Every successful person that I know has at least this one quality in common: perseverance. And Ashley Ashwander, the owner of The Albany and my guest for this podcast interview, has perseverance in droves.

Ashley is a young leader who has turned down the promise of instant gratification for the rewards that only come with time, intention, and fortitude. Ashley has faced multiple challenges and obstacles while building her company, and she has pivoted and succeeded in spite of them all. This is not a story of how she grew her business into a mega organization. This is a story about a wife, mom and entrepreneur who is constantly striving to do better and achieving the gradual result of excellence.

This interview will make you smile and renew your hope in the young leaders of our day. Take a few minutes to listen to Ashley, and enjoy her story of entrepreneurship, fortitude and ingenuity.

Dave Campion leads Areté Associates as its President and CEO. In our conversation, he shares with us the challenges he faced when, after being promoted to CEO, he realized that the company culture was in trouble and he set out to fill the void and create a healthy culture that values people just as much as it values results. The secret? Dave understands that exceptional results can rarely be accomplished without deep, healthy relationships. Dave offers advice on team building not only at work, but also in the home- one of his most important practices as a leader is to routinely engage in team building with his own wife and children.

I hope you’ll enjoy listening to this leader share his wisdom and insight on the importance of a strong work ethic and even stronger relationships.

From a young man who grew up on a farm, to the CEO of a large aerospace company, John Watson has learned a lot about developing the characteristics that make a successful leader. John is the President and CEO of Torch Technologies, an engineering services and solutions firm headquartered in Huntsville, AL with over $500M in annual revenues and 1,100 employees operating in ten states supporting primarily the Army and Missile Defense Agency.

From a young man who grew up on a farm, to the CEO of a large aerospace company, John Watson has learned a lot about developing the characteristics that make a successful leader. John is the President and CEO of Torch Technologies, an engineering services and solutions firm headquartered in Huntsville, AL with over $500M in annual revenues and 1,100 employees operating in ten states supporting primarily the Army and Missile Defense Agency.

This podcast episode was recorded on June 2, as our country is reeling from the murder of George Floyd and the protests and riots that have broken out in every single state demanding justice and change. I asked my long-time friend, Bruce Jones, to have an honest conversation with me about race. Since this is a podcast, for context I’ll tell you that Bruce is a black man, and I am a white man. We’re also releasing the zoom video recording of our conversation on our website, which I’ll link to in the show notes for this episode, if you’d like to watch as well as listen.

I hope you’ll listen and learn from Bruce.

Dave King is the President of Dynetics, a large aerospace and engineering company, a father to three children, and a close friend of mine. In this interview, Dave shares with us his experiences growing up in South Carolina, and how the lessons he learned as a child influenced the the values he holds closest as an adult, and he is transparent and vulnerable about his personal experiences with adopting his two daughters and parenting a son with special needs. As the former director of NASA’s Marshal Space Flight Center, Dave led the recovery efforts after the Columbia Space Shuttle tragedy, and during this interview he shares with us how he owned their mistakes by admitting that “we missed it”, and how that leadership helped the organization to heal.