Troublemakers Steve St. Clair

Getting to know Clement King, you get the sense that his career trajectory was single  minded.

He spent 17 years in highly important roles guiding companies like Wells Fargo, HSBC, S&P Global, JPMorgan Chase & Co., Barclays Investment Bank, and Citi.  During that period, Clement was focused  on risk and business strategy. 

Then best-selling author Patrick Lencioni came to do a 3-day workshop. He had written "The Advantage. Why organizational health trumps everything else in business." 

But along the way, his eyes were also opened beyond risk and business strategy. 

Talk to Clement and you'll quickly understand that he's a sponge for knowledge.  Along the way he was invited to join a group called Badassery,  a private community of unconventional thought leaders dedicated to igniting change.
This is one of my longest podcasts, and it's worth it.

When I run into someone whose job title on LinkedIn is Chief Disruption Officer, I know the podcast will be terrific. 

Alan F3 Zorro Blakeborough did not disappoint. He is packed with energy and pulls people into his orbit simply based on his total optimism. 

While solving a critical issue for the accounting sector, he also identified another  totally overlooked issue.  A lack of succession planning in the accounting sector.  

Alan's LinkedIn profile shows at least 20 different businesses. He’s worked at, founded, and guided over 20 different companies – many of them in the accounting sector.

Jessica Wolf has had six jobs. All of them were focused on community building. She is a great example of finding a career path you like and sticking to it. Her latest is Skye, a platform for coaching and serving leaders and their teams.

A 2022 paper from Statista found the  United Kingdom and the United States spending the least on e-learning or business or life coaching.  (source) 

This fact and and Jessica's focus on growth prove she and Skye are in the right place at the right time. 

In this podcast, Jessica opens up about some difficulties she had, opportunities to get her around the problems, and how much she depended on her very capable team members.

By carefully listening to their growing members, the Skye team heard a need that would make their businesses more successful and free them up to chase more clients. You'll like this approach.

One of my favorite moments in this podcast was when Jessica breezed past the fact that she was honored as a Forbes 30 Under 30. For such an accomplished CEO, she is incredibly modest. 

When troublemaker CEOs find ways to disrupt sleepy business sectors there's always a lot they can teach us. 

Founder and CEO of Bunafr, Anjani Annumalla, set his sights on a business sector 200 years old - the coffee industry.

For centuries, coffee enthusiasts had no control of the part of the process that gives coffee its taste - the roasting. 

This from an interview with Anjani - 
“Home coffee roasting can revolutionize the way each cup is personalized and consumed. And on top of that, it also starts to solve some deeply rooted problems of the coffee world – farmers’ inequity/poverty and the carbon footprint of coffee on the environment. Today, 80% of coffee farmers (25M farmer families) live below the poverty line because the coffee index gates the price paid to them, which is taken advantage of because farmers do not have the means to sell coffee directly to consumers. At Bunafr, our vision is to disrupt that practice by democratizing coffee roasting. “ 

Anjani Annumalla spent nearly 8 years at Amazon. He was in 3 leadership roles at Amazon during their most aggressive buildouts. These experiences prepared him to be ready for the difficulties many startups experience.

The page on https://www.TroubleGroup.com shows the brilliant and beautiful Bunafr machine. 
Be sure to visit https://bunafr.com/

The more I do these podcasts, the more optimistic I am that opportunities are all around us entrepreneurs. If you have the instinct to see them, and the bravery to jump in, you can be like my next guests.

Perry Griffith and Harry Dubke spotted, a gap in the three-to-four month rental market for student and intern housing – not just in DC, but world-wide.  Their company is Cortado, which means "stripped down" or efficient. And that's how they run their company.

You're going to enjoy this one.

We who are comfortable with technology, navigating social media, and working the web naturally think everyone else is just as adept. But that's not the case. 

All across America, HVAC installers, restaurants, and fashion stores are trying to survive post Covid and keep the lights on. Many don't even have a website and most don't have time to understand social media - much less to use it to grow their businesses.

My next guest, Rolan Reichel, has recognized just how lucrative this underserved market is.  He and his team think there could be up to $100B sitting on the sidelines and they want to help put it to work to help small businesses.

They launched their solution as a a browser extension.  If you've used Grammarly, then you know how easy it is to launch Arrow. It simply starts and the GUI is super friendly.