I am pumped to introduce today’s featured guest, Ronen Gafni. Ronen is a serial entrepreneur who grew up in the startup nation of Israel, trading on the stock market, operating a branding company, training companies, and more. He is the creator and founder of FreshBiz and the FreshBiz game developer as well. Ronen also co-authored the book, The New Entrepreneurz: Changing the Way You Play Life, and he is also a visionary global trainer, or business coach, as many like to call him.
Ronen has been featured on TV, radio, and magazines talking about the future of business, and he has trained over 15,000 people across 20 countries on innovation and entrepreneurial thinking. As a keynote speaker and futurist, Ronen weaves together new approaches to business, education, design, and lifestyle. Today we dive into applying gaming to business by starting with lifestyle and designing the business model accordingly. We also go further into creating a business model based on partnerships, the role of game-based learning in entrepreneurship, the effect of culture on creative thinking, and much more.
I am so excited to introduce today’s featured guest, Courtney Kingston. Courtney is the founder of Kingston Family Vineyards in Casablanca Valley, Chile. She’s a graduate of Princeton University and she started her career as a consultant for Deloitte’s wine industry practice. There she began learning the ins and outs of the California wine business, and later as a student at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, she wrote the vineyard’s original business plan using the Chilean cattle ranch that her family had owned and operated since 1922.
After many discussions about the feasibility of converting the family farm into a vineyard, Kingston Family Vineyards became a reality in 1998. Courtney and her husband, Andy, have three daughters and share their time between Portola Valley, California and Chile’s Casablanca Valley. Today Courtney shares the story how how it all began, as well as the ins and outs of what it’s really like to start and run your own vineyard.
Today’s featured guest is Jim Klopman. Jim is a lifelong innovator who has always been one of those people who thinks differently. He was born with brain damage, ADHD, and dyslexia and used athletics to overcome these challenges. After years of being an athlete and unsure of his purpose in life, Jim found his purpose and developed his own business called The SlackBow Balance Training System.
After five years of development, Jim believes that with the right neural whole-body training to optimize the human balance system, everyone can improve physically and mentally, and can even live longer and feel younger. Prior to starting SlackBow, Jim worked as a VP of Marketing at Intera Corporation and at Russell Athletic as a Management Turnaround Specialist and Product Developer. Today Jim is here to share more about balance training and what the SlackBow System is all about.
Today on the show we welcome Stephanie Goetsch. Stephanie is the founder of Spark Career Strategy, which she launched in 2010. What began as a dedicated career coaching for "what’s next" professionals, blossomed into organizational development and human resources consulting, career and performance coaching, and group training offerings. As the name suggests, Stephanie delivers both spark and strategy to each company and client that she works with. She’s a lover of change, whether it’s changing minds with learning, changing careers with career coaching, changing business with innovation and design, or changing behaviors with performance coaching.
Prior to launching her own business, she held a number of human resource positions in different organizations, including US Pharmacopeia and Chevy Chase Bank. She’s also a passionate supporter of the US Military and in 2016 she founded Call to Action, which is a non-profit organization that delivers exceptional career transition strategies to US veterans and military spouses to successfully leverage their unique talents for civilian careers.
Today’s featured guest is John Lee. John is the co-founder of Capital Kombucha, which is Washington D.C.’s first kombucha brewery. He founded the company with two classmates from GW’s business school in 2012. Prior to business school, John worked as a structural engineer, which was a far cry from the world of healthy beverages. John and his co-founders identified a market in D.C. for the fermented sweetened tea drink that’s believed to support a healthy gut and strong immune system.
Unlike the West Coast, which is saturated with these types of health and wellness beverages, D.C. was pretty low on kombucha offerings, yet had a very active, health-conscious population. So Capital Kombucha was born and they began selling their drinks at local markets before expanding to larger retail outlets, like Whole Foods and Safeway. Today they distribute to hundreds of locations from Virginia to New York, all along the mid-Atlantic.