product marketing strategies across the company’s international family of leading lifestage brands

Co-Authors, John Fitch, the CPO of Voltage Control and Max Frenzel, the R&D Lead at Bespoke join The Culture Factor for a truly deep dive into Time Off. A study in Rest Ethic, Work Ethic and Noble Leisure. Amazon's #6 Book in Business Health & Stress, #28 in Work Life Balance in Business and also ranked in Time Management.

As the President & Chief Executive Officer of the National Institute of Building Sciences, Lakisha Ann Woods brings a demonstrated history of leading strong, successful and talented teams into this association management profession.

Jeff Bettinger is the Chief Employee Experience Officer at NuSkin. He leads HR talent across 35 countries. Jeff is a culture expert with many awards, like HRO Today along with many others honoring him in the areas of culture and engagement.

Rich Tuckwell-Skuda is the Chief Operating Officer at Platinum Companies. He's out to help revolutionize the hotel sector with everything he does. And his effectiveness in a struggling industry is nothing short of miraculous. His superpower may be in recognizing the diverse and unique strengths of his talent pool.

As the VP of Global Intelligent Automation at Spotify, Sidney Madison Prescott strives to foster a collaborative, open-minded environment. Promoting brainstorming, idea exchanges, opportunities & solutions within her core team is creating new synergies. She’s a 2020 “Top 50 Tech Visionaries” award winner.

John Fitch is the Co-Author of Time Off and the Chief Product Officer at Voltage Control. His book is a practical guide to building your rest ethic and we were so intrigued by the concept and how it dovetailed into creativity and culture that we brought him on The Culture Factor.

Matt Wadiak is the founder and CEO of Cooks Venture. Prior to Cooks Venture, he founded and served as COO of Blue Apron. Matt developed and managed Blue Apron’s supply chain, led a team of over 5,000 manufacturing employees at six national centers, and built a network of over 250 farmers, ranchers, and agronomists.

Darren Murph is the Head of Remote at Gitlab. He also holds the Guinness World Record as the most prolific professional blogger, and yes, we’ll ask him about that. Darren claims he’s living the remote dream and has navigated this path when tech and wifi were merely on their way to becoming 3G.

Wanda Dunaway is a Regional Vice President in the Sales industry. She leads and supports a team of amazing professionals and takes pride in creating a rich team culture. But it didn’t start that way when she took on the role four years ago. Wanda was presented with a toxic work environment in her region that wasn’t in line with the rest of the company culture

Kelly Ireland is a Tech CEO, Investor, Advisor and Philanthropist. She launched CBT in 2001 with a focus on offering innovative technology solutions and unparalleled client service. She has evolved as an award-winning entrepreneur IT Solutions Provider with a roster of Fortune 50 clients.

Brandon Andra is a serial entrepreneur, founder, and CEO of California Renewable Energy. Prior to California Renewable Energy, he founded and served as President of a SaaS software company. Brandon has developed and managed many high performing sales teams over his years. He currently leads a team of over 54 sales reps that he has scaled in the past 6 months.

Joanne McKinney is the CEO of the Burns Group in New York City and founder of BGIN, Burns Group’s branding accelerator. The agency she leads is an integrated engine for strategy and creativity, devoid of layers, hierarchy or fussy departments. The team has built campaigns or brought brands back to relevancy for clients like Labatt, Chapstick, Centrum, Terra Chips, Simmons Mattress and Yellowtail Wine.

Jason Van Camp is the Chairman at Mission 6 Zero & the Executive Director at Warrior Rising. He is adept at helping teams win by providing new ways of solving organizational problems. It was in his training as a Green Beret and Commander that he was schooled in the art of trust as a method of building a strong culture.

Their motto is the Spirit of Hard Work, this double entendre is never more evident as they have mobilized to repurpose their spirit production to make hand sanitizer during this COVID19 pandemic. Litchfield Distillery has been in business for 5 years and while they still are a small group of distillers, their outreach, production and heart is beyond measure.

Today we sit down with Clint Pulver, As the president and founder of The Center for Employee Retention, Clint has transformed how corporations like Keller Williams, AT&T, and Hewlett Packard create lasting loyalty through his work and research as “The Undercover Millennial”. In this interview, we dig into C-Level culture and how COVID19 is transforming business.

Ian Sohn is a global client lead at Wunderman Thompson Central, overseeing an integrated agency team across continents and operating companies. He is a strong advocate for work/life balance, employee satisfaction and compassionate leadership and has led award-winning career and agencies doing so.

We have Chief Co-Founder Lindsay Kaplan today. Chief is a club designed for the VP and C-suite female executive. They have 2000 members a robust waiting list of 7,000. Chief closed funding of $22 million on their Series A, one of the largest of any female founded company in 2019. The members are top level women from HBO, Amazon, Sothebys, Google, and Mastercard, to name a few.

Today we sit down with Ryan Choura, Founder and CEO of Choura Events. Upon opening his new business he was immediately faced with the recession of 2007, so he is no stranger to challenge. When COVID19 brought with it the meeting recession of 2020, he was grounded with a healthy company culture and agile enough to pivot overnight.