Mentors and Counselors

I left Vistage in April and announced my retirement. That has opened a floodgate of opportunities to explore options and work with some potentially great individuals! My decision or plan was to sit back and figure out what I want to do..... one thing I felt I needed to do was give back. A mentor at HEMP suggested I learn about what they do. I started looking into it and couldn't be happier! I have been excepted to be a HEMP mentor. At Vistage Worldwide I managed over 140 Chairs (facilitators or coaches) and around 3,300 members. In certain ways similar to HEMP. My current company, GrowthPoint Midwest LLC came about because of requests from others to do consulting and other work for them.

M:CALIBRATE provides Growth and Strategic Marketing consulting services to mid-market and fast growing small businesses, as well as working with the private equity and entrepreneurial community. I serve as a Fractional Chief Marketing Officer to these businesses between $5MM-$200MM who should not hire a full-time CMO, but which would benefit from seasoned marketing leadership experience on a part-time basis. I also work with a range of expert partners in specialty areas like market research, creative, and PR to ensure that a client's tactical marketing execution is aligned to their strategic objectives.

Project Group 2000 is a comprehensive cell tower service company for Wireless Carriers of all sizes and technologies. The company provides on-call emergency repair and maintenance services, as well as fully documented site audits and inspections. Its field crews are designed for travel while delivering large-scale projects. The company currently operates in the Nashville, Tennessee and St. Louis, Missouri markets and have a proven track record of successful build outs.

Blender of Epoxies used for Transportation Infrastructure, Renewable Energy Construction and Industrial Coatings.

Education/Coaching/Consulting - Leadership Health/Wellbeing to improve personal and professional performance.

StarRecruit LLC is a premier IT recruiting firm, with over a decade of experience finding and recruiting the top 5-10% of talent in IT and software markets. We use proprietary databases, advanced Boolean searches, experience and skill to uncover “hidden”, passive candidates that aren’t looking for work. These high performers don’t show up on job board databases (Dice, Monster, Career Builder, etc). Our candidates are top performing, "free-agents" that are looking to upgrade their careers and lives. To borrow a sports analogy, we use our experience and skill to find the best players on the opposition team and work as their agent to help them upgrade to a team that is a better fit for their career objectives. Many recruiters are “smile and dial” telemarketers that make 100 calls a day hoping to wear down client companies into “giving them a shot”. This is generally proceeded by the telemarketer sending unemployed, unhappy, unqualified candidates to a client hoping that they are desperate enough to hire the candidate. StarRecruit LLC is quite the opposite.

Global Big Four Accounting Firm

Business advisory services.

Many business owners feel their marketing dollars are wasted on random services. At Shepherd Holmes Group we help businesses create a clear plan that turns their marketing into sales so they can focus on serving customers profitably. We'd love to help you create a plan that puts your marketing investment to work for you and your business. Send me your website url and I'll send you a video of a FREE StoryBrand Website Review of your site.

The Shirley and Barnett Helzberg Foundation provides support for other charitable organizations especially in the areas of entrepreneurship, education and the arts in Kansas City. Support is given to the Helzberg Entrepreneurial Mentoring Program (HEMP), University Academy, Friends of University Academy, Helzberg School of Management, The Nelson-Atkins Museum, The Kansas City Symphony, The Kansas City Zoo, Village Shalom, Jewish Federation of Greater Kansas City and other areas.

Hoffman Management Corp. manages investments in oil and gas production, as well as real estate.

Western Extralite was a regional distributor of electrical products, selling to electrical subcontractors, MROs and OEMs. The business was sold to Border States Industries in 2014. At the time of the sale, we had approximately 250 employees and 19 locations in Missouri and Kansas.

Founded in 1995, LionShare serves primarily the healthcare industry nationwide. Our expertise includes strategic consulting, research and creative, direct-mail services, execution and fulfillment. Our solutions, such as service-line campaigns, new mover/new parent programs, physician marketing, dynamic email deployment and social media monitoring, are rooted in DIATA™, our business intelligence tool (which includes CRM/PRM and propensity/modeling). Utilizing DIATA™, we listen to data and link analytics to marketing executions.

More than 5,300 professionals at Lockton provide 41,000 clients around the world with risk management, insurance, and employee benefits consulting services that improve their businesses. From its founding in 1966 in Kansas City, Missouri, Lockton has attracted entrepreneurial professionals who have driven its growth to become the largest privately held, independent insurance broker in the world and 10th largest overall.

LKLL&L is involved with commercial real estate. Prior Company EZTax, specialized in development and licensing of software products that automated sales, use and numerous other transaction tax calculations, filings and situs determinations. I sold this company to Avalara in June of 2015.

I owned Stouse Inc for 38 years and recently sold it in November of 2015. Stouse was a specialty printer specializing in screen printing, flexography, foil stamping, embossing, digital printing. Stouse in 2015 had approximately 330 employees located in Gardner Kansas . The facility consisted of 20,000 office space with 160,000 manufacturing space. Stouse sold through resellers located nationally with approximately 16,000 active distributors. Stouse products sold through a 130 page cataloglue. The primary product were decals and posters, banners.

Dredge America performs professional hydraulic dredging services throughout the entire U.S. We specialize in portable hydraulic dredging, meaning we can go anywhere. We have been learning and improving our craft for over twenty years.

Strenuus helps insurance companies design smarter physician networks. Network360, its flagship SaaS application, was used by every national insurer, and well over half of the BCBS plans nationwide. Strenuus also developed physician search and recommendation tools used by private health exchanges. One out of ten health plan enrollments in the US use these tools.

Restaurant Management Company

Coffee Roaster

Industrial Distribution

Lux Research is an independent research and advisory firm, providing strategic advice and ongoing intelligence on emerging technologies. Science-driven innovation is a cross-cutting key to success in today's business environment. In an increasingly crowded competitive landscape, decision makers need critical advice about markets, technologies, and strategy – both to position existing business for growth and to launch new businesses wisely. Emerging technology fields are fertile hunting grounds for new business opportunities, and corporate executives, investors, policymakers, and entrepreneurs across many industries look to these areas to drive growth. Whether it is cleantech or conventional oil and gas, advanced aerospace or consumer packaged goods, electronics or agriculture, the industries we serve are highly dependent on innovative materials, processes, and strategies to lower costs, increase revenues, defeat competitors, and serve customers. However, emerging technology markets are also uniquely challenging to understand and to take advantage of – Lux Research analysts are specialists in understanding and assessing these complex and rapidly-changing fields. Our research products are: Driven by proprietary primary research, not just publicly available data. We conduct over 5,000 interviews annually with company management, customers, partners, and outside experts, including on-site visits and facility inspections in 45 countries Based on a deep understanding of technology and markets. Our researchers are not generalist consultants or market researchers, but domain experts (most with advanced degrees in science and engineering), familiar with issues and trends in these technology areas. At the same time, our analysts aren't simply technologists, but are well-versed in assessing business implications of emerging technology Factual, detailed, and numerate. We don't indulge in vague generalizations, but support conclusions with specific data, examples, and case studies. Lux Research reports and other deliverables are not merely qualitative, but provide specific numbers – market sizes, figures of merit, price/cost, revenues – to help make decisions Bold and opinionated. We do not simply take claims or reports at face value, but apply critical analysis to cut through the hype and get to what is really true. We do not just report data or information, but say what it means – and put a firm stake in the ground in recommending what clients should do.

Marketing/Corporate Communications/Electronic Media Production/Live Event Production

Consulting services that help companies identify and develop market driven growth opportunities. Services include strategic planning, marketing, brand development and research.

RC Royals & Associates, LLC is a global consulting firm specializing in improving the operating performance of our customers. Our focus is financial services that encompass a broad range of companies that deal with the management of money. Among these organizations are banks, credit card companies, consumer finance companies, stock brokerages, investment funds, and some government sponsored enterprises. The company is uniquely positioned to creatively transform your financial performance of mid­-market companies.

Catalog & Direct Marketing Agency

Commercial Real Estate

Consulting

Hemp and Cannabis - Point3 Farma is a vertically integrated supplier of cannabinoids in the form of distillate and isolate, supporting producers of cannabinoid based products in a wide variety of end markets.

K-12 full enterprise technology for managing schools and school districts. This all-in-one solution is made up of modules to manage student information (AXSIS), special education (SPEDEX), curriculum (COREX), library (LYRICX), career and college (MyTRAX) as well as early learning (FirstTRAX) and district wide communication (DuX).

Transportation Brokerage - 3rd Party Logistics And asset based over the road carrier