The Driven Podcast

Colt Charlebois
  • 0.0 (0)
  • Entrepreneurship

The Driven is a podcast hosted by Colt Charlebois. Sitting down with business owners, founders, and high-capacity leaders, he uncovers the real stories behind their success — the lows, the turning points, and the faith woven through it all. Every episode follows the same arc: where it all started, what nearly broke them, the moment things shifted, and where they are now. Raw testimony from leaders who built something meaningful while carrying real weight — in business, in life, and in faith.

  1. 17h ago

    Ep 017 | Accountability Fails When It Skips the Heart | feat. Kari Yil-Renko

    You’ve built the business and you’re serving at church, but what if the drive underneath it all is still trying to earn God’s approval? In this conversation, Colt sits down with Kari Yil-Renko, the man he calls his spiritual father, who was drafted by the Cincinnati Bengals, cut before his first regular season game, and came to faith only to realize years later he was still just as driven as before. You’ll hear why accountability that stops at being a cop or a coach rarely changes anything, what Kari calls cardiac accountability instead, why you should give from your fruit and not your seeds, and what separates an orphan spirit from sonship. Kari also shares the sentence he almost couldn’t say out loud: “I am worth the death of Christ.” If you have been working harder for God and feeling further from Him, this one is for you. ABOUT THE GUEST Kari Yil-Renko oversees about 35 Leader Impact groups for business leaders across Ottawa and Hamilton. Raised in Sudbury, Ontario, the son of immigrant parents, he won the Ontario hammer throw championship before football took him to Cincinnati and a draft selection by the Bengals, then played offensive tackle in the USFL and the CFL with Calgary, Ottawa and Toronto before retiring in 1994 to found Gym Jam, an indoor family fun centre in Ottawa. Discipled through Athletes in Action after being cut by the Bengals, he now leads men past rule-checking and encouragement to the heart issues driving their behaviour through his Cardiac Accountability framework, anchored in Galatians 2:20.

  2. Oct 2

    Ep 016 | Satan Cheers When Christians Play Small | feat. Brian Dixon

    You say your business exists to build the kingdom, so why are you still pricing like you're apologizing for it? In this conversation, Colt sits down with Brian Dixon to unpack why good-hearted Christian leaders shrink from the gifts God gave them. For Brian, it started with a car crash at 18 that left him with 26 breaks in his hip and pelvis and a lesson about living with open hands. You'll hear why "Did God really say?" is an identity question, not a business one. You'll also hear how a simple left hand, right hand test ("would Jesus or Satan cheer for this?") cuts through false humility, why "what's obvious to you is magic to somebody else," and why raising Hope Writers from $22 to $47 a month doubled its membership twice. Brian also shares the webinar that convinced him the "kids of the King" had no excuse to undercharge. If you've been calling your hesitation humility, this one is for you. ABOUT THE GUEST Brian Dixon is the founder of Hope Media Network, home to Hope Writers, Hope Books, and the Hope Story Conference, and author of six books, including the bestselling Start With Your People (Zondervan/HarperCollins), which Forbes named one of 20 books to make you a better coach or mentor. A business coach, marketing strategist, and TEDx speaker, he helps authors, speakers, and aspiring messengers build sustainable businesses by clarifying their calling, discovering their audience, and creating their products. Brian left his role as CEO of a charter school with a $5.5 million budget to start over at zero, learned the hard way that a business built around himself had no clients, and built his approach on the daily decision to start with your people. Today he leads a team of 12 from a 1952 library building in North Carolina, where he and his wife, Julie, run the business together.

  3. Sep 25

    Ep 015 | Unprocessed Pain Is Leading Your Team | feat. Ross Naylor-Tatterson

    You've poured into people who left and kicked you on the way out, and now you lead a little more guarded than you used to. Is that wisdom, or pain you never dealt with? In this conversation, Colt sits down with Ross Naylor-Tatterson, a leadership coach and pastor, to unpack what it takes to become a leader worth following. You'll hear why agreement doesn't equal commitment, and how Ross listens to every struggling entrepreneur for three things: self-awareness, others awareness, and skills awareness. You'll hear why "without humility, it's impossible to learn," and what separates clean pain from dirty pain. Ross also shares the story of a woman who grew up in a Himalayan slum and now goes back to her village to tell the people who harmed her that their lives can change, and why he believes earning a livelihood, not education alone, breaks generational poverty. If you've been absorbing hurt from the people you lead and calling it leadership, this one is for you. ABOUT THE GUEST Ross Naylor-Tatterson leads EnLive Leaders, where he helps entrepreneurs become a leader worth following through honest conversations and small behavioral experiments. His work focuses on character and decision making. He builds leaders' skills in communication, decision making, and conflict resolution, and the organizations they serve see better quality, higher job satisfaction, stronger retention of good workers, and greater profitability. Ross is regional coordinator for Asia and MENACA with Vineyard Mission USA and pastor emeritus of the church he planted in Michigan. He was born in Australia and has lived in the United States for 26 years. He writes two weekly Substack columns, Wisdom and Pressure on Mondays and the Friday Exhale.

  4. Sep 18

    Ep 014 | Stay The Course | feat. Jaegap Chung

    You go to church on Sunday and try to be a good boss Monday through Friday, but you've never bridged the gap between the two. In this conversation, Colt sits down with Jaegap Chung, founding principal of Studio JCI, to unpack what it actually means to partner with God in business rather than just be nice at work. When his industry got decimated and clients started going bankrupt, Jaegap stopped listening to the experts and asked one question: "God, what do you want me to do?" The answer was to stay the course, and his 45-person firm expanded while competitors fired people left and right. You'll hear why meekness is power held under submission rather than weakness, how his faith-fitness regimen of diet, resistance, fasting, and rest builds spiritual muscle, and what the difference between rhema and logos means for hearing God daily instead of only on Sundays. He also shares why he thinks every Christian should be an entrepreneur for a week, and how agency is the antidote to a generation drowning in anxiety and hopelessness. If you've been living a divided life between your faith and your work, this one is for you. Bio Jaegap Chung is the founding principal of Studio JCI, a Toronto architecture firm, and holds a Bachelor of Architecture from the University of Toronto. His award-winning practice has designed and built over eight million square feet of residential projects, with a focus on community-centric, future-proofed residential innovation. As a subject matter expert, Jaegap has shaped City of Toronto municipal policy, advocating for multiplexes and mid-rises to restore the city's missing middle housing stock. He also co-founded and now leads CLIP Homes, a design-build firm creating scalable, sustainable housing solutions to address Canada's housing crisis.

  5. Sep 4

    Ep 013 | Paying People to Pray, Then Getting Called In | feat. Bryan Elliott

    You've hit the numbers and the wins keep stacking, so why does the quiet sense that you're not enough still drive everything you build? In this conversation, Colt sits down with Bryan Elliott, founder and CEO of Flō Energy Solutions, to unpack the hidden driver underneath high-performing ambition. Bryan grew a company from a $20,000 loan from his parents into specialized systems now running in roughly 2,500 stores across 35 US states, and for decades a lie that he was "not enough" ran underneath all of it. When faith started to reawaken, his first instinct was to run it like a founder: he brought a prayer team onto staff to cover the business, with zero intention of praying himself, until the conviction to join in slowly pulled him off the sidelines. You'll hear why success can't fix that lie ("it doesn't change the lie until it's displaced with truth"), how he turned an engineering mind into a supermarket market gap no competitor was solving, why he validates a problem exhaustively before building anything (Einstein's 55 minutes on the problem, five on the solution), and how his team learned to pray "we're not gonna let this customer become an idol" through years of financial storms. Bryan also shares the loss that reframed everything: waking the morning after his daughter's death with a peace he couldn't manufacture, where the heavenly reality superseded the earthly one. If you have been performing to prove something you can't quite name, this one is for you. ABOUT THE GUEST Bryan Elliott, P.Eng., is the founder and CEO of Flō Energy Solutions, the only HVAC company focused solely on optimizing mechanical equipment performance for food retail, and the author of five books, including More Than Gold and As In Heaven. A professional engineer trained at the University of New Brunswick, he started the company at 28 and filed his first patents in 1999 and 2000, building specialized supermarket systems now running in roughly 2,500 stores across 35 US states, with clients including Loblaws, Sobeys, Shoppers Drug Mart, and Aldi, all from a problem-first, minimum-viable-product discipline that validates a customer's real willingness to pay before engineering a solution. He is also the co-founder and president of M46 Ministries, co-founder and chairman of Bee Me Kidz, and a board member of Transform Our World Canada and EPIC at Work, and after returning to faith at 46 much of his writing and speaking now centers on inner healing, working from rest rather than toil, and the relentless love of God that pursued him through profound loss.

  6. Aug 28

    Ep 012 | Loosen Your Grip and Let God Move You Forward | feat. Sue-Jean Chung

    You're building at a scale you once thought was above you, and still a quiet voice asks whether you actually have what it takes. In this conversation, Colt sits down with Sue-Jean Chung, who passed a pivotal architecture course with a technical C and graduated certain she would never be an architect, then went on to grow Studio JCI from three people to more than thirty-five and help build over 1,800 residential units. You'll hear why she stopped calling herself an architect and started calling herself a problem solver who just uses architecture as the tool, how she reframed imposter syndrome as an insecurity about identity rather than ability, and what she means by yielding to promotion when God pushed her toward recognition she never sought. She unpacks why submission and authority are partners rather than opposites, traces the childhood tag-and-chips memory behind her fear that people would only value her for what she has, and shares how a loss in 2025 drove her to 2,700 logged hours and the brink of burnout before she learned that rest is not the opposite of faithfulness. If you have been performing at a level that looks like success from the outside while quietly wondering whether you belong there, this one is for you. ABOUT THE GUEST Sue-Jean Chung is a Founding Principal of Studio JCI, a multidisciplinary architecture firm committed to solving the housing and design challenges facing Canadian cities, which she has grown from a team of three to more than thirty-five architects and designers and whose work has contributed to over 1,800 residential units across the GTA and Greater Golden Horseshoe. A graduate of the John H. Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape, and Design at the University of Toronto, she has led projects on site for over ten years through every phase from tender to close-out, brings deep expertise in zoning by-laws and codes, and was recently inducted as a Fellow of the Royal Architecture Institute of Canada while her firm ranks number 39 on Canada's list of top women-led businesses. Through JCI Learn, she teaches weekly modules to raise up the next generation of problem-solving architects, advocates for women in the profession, and supports BEAT Toronto, building the practice alongside her husband, Jaegap Chung, on the conviction that two are better than one and that she is a steward of what God has entrusted to her.

  7. Aug 21

    Ep 011 | Obsessed With The Right Thing | feat. Rabbi Curt Landry

    You hit the number — the profit, the cars, the employee-of-the-year cover — and instead of arriving, you find yourself burned out and further from God than when you started. Curt Landry was 36, sitting on $7.6 million in project profits, when that exact life cracked open in a bathtub encounter with Jesus that dragged the shame of his origins to the surface and rebuilt his identity from the ground up. In this conversation, Colt sits down with Curt to separate being driven from being obsessed — why ambition either balances under God's power or spins off into the flesh, and why failure, not success, turned out to be his best teacher. You'll hear how he sanctifies behavioural tools like NLP instead of using them to manipulate, why he argues AI can carry anointing rather than strip it, and the prophetic word he took heat for: that revival is coming to the "business mountain" through its partnership with media. It builds to a single unscripted phone call to Palm Beach — a father recognized across a parking lot, and two reconciliations, earthly and heavenly, in one evening. If you've been chasing a goal so hard that your life has gone a little off the rails, this one's for you. Guest Bio Rabbi Curt Landry is a speaker, author, and international ministry leader with a heart to see restoration between Israel and the church. Founder of Curt Landry Ministries and House of David in Oklahoma, he spent his early career at the top of the corporate world as a master-level NLP practitioner trained in performance goal-setting, before coming to faith in 1989. A Jewish man who believes in Jesus — conceived out of wedlock, nearly aborted, born in Skid Row, and adopted at six months by a Jewish mother and Catholic father — he frames his life's calling around Malachi 4: turning the hearts of Jew and Gentile back to the Father to become "one new man." Across 37 years in ministry he has taught biblical finance and spiritual warfare, authored books including Reclaiming Our Forgotten Heritage and the Goals to Grow workbook, and leads the invitation-only Summit Leadership program in Destin, Florida. He and his ministry work closely with Israel and the IDF — delivering roughly $970,000 in support to reservists within 28 days of October 7th — and he has ministered to leaders worldwide, including Israel's Prime Minister and otther officials.

  8. Aug 14

    Ep 010 | You Cannot Burn Out a Man in Love | feat. Bill Nissen

    Description Most men north of sixty ease off the throttle. Bill Nissen is hitting higher RPMs, and the reason traces to a single conviction: you cannot burn out a man in love. In this conversation, Colt sits down with Bill to separate the exhaustion that flattens driven leaders from the devotion that never empties, a distinction he drew from a study of Song of Solomon after church elders once warned him to slow down before he burned out. You'll hear why he spends his energy turning oughts into want-tos, how he argues much of the Western church sells fire insurance instead of intimacy, why he insists only a new experience and not another book can change what you truly believe, and what he means when he tells a stalled leader that you can't steer a parked car. Bill also shares why he set out to work himself out of a job on purpose, certain that was the point of his leadership all along. If you have been burning out while doing all the right things, sure your heart is right yet unable to get off the couch, this one is for you. Bio Bill Nissen is the Head Performance Coach at AlterCall, drawing on more than 35 years of pastoral ministry, 25 years of trauma-based counselling, and 35 years of mentorship focused not just on imparting knowledge but on building character, resilience, and a sense of purpose in the people he leads. For the last 15 years, he has worked in business consulting and team building, growing a company past $50 million in revenue, and he serves as a corporate trainer, public speaker, and author. With a foundation in psychology, sociology, public speaking, and ministry, he coaches across emotional mastery, mindset training, team building, and business accountability, helping leaders integrate their spirituality into their professional identity and serve a cause greater than themselves with a heart of service.

See All (18)

About

The Driven is a podcast hosted by Colt Charlebois. Sitting down with business owners, founders, and high-capacity leaders, he uncovers the real stories behind their success — the lows, the turning points, and the faith woven through it all. Every episode follows the same arc: where it all started, what nearly broke them, the moment things shifted, and where they are now. Raw testimony from leaders who built something meaningful while carrying real weight — in business, in life, and in faith.

Information

  • Creator
    Colt Charlebois
  • Years Active
    2026
  • Episodes
    18
  • Rating
    Explicit
  • Copyright
    © 2026 The Driven Podcast
  • Show Website
    The Driven Podcast