School for Startups Radio

Mark Quann – CEO of The Perfect Portfolio and Author of Be Smart Pay Zero Taxes: Use the Buy, Borrow, Die Strategy to Get Rich and Stay Rich
Inflation makes me wealthy, and I build my wealth without having to work.
Mark Quann is the Founder and CEO of The Perfect Portfolio, a financial education company focused on helping individuals and families better understand investing, taxes, debt, and long term wealth creation. He is also an entrepreneur, investor, financial educator, and author who has spent more than two decades studying how money, investing, and the tax system work. Through The Perfect Portfolio, Mark teaches strategies involving stocks, real estate, life insurance, cryptocurrency, precious metals, and the use of debt as part of a broader wealth building plan. His goal is to make financial concepts that are often associated with wealthy families and professional investors understandable to ordinary Americans. Mark grew up in a blue collar family in Canada, where money was often tight. His father worked as a brick mason and his mother stayed home to raise the family. Frustrated by how little he was learning about money in school, Mark became interested at an early age in understanding how people build financial security. He later attended college to study business and financial advising before moving to California in 1999. His early financial mistakes, including accumulating credit card and student loan debt, pushed him to study investing and personal finance more seriously. He went on to work as an insurance investigator and spent approximately 13 years as an Investment Adviser Representative before shifting his focus toward financial education and entrepreneurship. In 2018, Mark founded REMii Group, Inc., followed by The Perfect Portfolio in 2019. The company teaches what Mark calls the Five Pillars of the Perfect Portfolio, which include stocks and exchange traded funds, real estate, life insurance, cryptocurrency, and precious metals. A central theme of his work is the “Buy, Borrow, Die” strategy, which describes how some wealthy investors hold appreciating assets, borrow against them rather than selling them, and use estate planning rules to transfer wealth. Mark emphasizes financial education and understanding the tax consequences of different strategies rather than relying exclusively on traditional retirement planning approaches. Mark is the author of four personal finance books, including Rich Man Poor Bank: What the Banks Don’t Want You to Know About Money, Top 10 Ways to Avoid Taxes: A Guide to Wealth Accumulation, Top 25 Ways an IUL Can Secure Your Financial Future, and Be Smart Pay Zero Taxes: Use the Buy, Borrow, Die Strategy to Get Rich and Stay Rich. Published by Humanix Books in March 2025, Be Smart Pay Zero Taxes presents his S.M.A.R.T. framework, which stands for Strategies to Maximize Assets and Reduce Taxes, and explains how investors can combine asset ownership, borrowing, tax planning, and long term investing. Through his books, courses, media appearances, and educational programs, Mark‘s broader mission is to improve financial literacy and help people make more informed decisions about building, protecting, and transferring wealth.Jay Sargeant – Keynote Speaker, Reinvention Coach & Founder of The Shift Project and Author of Shift: The Gift of Reinvention
The major ingredient for failure is short timelines and over expectations.
Jay Sargeant is a keynote speaker, reinvention coach, entrepreneur, author, and Founder of The Shift Project, where he helps people recognize when a chapter of life has ended and develop the courage and clarity to begin another. Across nearly eight decades, Jay has reinvented himself through seven distinct careers, including work as a tennis professional, entrepreneur, software retailer, corporate trainer, speaker, author, and coach. His work today focuses on helping people understand that reinvention is not simply something that happens to us. It is a skill that can be developed through adaptability, curiosity, persistence, communication, and a willingness to act before everything feels certain. Jay has spent more than four decades studying and teaching communication, persuasion, leadership, entrepreneurship, and human behavior. One of the largest chapters of his business career involved helping build a network marketing organization that eventually grew to approximately 675,000 distributors in North America. He has also worked in franchising, sales leadership, consulting, corporate training, and business development. Rather than following a single professional path, Jay repeatedly moved into new industries and roles, often without conventional credentials or prior experience in the field. Those transitions became the foundation for his belief that a person’s accumulated experience can become an advantage when it is applied to a new opportunity. Through The Shift Project, Jay teaches people how to identify the patterns and strengths that have followed them throughout their lives, recognize when it may be time for change, and move into a new chapter with greater intention. His approach emphasizes identity, purpose, confidence, courage, opportunity, strategy, and action. A central idea in his work is that people are not truly starting over when they reinvent themselves because they bring the skills, relationships, judgment, mistakes, and experience of every previous chapter with them. He is particularly interested in helping people who believe they may be too old, too established, or insufficiently qualified to make a significant change. Jay is the author of Shift: The Gift of Reinvention, a book that combines stories from his own unconventional career with practical lessons about personal and professional transformation. Drawing on successes, failures, unexpected opportunities, and the decisions that redirected his life, Jay argues that reinvention is rarely the result of one dramatic moment. More often, it begins with a conversation, a new relationship, an uncomfortable realization, or a willingness to pursue an opportunity before the entire path is visible. His broader message is simple: your past may help explain who you are, but it does not have to determine who you become next.

Michael Trkolta – Managing Director of WebOracle
Americans aren’t scared to fall down and pick themselves up,dust themselves up and keep moving. And that’s a that’s a bigthing to be able to do.
Michael Trkolta is the Managing Director of WebOracle, an Australian digital marketing agency that helps businesses build sustainable growth through digital strategy, SEO, paid advertising, branding, web development, and customer acquisition. With more than 25 years of experience spanning publishing, marketing, business operations, strategic planning, product development, and digital technology, Michael brings a practical business perspective to the increasingly complex world of online marketing. He is known for helping clients move beyond isolated marketing tactics and instead build strong digital foundations where strategy, messaging, data, and execution work together to produce measurable results. Michael began his career in print with MYD Publishing, where he played an important role in building a readership of more than 1.5 million people across Australia. As the business world moved increasingly online, he applied his marketing and operational experience to digital strategy and ultimately WebOracle, working with companies across a wide range of industries in Australia and internationally. His approach emphasizes education as much as execution, helping business owners understand why their digital strategies work rather than simply selling them individual services. Michael focuses particularly on the fundamentals behind successful SEO and paid advertising, the relationship between brand and customer acquisition, and the importance of creating marketing systems that can compound over time. Through WebOracle, he continues to help businesses cut through changing technologies and marketing trends to focus on the strategy, discipline, and execution required for lasting growth.
Dr. Gleb Tsipursky – CEO of Disaster Avoidance Experts
A recent study out from MIT shows that 95% of AI pilots fail to scale.
Dr. Gleb Tsipursky is the CEO of Disaster Avoidance Experts, a future of work consultancy that helps organizations improve artificial intelligence adoption, decision making, and organizational change. Known as the “Office Whisperer,” he works with executives and leadership teams on the human side of technology transformation, particularly the resistance, cognitive biases, cultural obstacles, and management challenges that can prevent promising AI initiatives from producing results. His clients have included organizations such as Aflac, Applied Materials, Honda, Nationwide, Wells Fargo, Xerox, and other large companies and institutions. Gleb brings more than two decades of consulting and coaching experience together with an extensive academic background in behavioral science and decision making. He spent more than 15 years in academia, including faculty roles at The Ohio State University and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. His research has focused on behavioral economics, cognitive biases, decision making, risk management, and how individuals and organizations respond to uncertainty and change. He earned his Ph.D. from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, a master’s degree from Harvard University, and a bachelor’s degree from New York University. He is the author of seven books on decision making, leadership, workplace change, and artificial intelligence. His newest book, The Psychology of AI Adoption at Work: From Resistance to Results, was published by Georgetown University Press in September 2026. Drawing on behavioral science, more than 100 consulting projects, and more than 50 interviews with executives and leaders from organizations including Microsoft, Uber, and Experian, the book examines why AI transformations often fail even when companies have invested heavily in technology. Gleb argues that the biggest obstacles are frequently human rather than technical, including employee anxiety, resistance to change, status quo bias, weak psychological safety, and organizational cultures that make experimentation difficult. The book provides leaders with practical methods for increasing employee engagement, designing effective AI training, building trust, managing ethical and operational risks, and turning small AI experiments into scalable changes in everyday work. Gleb’s broader message is that successful AI transformation depends on more than selecting the right tools. Leaders must understand how people make decisions, why employees resist unfamiliar technologies, and how management practices can turn anxiety into participation. His work has appeared in hundreds of articles and interviews, including in Harvard Business Review, Fortune, USA Today, Time, Business Insider, and other major business and news outlets.

Lt. Gen. (Ret.) Leslie C. Smith – Vice President Leadership and Education at the Association of the United States Army and Co-Author of  All the Difference: Six Leadership Actions to Bridge Perspectives, Strengthen Teams, and Create Value
Self awareness is the foundation. We think that differencedoesn’t derail teams. Unaware leaders do.
Lieutenant General Leslie C. Smith, U.S. Army Retired, is Vice President, Leadership and Education at the Association of the United States Army, where he works across the Army, industry, academia, and AUSA’s national network to strengthen leadership development and support soldiers, Army civilians, and their families. He is also the Carter Chair for Leadership at Georgia Southern University and CEO of LV Smith Corporate Group, where he advises organizations on leadership, strategy, and organizational development. His work today draws on nearly four decades of military service and senior leadership experience in complex, high consequence environments. Smith received his Army commission through Georgia Southern University in 1983 and graduated in 1985 as a Distinguished Military Graduate with a bachelor’s degree in accounting. He began as a Field Artillery officer before transitioning to the Chemical Corps. Over the course of his Army career, he held a series of increasingly senior commands, including serving as the 25th Chief of Chemical and Commandant of the U.S. Army Chemical, Biological, Radiological, and Nuclear School, Commanding General of the 20th Support Command, and Commanding General of the Maneuver Support Center of Excellence and Fort Leonard Wood. His final active duty assignment, from 2018 to 2021, was as The Inspector General of the Army, making him the first Chemical officer to serve in that role.  Throughout his career, Smith became known for leading organizations made up of people with different backgrounds, specialties, experiences, and perspectives who still had to accomplish a shared mission. That experience now shapes much of his work on leadership, trust, teamwork, and organizational performance. His approach emphasizes integrity, clarity, accountability, and the ability to create unity without requiring everyone on a team to think or work in exactly the same way. He argues that differences within teams do not have to become sources of division. When leaders understand and manage them well, those differences can improve judgment, strengthen relationships, and produce better results. Smith is the co-author, with Susan MacKenty Brady and Stuart D. Kliman, of All the Difference: Six Leadership Actions to Bridge Perspectives, Strengthen Teams, and Create Value. Published by Harvard Business Review Press in July 2026, the book argues that the differences among team members can become a competitive advantage rather than a source of friction. Drawing on research, interviews with leaders, and lessons from business, education, and the military, the authors present six practical leadership actions for building trust, understanding different perspectives, strengthening collaboration, and converting disagreement into better decisions and greater value. Smith brings to the book the perspective of a military leader who often had to achieve results with the people, resources, personalities, and circumstances already in front of him. Smith holds a Master of Science in Administration from Central Michigan University and a Master of Arts in National Security Strategy from the National Defense University. He has continued his service beyond the Army through education, corporate and nonprofit board work, mentoring, and leadership development. Across those roles, his central message remains consistent: effective leadership is not about eliminating differences. It is about creating the trust, shared purpose, and disciplined action that allow different people to contribute their best toward the same objective.
Dr. Jessica Gold – Co-Founder & COO of Digital Wisdom and CEO of Bliss Science Coaching
I think the deeper thing that love languages is pointing at is haveyou learned your partner’s operating manual?
Dr. Jessica Gold is the CCO and Co-Founder of Digital Wisdom and the CEO and Founder of Bliss Science, where she works with high achieving founders, executives, and couples on relationships, communication, and personal growth. A scientist turned entrepreneur and relationship coach, Jessica brings an unusually analytical perspective to human connection. She earned her bachelor’s degree in chemistry from MIT, with a minor in neuroscience, completed her Ph.D. in chemistry at the University of California, Berkeley, and conducted postdoctoral research in neuroscience at the University of California, San Francisco. After roughly a decade in scientific research, she shifted her attention from molecular bonding to what she calls romantic bonding. That transition eventually led Jessica to create Relationship Chemistry, her approach to helping analytical and high performing people understand the patterns that shape intimacy, communication, trust, and partnership. She has trained in several coaching and relationship methodologies and holds the Professional Certified Coach credential from the International Coaching Federation. Her additional training includes Relational Life Therapy, Gottman based relationship education, applied neuroscience, process oriented psychology, and other coaching approaches. Through Bliss Science, she has worked with more than 500 clients, including entrepreneurs, executives, engineers, investors, and couples who often find that the problem solving skills that serve them extremely well professionally do not necessarily translate into stronger relationships at home. Jessica is also an entrepreneur in the artificial intelligence space. She co-founded Digital Wisdom with her husband and business partner, Tevye Krynski. The company develops AI based tools designed to make the knowledge of coaches, educators, experts, and other professionals available through personalized digital experiences. Digital Wisdom has created AI mentors and assistants that can be trained on the expertise and content of specific individuals rather than relying only on a generic chatbot experience. Jessica brings her background in coaching and human behavior to the company while also experiencing firsthand the unusual challenges of building a business with a romantic partner. Jessica’s work has been featured by outlets including SFGATE and The Guardian, and she delivered a TEDx talk titled “Chemistry for Your Sex-Starved Marriage,” exploring parallels between molecular bonding and human relationships. Her broader message is that successful relationships require skills that many ambitious people were never formally taught. She encourages founders and high achievers to bring the same curiosity, experimentation, and willingness to learn to their closest relationships that they routinely bring to business. Her work is particularly focused on helping people recognize that leadership, entrepreneurship, and intimate relationships may all depend on communication and trust, but the behaviors that create success in one setting can sometimes create distance in another.

Brian Kavicky – CEO of Lushin
So if you think about all the things that you hate about a salespersonand you flip all those things around, that is actually what astrong salesperson looks like.
Brian Kavicky is CEO of Lushin, a sales consulting, coaching, and training firm that helps business leaders create more intentional and predictable growth. A veteran sales management consultant, Brian works primarily with presidents, CEOs, entrepreneurs, sales leaders, and their teams to identify the behaviors and systems that prevent otherwise successful organizations from reaching their potential. His career has been spent in sales, sales management, and operations leadership in high growth companies, both in corporate environments and as an entrepreneur. That experience gives him a practical perspective on the challenges leaders face when growth begins to slow, sales performance becomes inconsistent, or an organization becomes too dependent on a handful of top performers. At Lushin, Brian focuses on helping companies build sales organizations that can produce sustainable results without relying on individual heroics. His work includes evaluating and improving sales processes, strengthening sales management, developing salespeople, protecting margins, aligning sales and marketing, improving customer retention, reducing sales force turnover, and creating stronger accountability throughout the organization. He also works with companies as they hire and develop sales talent, launch new products and services, and build the structure needed to scale. His approach emphasizes repeatable processes, clear ownership of results, consistent coaching, and helping sales teams understand exactly what effective performance looks like. Brian is especially interested in the connection between leadership and sales performance. He argues that what appears to be a sales problem is often rooted higher in the organization, where unclear expectations, weak accountability, executive blind spots, or inconsistent management create problems that eventually show up in the revenue numbers. He challenges leaders to examine not only what their salespeople are doing, but also how the organization is managing, coaching, measuring, and supporting them. His direct communication style is reflected in one of his favorite pieces of advice, “Stop doing that,” a reminder that growth often begins by eliminating behaviors that are no longer producing the desired result. Brian’s coaching philosophy centers on clarity and confidence. Rather than overwhelming clients with theory, he aims to help them understand what needs to change, why it matters, and what specific behaviors will move the business forward. Clients have credited his work with helping them establish scalable sales structures, strengthen leadership, improve sales processes, and create cultures capable of sustaining growth over time. Outside of his professional work, Brian is a licensed private pilot and brings the same emphasis on preparation, discipline, and avoiding preventable mistakes to both flying and selling.Julian Blair Baldwin – Founder of Cohere Leadership Group and Author of To Zuri: Leadership That Outlives Us
I’ll probably learn more from failure because failure hurts, and it hurtsin such a way where the lessons get deeply embedded in you.
Julian Blair Baldwin is the Founder of Cohere Leadership Group, an author, speaker, leadership thinker, and former healthcare and technology executive with more than two decades of senior leadership experience. His career has included leadership roles with organizations such as Optum, Walgreens, DaVita, and Amwell, where he worked in complex environments involving large scale operations, business growth, healthcare innovation, and organizational transformation. Today, through Cohere Leadership Group, Julian works with CEOs, CHROs, and executive teams to strengthen trust, improve decision making, and address what he calls leadership fragmentation, the tendency for leaders to operate by different standards as the audience, environment, or pressure changes. Julian’s approach is built around the concept of coherence, the alignment of identity, values, decisions, and actions. He argues that organizations often treat problems such as poor communication, slow decisions, declining trust, and weak accountability as separate leadership challenges when they may actually share a deeper cause. Leaders can become different versions of themselves in different rooms, adjusting their principles as pressure and incentives change. Cohere Leadership Group helps leadership teams establish clearer decision standards and translate stated values into behaviors that remain consistent when the stakes rise. Julian earned his Doctor of Pharmacy degree from Temple University School of Pharmacy and his MBA from The Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania, where he received the Dean Patrick Harker Leadership Award. His perspective on leadership has also been shaped by family history and fatherhood. His cousin, Jibreel Khazan, formerly known as Ezell Blair Jr., was one of the Greensboro Four, the four Black college students whose February 1960 sit in at the Woolworth lunch counter in Greensboro, North Carolina, became a defining event of the civil rights movement. Julian draws on that inheritance as an example of leadership rooted in dignity, conviction, and principles rather than formal authority. Julian is the author of the forthcoming To Zuri: Leadership That Outlives Us, scheduled for publication by River Grove Books on September 29, 2026. Written as a series of letters to his daughter, Zuri, the book combines personal history, family legacy, executive experience, and leadership lessons to explore what people inherit, what they choose to carry forward, and what they ultimately leave behind. At the center of the book is Julian’s belief that leadership is measured not simply by professional accomplishments or titles, but by the values a person models consistently at work, at home, and under pressure. Through his writing, speaking, and work with Cohere Leadership Group, he challenges leaders to build lives in which their private values and public decisions operate by the same standard.

Ricardo Valerdi – Department head, System, & Industrial Engineering of University of Arizona and Author of The Five-Tool Team: Bringing Out the Best in People to Make Better Decisions
The best decision makers know that the moment that you take a differentperspective, whether it’s the perspective of the opposing team or theperspective of your allies, or the perspective of your competitors,the solution may look totally different.
Dr. Ricardo Valerdi is the Department Head of Systems and Industrial Engineering at the University of Arizona, where he also serves as a Distinguished Outreach Professor and the university’s Faculty Athletics Representative. An engineer, researcher, sports scientist, and social entrepreneur, Ricardo works at the intersection of systems engineering, decision making, leadership, and sports analytics. His research has focused on systems engineering, cost estimation, and sports analytics, while his applied work has helped organizations including SpaceX, the U.S. Army, Major League Baseball, and the NCAA approach complex decisions more effectively. Ricardo has built an academic and professional career around understanding how individuals and teams make decisions when the stakes are high and the information is incomplete. He is a Fellow of the International Council on Systems Engineering and a foreign member of the Mexican Academy of Engineering. His international academic experience includes serving as a visiting fellow of the UK Royal Academy of Engineering, a visiting professor at the United States Military Academy at West Point, and a Fulbright Scholar at Universidad Carlos III of Madrid in Spain. At the University of Arizona, he also serves as a liaison between the university, the Big 12 Conference, and the NCAA through his role as Faculty Athletics Representative. Ricardo is also the founder of Science of Sport, a nonprofit organization that uses sports to make science, technology, engineering, and mathematics more engaging for young people. The organization has reached more than 700,000 students by connecting classroom concepts with the sports they already understand and enjoy. His work in sports education and analytics has given him an unusual perspective on teamwork, performance, and decision making that complements his engineering background. He is the author of the forthcoming The Five-Tool Team: Bringing Out the Best in People to Make Better Decisions, scheduled for publication by Regalo Press in September 2026. The book presents a practical framework for helping teams question assumptions, evaluate consequences, collaborate more effectively, and make better decisions under pressure. Drawing lessons from engineering, business, sports, the military, and his own experiences, Ricardo argues that good decision making should not depend on one brilliant individual. It can be developed as a repeatable team capability. His work ultimately focuses on helping leaders bring out the best thinking in the people around them so their organizations can make clearer, more confident, and more effective decisions.Dr. Cindra Kamphoff – Confidence Researcher, Award-winning Keynote Speaker, Performance Psychology Expert and Author of The Confidence Habit: 7 Core Practices to Transform Self-Doubt to Self-Belief
Confidence is built by acting like the person that you want to become.
Cindra Kamphoff, Ph.D., CMPC, PCC, CSP, is a confidence researcher, award winning keynote speaker, performance psychology expert, and certified mental performance consultant who helps leaders, athletes, and high performers strengthen their confidence and perform effectively under pressure. She is the Founder of the Mentally Strong Institute, where she leads a team focused on helping people develop the mental skills needed to overcome self doubt, respond to adversity, and perform closer to their potential. Cindra is also a Professor of Sport and Performance Psychology and Director of the Center for Sport and Performance Psychology at Minnesota State University, Mankato. She earned both her master’s degree and Ph.D. in Sport and Exercise Psychology from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. Cindra has applied performance psychology with some of the world’s highest performing athletes and organizations. She provided mental training to Minnesota Vikings players for four years and has worked with USA Track & Field athletes, including providing individual mental performance support connected with the Tokyo Olympics. Her corporate clients have included organizations such as Target, Verizon, Bobcat, and Mayo Clinic Health System. Her work focuses on practical mental strategies for building confidence, maintaining focus, recovering from mistakes, managing pressure, and developing the resilience required to perform consistently when expectations are high. Cindra also led the 2025 National Research Study on Confidence, conducted with the Center for Generational Kinetics, which examined confidence among working Americans and its impact on workplace performance. The research found that 66 percent of working Americans believe the country is experiencing a confidence crisis, while younger workers reported particularly high levels of self doubt and comparison. Cindra’s research supports one of the central ideas behind her work: confidence is not simply a personality trait that some people possess and others do not. It is a skill that can be intentionally developed through repeated behaviors, supportive environments, preparation, and specific mental practices. Cindra is the author of The Confidence Habit: 7 Core Practices to Transform Self-Doubt to Self-Belief, published by Simon Element and Simon Acumen on September 1, 2026. Drawing from performance psychology, neuroscience, her national confidence research, and nearly two decades of work with athletes and business leaders, the book presents seven core practices and nineteen strategies for turning self doubt into stronger self belief. She is also the author of Beyond Grit: Ten Powerful Practices to Gain the High Performance Edge and Beyond Grit for Business, and she hosts the High Performance Mindset podcast. Through her books, research, speaking, coaching, and the Mentally Strong Institute, Cindra is pursuing a broader mission to help millions of people strengthen their minds, build lasting confidence, and approach their biggest goals with greater courage and belief.

Robinson Aquino – CEO of JBS Corp and Author of The Small-Business Money Game: The Hidden Strategies That Turn Survival into Scale
There are infinite amount of ways to win the game,but there are only a handful of ways to lose the game.
Robinson “Rob” Aquino is an entrepreneur, financial strategist, and the CEO of JBS Corp., where he transformed his family’s neighborhood tax practice into a modern financial leadership firm that helps entrepreneurs build the systems, strategies, and financial infrastructure needed for sustainable growth. After beginning his career in wealth management, Rob combined financial expertise with firsthand entrepreneurial experience to help business owners move beyond bookkeeping and compliance toward using financial data as a strategic tool for decision making and long term success. Over the course of his career, Rob has advised more than 3,500 entrepreneurs and business owners, helping companies navigate the challenges that arise as they grow from startup to multimillion dollar enterprises. As an angel investor and serial entrepreneur, he has worked across multiple industries, giving him practical insight into the financial, operational, and leadership challenges that determine whether businesses plateau or continue to scale. His approach emphasizes building strong financial systems, data driven decision making, profitable pricing, and leadership structures that allow companies to grow beyond dependence on their founders. Rob is the author of The Small-Business Money Game: The Hidden Strategies That Turn Survival into Scale, where he introduces practical frameworks such as the Breakpoint Ladder and the Moneyball Strategy to help entrepreneurs overcome predictable growth barriers. Through his writing, speaking, and advisory work, he equips founders with the financial knowledge and operational discipline needed to transform growing businesses into scalable, resilient organizations.Amanda Martin – CEO of Studyville Academic Workspace and Author of Henry the Star-Spangled Spaniel
We hire a lot of younger workforce and we can see firsthand and anyother business probably can do like the, the soft skills that these kidscoming out of college just do not have.
Amanda Martin is the Founder and CEO of Studyville, an education company she launched in 2020 to rethink the traditional tutoring experience. The idea grew out of her own experience as a mother of two teenage boys and the frustration that homework could create for an entire family. Amanda set out to build an environment where students could receive academic support, develop greater independence, and complete their work outside the home. Studyville has since expanded into a multi state operation providing in person and virtual tutoring through its Academic Workspaces, private programs, and partnerships with schools and districts. Under Amanda’s leadership, Studyville has increasingly focused on combining personalized instruction with measurable academic outcomes. The company developed StudyTrack, a FERPA compliant platform that records tutoring sessions, attendance, skills, assessments, and student progress. Studyville says the system is currently used across partnerships involving 14 Louisiana school districts, 107 schools, more than 8,600 K through 5 students, and more than 300 trained tutors. Amanda has also championed ReadingImpact, Studyville’s literacy program built around the Science of Reading and its core areas of phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary, and comprehension. Studyville’s growth has earned Amanda recognition as both an entrepreneur and an education leader. In 2023, Studyville was selected as one of 70 honorees in the U.S. Chamber of Commerce’s America’s Top Small Business program from more than 15,000 applicants nationwide. Amanda was also named one of Baton Rouge Business Report’s Influential Women in Business for 2024. Her broader work reflects a belief that academic support should give parents greater choice while giving educators clearer evidence of whether tutoring is actually improving student performance. Amanda is also the author of Henry the Star-Spangled Spaniel, illustrated by Zoya Malik and published by Forefront Books in June 2026. The children’s book follows Henry, a spaniel who discovers that his Fourth of July birthday is shared with the United States and travels through important moments in early American history, including the Declaration of Independence, the Revolutionary War, and the creation of the Constitution. Amanda created Henry as a way to combine children’s literacy with history, civic understanding, and a sense of curiosity about America’s founding. The character has also become part of Studyville’s ReadingImpact literacy program. Across her work as an entrepreneur, educator, and author, Amanda is focused on a common goal: giving students the structure, instruction, and tools they need to become stronger learners while reducing the stress that academic struggles can create for families. What began as her effort to “Take the Homework Fight Out of the Home” has grown into a broader effort to make tutoring more accountable, literacy instruction more effective, and academic support more accessible to students and families.

Rick Ford – CEO of Ford Family Investments and Author of The Growth Capital Playbook: How Smart Founders Find the Right Partner, Scale Fast, and Build What Lasts
That’s the easy part, finding capital is not hard, finding theright fit in the right partner. That’s the hard part.
Rick Ford is the CEO of Ford Family Investments, an entrepreneur, investor, and business leader with more than 45 years of experience building and scaling capital intensive companies. Today, through Ford Family Investments, he invests across private equity, venture capital, real estate, and selected operating businesses while working closely with founders and management teams. His investment philosophy reflects his experience as an operator, emphasizing strong leadership, disciplined execution, cultural alignment, and sustainable long term value rather than growth for growth’s sake. Rick is best known for founding RFJ Auto Partners in 2014 and serving as its President and CEO until 2021. Under his leadership, RFJ grew into one of the largest privately held automotive dealership groups in the United States, with more than $3.5 billion in annual revenue. The company ultimately operated dozens of automotive retail locations across multiple states and delivered a reported 4.8 times return to its investment partners. In December 2021, RFJ was acquired by Sonic Automotive in one of the largest transactions in automotive retail at the time, adding 33 locations, seven states, and 16 automotive brands to Sonic’s operations. Following the RFJ transaction, Rick launched Ford Family Investments as a single family office and shifted his focus from day to day operating leadership toward investing, mentoring, and helping other business owners navigate periods of rapid growth. His experience has given him a particular interest in the decisions founders face when considering outside capital, including when to raise money, how to evaluate potential partners, how to structure relationships, and how to scale without damaging the culture and values that made the company successful in the first place. Rick is the author of The Growth Capital Playbook: How Smart Founders Find the Right Partner, Scale Fast, and Build What Lasts, published by Forbes Books in June 2026. Drawing on more than four decades of operating and investing experience, the book offers founders a practical guide to determining whether their business is ready for growth capital, selecting the right financial or strategic partner, structuring deals thoughtfully, transitioning from owner operator to strategic leader, and building the leadership and infrastructure required for sustainable expansion. Rick’s broader message is that capital itself is neither good nor bad. Its value depends on choosing the right partner, creating alignment from the beginning, and using investment as a tool to build a stronger and more enduring business.TJ Sweet – Founder/CEO of TJ Sweet Enterprises and Author of Grateful Leadership: Finding Purpose, Building Resilience, and the Power of Appreciation
When you’re grateful for something or someone, you show up for itdifferently and you consider it differently and then obviouslyyou treat it differently.
TJ Sweet is the Founder and CEO of TJ Sweet Enterprises, a keynote speaker, leadership expert, author, and host of the Living The Sweet Life podcast. For more than two decades, TJ has led teams, coached leaders, and worked with organizations to explore what creates meaningful performance, strong workplace cultures, and lasting personal fulfillment. Today, he works with companies, healthcare organizations, financial institutions, and associations to help leaders strengthen gratitude, purpose, trust, and human connection. His central belief is that the strongest organizations are built not only through strategy and performance, but through the way people experience one another every day. TJ is the author of Grateful Leadership: Finding Purpose, Building Resilience, and the Power of Appreciation, a book that challenges conventional definitions of leadership and success. Rather than measuring achievement only through titles, financial results, or professional milestones, TJ encourages leaders to consider the kind of person they are becoming and the impact they have on the people around them. His work explores how gratitude, kindness, personal responsibility, and intentional action can influence leadership, resilience, relationships, and the pursuit of meaningful success. He is also the author of Practice Gratitude: Find Joy. A major theme of TJ’s work is what he calls the missing metric in leadership: human connection. He challenges high performers to consider whether their success is creating greater fulfillment or simply making them busier. Through personal stories, practical reflection, and his 3 2 1 Gratitude Practice, TJ helps people become more intentional about how they lead, communicate, and connect. His presentations combine personal experience, research, neuroscience, and practical strategies designed to give audiences tools they can apply in their professional and personal lives. His signature topics include gratitude, purposeful living, trust, collaboration, employee engagement, and the importance of maintaining authentic human connection as technology and artificial intelligence reshape the workplace. A native of Missouri, TJ holds a master’s degree in health care and has long incorporated physical health, mindfulness, relationships, and personal development into his broader approach to leadership. His own experiences, including a serious car accident and other moments that forced him to reconsider his priorities, have helped shape his message about slowing down enough to recognize what matters. Through TJ Sweet Enterprises, his speaking, books, coaching, and podcast, he encourages leaders to pursue achievement without losing connection to their families, teams, purpose, and values along the way.

Bob Rogers – Founder of BRC Imagination Arts and Author of Deep Story: A Complete Guide for Creating Transformational Visitor Attractions
They come here hoping that we will help them to discoversome magic within themselves.
Bob Rogers is the founder and chairman of BRC Imagination Arts, an award winning strategy, design, and production company that creates transformational experiences for brands, museums, cultural institutions, and visitor destinations around the world. For more than four decades, Bob and BRC have combined storytelling, design, filmmaking, theater, technology, and business strategy to create experiences that build deeper emotional connections between organizations and their audiences. BRC’s work has earned more than 500 awards and includes experiences for Johnnie Walker, Ford, Coca-Cola, Disney, NASA, the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, the Grand Ole Opry, The Henry Ford Museum of American Innovation, Heineken, Jameson, Great Wolf Lodges, the Las Vegas Raiders, World Expos, and the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum. Bob began his career as a magician at the Magic Shop in Disneyland, an experience that helped shape his lifelong interest in the power of emotional engagement and storytelling. He went on to become one of the most recognized creators in the themed entertainment and experience design industries. Bob has received the Themed Entertainment Association’s Lifetime Achievement Award and has been inducted into the IAAPA Hall of Fame. His work in film and television has earned two Academy Award nominations and an Emmy nomination, and he has served on the Board of Governors of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. An inventor as well as a storyteller, Bob holds two patents for Holavision technology. He has also served on NASA advisory committees involved with planning for future Mars missions and received the NASA Public Service Medal for his contributions. Bob is the author of Deep Story: A Complete Guide for Creating Transformational Visitor Attractions, which distills the principles he has developed throughout his career for designing experiences that do more than entertain or inform. His Deep Story approach begins by identifying the transformation an organization wants to create and then designing the experience around the emotions, memories, decisions, and behaviors that can produce that change. Through his writing and work at BRC Imagination Arts, Bob helps businesses and institutions think beyond simply capturing attention and instead create meaningful experiences that can change what customers understand, feel, trust, remember, recommend, and ultimately do.Mark Sims – Managing Principal at ConsultMSG
For the most part, buyers are going to pay for value thatthey can see and that they can transfer.
Mark Sims is the Managing Principal of Technology Solutions at ConsultMSG, where he applies more than 25 years of experience in strategy, mergers and acquisitions, information technology, and business transformation to help organizations improve performance and prepare for growth. His work focuses on connecting business strategy with technology and operations, including ERP implementations, systems optimization, analytics, technology transformation, and complex acquisition and integration initiatives. At ConsultMSG, Mark works with companies to simplify operations, strengthen systems, and build technology foundations that can support sustainable growth and greater long term business value. Before joining ConsultMSG, Mark held senior leadership positions as a CEO, CIO, and corporate strategy executive. He spent many years with The Scotts Miracle Gro Company, where his roles included Chief Information Officer and Vice President of Business Transformation, as well as Senior Vice President of Strategy and M&A. In those positions, he led initiatives involving corporate strategy, technology, process transformation, mergers and acquisitions, enterprise risk management, and organizational change. He later served as President and CEO of RIV Capital, where he was responsible for leading the company through a period of strategic expansion and acquisition activity. Earlier in his career, Mark spent approximately 15 years in management consulting focused on improving growth and productivity. A central theme of Mark’s work is that technology should solve business problems rather than add unnecessary complexity. He encourages leaders to establish clear processes, reliable systems, and well defined business objectives before pursuing new technologies, including artificial intelligence. His approach helps business owners evaluate technology investments based on measurable business results, improve operational efficiency, eliminate bottlenecks, and create organizations that are easier to scale, integrate, or eventually sell. Mark has worked across industries including consumer products, retail, specialty packaging, manufacturing, and private equity. He holds a bachelor’s degree in Industrial and Operations Engineering from the University of Michigan and a master’s degree in Industrial Engineering from Cleveland State University. He also completed the Advanced Management Program at The Wharton School. Across his career, Mark has focused on bringing clarity to complex business challenges and helping leadership teams translate strategy into systems, execution, and measurable results.

Robert Misheloff – President of Smarter Finance USA
You know, it didn’t right away. Primarily because I I was incompetent whenI started. And I think everybody you always have to start somewhere.
Robert Misheloff is the President of Smarter Finance USA, also known as Smarter Equipment Finance LLC, where he helps entrepreneurs and small business owners understand equipment financing, evaluate funding options, and avoid costly mistakes. His work focuses on financing for equipment and commercial vehicles across industries ranging from construction and transportation to manufacturing, agriculture, warehousing, and professional services. Rather than simply helping clients obtain financing, Robert emphasizes transparency and education so business owners understand the true cost, conditions, and risks of a financing offer before making a commitment. Before entering the equipment finance industry, Robert spent approximately 10 years running a marketing company that worked with equipment finance and small business finance brands. That experience gave him an inside view of how financing products were marketed and how difficult it could be for business owners to distinguish straightforward offers from confusing or misleading ones. He later built Smarter Finance USA around a more transparent approach, helping customers recognize issues such as conditional approvals, unclear terms, stacked fees, misleading representations of rates and payments, and requests for deposits that may signal potential problems. Robert brings an entrepreneur’s perspective to financing decisions, particularly for owners purchasing revenue producing equipment or vehicles. He encourages business owners to look beyond an advertised rate and instead consider total financing cost, repayment terms, cash flow, conditions attached to an approval, and the likelihood that a transaction can actually be completed as promised. His philosophy is that access to capital is valuable only when the financing supports the long term health of the business. Through Smarter Finance USA, Robert also advocates for higher standards of disclosure and communication within the equipment finance industry. His commentary and expertise have been featured by Entrepreneur, Manufacturing.net, and Overdrive Online. Across his work, Robert focuses on giving business owners the information they need to compare offers intelligently, protect themselves from questionable financing practices, and use capital more strategically as they grow their companies.Steven Phillips – Managing Partner at CCG CPAS
You’ve got to have the right people in place because you will get morevalue if, if you can build a business where you can take a month offand the business keeps running, that is a more valuable businessthat if it’s all relying on you.
Steven Phillips, CPA, is the Managing Partner of CCG Certified Public Accountants, also known as Capital Care Group, a Southwest Florida accounting firm serving individuals, families, and business owners. His work focuses on helping clients move beyond year end tax preparation and take a more proactive approach to financial decision making. Through CCG, Steven and his team provide services that include tax planning and preparation, small business accounting, cash flow management, business advisory services, succession planning, estate and trust tax services, and outsourced CFO support. Steven brings a business owner’s perspective to his work. Earlier in his career, he experienced an unexpected layoff during a housing market downturn while supporting a young family. That setback pushed him to rebuild his career and eventually create a practice centered on helping other business owners prepare for uncertainty rather than simply react to it. Today, he works with entrepreneurs and established small business owners to identify tax planning opportunities, improve financial visibility, prepare for major transitions, and address issues that can affect the long term value of a business. A major focus of Steven’s approach is year round planning. He encourages business owners to view taxes as part of a broader financial strategy rather than an issue to consider only when returns are due. CCG works with clients throughout the year on tax planning, business structure, cash flow, retirement planning, succession strategies, estate and trust matters, and preparation for the eventual sale or transfer of a company. The firm’s succession planning work includes business valuations, ownership transfers, buy and sell agreements, retirement projections, and estate and trust tax planning. Steven is also a registered representative and financial advisor with Park Avenue Securities and a financial representative of The Guardian Life Insurance Company of America. His professional experience allows him to look at the challenges facing business owners from both an accounting and broader financial planning perspective, while maintaining the appropriate distinctions between those professional roles. At the center of his work is a simple goal: helping clients make better informed decisions today so they can create greater financial stability, protect what they have built, and prepare more effectively for the future.

Alex Guirguis – Co-Founder & CEO of Off the Road, INC
Not everyone in the country has the same access to the legal systemand just justice in general. And that’s part of the reason we startedOff The Record was to level the playing field.
Alex Guirguis is the Co-Founder and CEO of Off The Record, Inc., a legal technology company that is making it easier for people to find and hire experienced local attorneys. The company began by helping drivers fight traffic tickets and has since expanded its marketplace to handle a broader range of traffic and criminal matters, including DUIs, suspended licenses, misdemeanors, and felonies. Off The Record operates nationwide and uses technology and its SmartMatch system to connect clients with attorneys based on factors including location and experience in the relevant court. The platform has contested more than 500,000 cases and processed more than 2.3 million ticket submissions. Before becoming an entrepreneur, Alex spent six years as a software engineer at Amazon, where he worked on large scale technology systems and was an early member of the Fulfillment by Amazon team. The idea for Off The Record emerged after a 2014 camping trip to Crater Lake, Oregon, when Alex and several friends received speeding tickets on their drive back to Seattle. Alex discovered that finding and hiring the right local attorney involved phone calls, paperwork, uncertainty about pricing, and little useful information about which lawyer had the strongest record in a particular court. Convinced that technology could create a much simpler experience, Alex left Amazon in 2015 and co-founded Off The Record with fellow Amazon engineer Mark Mikhail and his brother Chris Guirguis, who was then an engineer at Microsoft. Alex approaches the legal industry with the mindset of a software engineer, looking for complicated processes that technology can make simpler, more transparent, and easier to navigate. Off The Record allows users to submit information about their case, receive transparent pricing, get matched with a local attorney, communicate with their lawyer, and receive case updates through one platform. The company reports a 97 percent favorable outcome rate for traffic ticket cases and works with more than 1,000 partner attorneys across all 50 states. Alex’s larger vision is to apply the marketplace model beyond traffic law and make hiring the right lawyer as straightforward as using other modern digital services.Jeremy Pollack – CEO and Founder of Pollack Peacebuilding Systems and Author of Wired for Peace: Using 7 Neuroscience-Based Principles to Resolve Conflicts
If you’re taking on authority or responsibility, it’s really your responsibilityto stay humble and to stay curious and to try to resolve conflicts.
Jeremy Pollack, PhD, is a social and organizational psychologist, conflict resolution expert, entrepreneur, and author of Wired for Peace: Using 7 Neuroscience-Based Principles to Resolve Conflicts. He is the founder and CEO of Pollack Peacebuilding Systems, a consulting and training firm that helps organizations reduce workplace conflict, strengthen leadership, and build cultures of trust, collaboration, and psychological safety. For more than a decade, Jeremy has worked with executives, founders, leadership teams, human resources professionals, and organizations seeking practical solutions to workplace tension and interpersonal conflict. His work combines insights from psychology, neuroscience, organizational behavior, and peace studies to help leaders understand how stress, fear, and perceived threats influence decision making, communication, and team performance. Through coaching, training, and conflict intervention programs, he helps organizations transform conflict from a costly obstacle into a catalyst for growth, innovation, and stronger relationships. Jeremy is also the founder of Peaceful Leaders Academy, where he teaches leaders how to create environments that encourage healthy disagreement, productive dialogue, and sustainable organizational success. His research focuses on the cognitive, behavioral, cultural, and neuropsychological factors that drive conflict and cooperation, with particular attention to how acute stress responses affect leadership effectiveness and workplace dynamics. As a sought-after speaker, consultant, and educator, Jeremy has helped organizations across a wide range of industries improve communication, increase employee engagement, strengthen workplace culture, and navigate difficult conversations with confidence. Through his writing, teaching, and consulting, he is dedicated to helping leaders build more peaceful, productive, and high-performing organizations.