Stevie-winner Domo, Inc. is a cloud-based platform designed to provide direct, simplified, real-time access to business data for decision-makers across the company with minimal IT involvement.

Domo’s business management platform turns data into insights and gives customers the context they need for faster, better-informed decisions. Traditional reporting methods often result in backlog, but Domo automates those processes by connecting to data in real time.

Domo’s low-code data app platform goes beyond traditional business intelligence and analytics to enable anyone to create data apps to power any action in their business, right where work gets done. With Domo’s fully integrated, cloud-native platform, critical business processes can now be optimized in days instead of months or more.

Female Employee of the Year in Business, Nikki Walker
Nikki Walker is the Director of Diversity, Equity & Inclusion (DEI) at Domo, where she works with a team of professionals to elevate and amplify Domo’s mission and values in the workplace and in the community. She does so by creating and driving programs and initiatives focused on diversity and inclusion, workplace equity and belonging, and community engagement.

Nikki leads Domo’s newly formed DEI leadership council, which represents multiple voices from around the organization to bring a more contextual application of DEI best practices and outcomes across the entire business. In addition to helping advance a culture of belonging, Nikki also focuses on creating employment pipelines and supporting student leadership programs that help build and nurture a more diverse pool of qualified talent for the tech industry.

Prior to her current role, Nikki was Director of Community Engagement wherein she created and managed programs for Domo that aligned with community partners. In addition, she runs the Domo for Good initiative, a social good program designed to leverage the Domo platform in collaboration with nonprofits, bringing the power of data to help solve society’s most pressing issues.

She has also partnered with the Multicultural Subcommittee of the COVID-19 Community Task Force's digital equity team to address the racial injustices facing the Black community.

Nikki currently serves on the board of directors for Encircle, The Road Home, and The Children’s Center, as well as the Utah Tech Leads PAC, the Foundation Board, and the President’s Cabinet of Salt Lake Community College. Nikki is also a member of The KUED Advisory Board and is an active member of the NAACP, the Utah Black Chamber, and the Junior League of Salt Lake City.

As a professional communicator and a strong advocate of leaving a place better than it was, Nikki has set out to educate the public on becoming more accepting of Black lives. Serving the community is Nikki’s passion, and she's dedicated to spreading the importance of diversity and inclusion at every level of community, business, and government through both her personal and professional endeavors.

Domo’s commitment to multiplying impact extends to its local community through donations of time, funding, and expertise to help build and foster the next generation of tech talent and leadership.

Domo’s Director of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Nikki Walker won a Bronze Stevie^® Award for Female Employee of the Year - Business in the 2022 Stevie Awards for Women in Business. 

Interested in entering the 2023 Stevie Awards for Women in Business? 

Regalix is a global leader partnering with companies on revenue operations, customer experience, and thought leadership. They are a growth-based enterprise that helps digital platforms drive growth from their mid-market and small/medium business (SMB) segments by handling the whole range of sales/growth lifecycle. 

For 10+ years across 16+ countries, Regalix has been driving revenue growth for digital platforms by selling their complex services to SMBs and assisting them in building their sales infrastructure, contributing to more than $10 billion in revenue for world-renowned brands.

They have helped over 150+ iconic Fortune 500 brands, including Google, Meta, Amazon, Apple, Cisco, and others, unlock opportunities and business possibilities at scale.

Highlighted Projects
For one client, Regalix enabled increased ad adoptions among its SMB markets and helped increase the business's revenue by 3.5X. They achieved this by implementing targeted marketing campaigns focused on the businesses' specific needs and pain points. 

This included creating tailored ad packages that offer more cost-effective solutions for smaller budgets and providing education and resources to the advertisers on the benefits of utilizing ads. Ultimately, the brand increased its overall revenue by 81% within two years, while the total cost of generating this revenue remained the same.

For another client from the F&B sector, they helped increase merchant adoption by 95%. They significantly increased the client's success in pre-sales activities by implementing targeted marketing campaigns that effectively reached their target audience.

Additionally, they streamlined the merchant signup process. In post-sales activities, they focused on providing onboarding support. Overall, these strategies increased the client’s merchant base with a conversion ratio of 51%, increased revenue by 88%, and improved customer satisfaction.

Ingredients to Success
Regalix’s secret to achieving success on a much higher level when compared to its competitors is due to its in-house AI-based platform designed to help train and assist sales reps in all aspects of call management, from initial training to ongoing skill development.

The platform streamlines the sales process and allows for end-to-end lifecycle management, resulting in a faster ramp-up time for new reps, a higher ROI, and an overall improvement in sales performance.

One of the key features of the platform is its comprehensive training modules. These modules cover all aspects of the sales call process, from basic selling techniques to advanced strategies for closing deals. The interactive and engaging modules make it easy for sales reps to learn and retain the information.

The platform offers AI-based pitch intelligence and a coaching feature. The coaching feature allows reps to boost their confidence with virtual pitch practice. This helps reps to improve their skills and techniques on the fly. In addition to training and coaching, the platform also helps to refine sales reps' skills. It tracks key performance metrics such as call duration, conversion rates, and win/loss ratios which managers can use to assess progress.

This AI-based platform provides a powerful toolset to help train and assist our sales reps, ensuring they have the necessary skills to succeed and providing feedback and guidance to help them improve their performance.

Regalix won a Bronze Stevie^® Award for Account Management Team of the Year in the 2023 Stevie Awards for Sales & Customer Service.

Interested in entering the 2024 Stevie Awards for Sales & Customer Service? 

Stevie-winner Searchspring is an agile site search, merchandising, and product recommendation solution taking e-commerce findability to the next level. Searchspring enables brands to get the right product, to the right person, at the right time.

Searchspring was founded in 2007 in Colorado Springs with a vision of creating a platform that would provide state-of-the-art site search and merchandising to online retailers. It was soon discovered there was a huge demand for this technology due to gaps in native e-commerce platforms.

At its core, Searchspring is dedicated to helping brands deliver the ultimate shopper experience through its search, merchandising, and personalization platform. To accomplish this mission, the company has prioritized the success of its clients and growing a team that fully supports and understands the needs of merchants.

Since its early days, Searchspring created separate customer support and customer success teams designed to address clients’ technical and strategic needs, respectively. The support team works on the technical complexities of the solution. The success team provides strategic guidance on how to deliver the right product to the right person at the right time. Together, the teams collaborate and ensure they provide best-in-class service, serving nearly 1,500 brands in the past 15 years.

Searchspring’s teams are motivated by serving clients’ strategic needs first, rather than the bottom line. When clients see that Searchspring’s customer support team has no underlying motives to sell more solutions, clients have greater trust in Searchspring’s solutions and the company overall. 

Searchspring’s team is also trained to approach each client uniquely. While many other teams take a cookie-cutter approach for all clients, Searchspring’s team treats each client’s site individually.
Another key factor to Searchspring’s success is bringing good people to the company. Searchspring knows that to provide the best customer experience to brands, the company needs to hire the right people for its clients. Searchspring does this by hiring slowly, which ensures it builds a team that has both retail and e-commerce experience, as well as diverse skill sets. Searchspring’s team members truly understand the shopping journey, which enables them to help clients create the best e-commerce experience for customers like.

Since Winning a Stevie
Recently, Searchspring has experienced exponential growth by investing in its product, process, and team. In 2022, Searchspring signed over 250 new customers and secured an investment from PSG, a leading growth equity firm.

To maximize the reach and success of its product portfolio, Searchspring expanded its leadership team to include a new chief customer officer, chief technology officer, and senior vice president of global sales.

In response to the company’s steadfast pursuit of customer satisfaction, Searchspring was recognized by several award programs since submitting for the Stevie^® Awards, including San Antonio Business Journal’s Business of the Year.

Searchspring won a Bronze Stevie Award for Front-Line Customer Service Team of the Year - Technology Industries in the 2023 Stevie Awards for Sales & Customer Service.

Interested in entering the 2024 Stevie Awards for Sales & Customer Service? 

Stevie-winner STEM Punks’ mission is to “Inspire Tomorrow's Innovators” to create 21st-century learners through a mindset of innovation, creativity, and entrepreneurship. All programs are curriculum aligned and linked with industry to give children career prospects and pathways. 

After researching trends in overseas education, a gap in the market for quality STEM education for children in Australia led Fiona Holmstrom and Michael Holmstrom to co-found STEM Punks (out of their suburban garage) almost five years ago.

At the time, STEM wasn’t part of the national curriculum. They saw the need for quality STEM education for children, providing them with learning outcomes aligned to the national curriculum, not just for entertainment value.

Their mission is to bring STEM education to less fortunate communities, focusing on remote areas and predominantly primary and high schools. Random parties historically service it, providing sporadic STEM education programs through external providers, with an inadequate focus on long-term upskilling teachers and remote support. 

STEM Punks provides leading, award-winning educational programs that support teachers and students to learn about STEM and be skilled for the jobs of the future. 

Scaling STEM Punks Nationally
What started as market testing with the local community had such a rapid uptake from parents and teachers that the business scaled up nationally. Since then, they have inspired and educated over 150,000 young people.

Last year, in a move to bring STEM education to a wider audience, STEM Punks TV was created. It's a world-first streaming platform dedicated to STEM education. The OTT (over-the-top) platform is available on iOS, Android, and Web, and provides leading STEM education to enable equity and equality in STEM education for children across the globe.

They have also formed a new global collaboration between the not-for-profit LING Project (Literacy In Northern Ghana) in Ghana to build literacy for females in the region and help schools and communities access tools, training, and support.

Tackling Stereotypes Around STEM
A particular passion of Fiona’s, getting girls into STEM in and after school in their careers builds a sustainable global female STEM network for integration of students, female leaders, and industry mentors, inspiring a new generation of innovators and entrepreneurs. 

Studies show that by educating girls in lower socioeconomic demographics, their families and communities also prosper, with a flow-on effect boosting the economies of smaller towns around the world. When these girls finish school and start their own companies, they help grow the nation’s economy as part of the business ecosystem. If we don’t invest in girls, the ripple effect is alarming, impacting well-being and the economy.

Fiona tackles the stereotypes around STEM, creating visibility around a wide range of careers. She interviews women in STEM all over the world, not just focusing on conventional jobs, but the whole gamut of STEM careers. She challenges the mainstream mindset around learning for the benefit of students. There's a core belief in society that learning must demand self-discipline from learners.

Since Winning Their Stevie^® Awards 
Over the past 18 months, STEM Punks have innovated by introducing a world-first streaming platform for STEM Education, STEM Punks TV.

They have also launched space education programs across the world, resulting in a Guinness World Record for the largest STEM lesson in Dubai in 2022. They are expanding their ed-tech program with the recent opening of an office in Austin, Texas.

STEM Punks won a Gold Stevie Award for Most Innovative Company of the Year - 10 or Less Employees and Co-founder Fiona Holmstrom won a Bronze Stevie Award in Women Helping Women - Social Change in the Stevie Awards for Women in Business.

Interested in entering the 2023 Stevie Awards for Women in Business?

Stevie-winner Output is a global leader in music creation, inspiring people at all levels—from newcomers to professionals. Output develops innovative software and gear for musicians, composers, producers, and sound designers across all genres.

Launched in 2013, Output’s software is used by hitmakers such as Kendrick Lamar, Bjork, Justin Timberlake, Rihanna, Imagine Dragons, Coldplay, and Drake, to name a few. It has also been used to create musical scores for films and shows such as Game of Thrones, Stranger Things, and more.

The Output Customer Support team lives and breathes music. They describe themselves as a group of professional musicians who decided that they wanted to work with and help other musicians be creative. The Support team originally started in 2016 with a two-person team taking requests via email. Slowly that evolved into using a traditional support ticketing system.

Shifts in the Global Music Industry
By 2020 during the height of the pandemic, their flagship product Arcade hit an all-time high for users. In addition to Arcade, they were having record sales in plugins/instruments and for their studio hardware line of products.

The team needed to scale even more, as they saw upwards of 50k support tickets per year. With long wait times and inefficient procedures, making a change was necessary. At the end of 2021, they brought on a seasoned Customer Service Manager. With fresh leadership onboard, they then made immediate changes to daily operations, such as internal meeting management and incorporating SMS and social media channels for users.

The past three years brought on massive changes to the world and the music industry. Musicians started creating their own home studios, and recording at home was more popular than ever. Companies like Output had to scale and quickly. When they assessed their Customer Support, they determined the need to find better strategies, looking to achieve faster response times and improve their knowledge base and overall customer satisfaction.

Working on three areas essentially had a domino effect. By improving the customer knowledge base, users are able to easily find the troubleshooting steps they need without even contacting support. But if they need to contact support, getting back to them as quickly as possible is extremely important—if they are waiting for a solution that means they are not working or creating. By improving their first-response time from 30+ hours to 5 hours, users were able to get back to work quicker and increased the overall satisfaction rate.

They also enhanced processes for their internal team by creating career paths for each support team member. Many reps are able to split their time between Support and other teams (e.g., QA, Edu, Product) eventually leading to a promotion and/or more responsibilities. In the past two years, five members of the support team have been promoted to Senior Support Rep or are leading a project outside of support.

Since earning their Stevie^® Award, Output has continued to improve on their user promise of "keeping you in session," by improving first-response times, adding new options to contact Support, and overall improvements in products. They are now exploring ways to add more self-service options for users and are incorporating AI into workflows.

Output won a Silver Stevie Award for Front-Line Customer Service Team of the Year - Technology Industries - Software in the 2023 Stevie Awards for Sales & Customer Service.

Interested in entering the 2024 Stevie Awards for Sales & Customer Service? 

As a principal dancer, Stevie-winner Sara Ordway captivated audiences across the nation, but her true passion has always been art education. In 2018, she founded the Ordway Conservatory of Classical Ballet, and it immediately became a place where students could feel seen, heard, and respected. 

Sara understands how to get children out of their shells and help them recognize the amazing things they are capable of as dancers and as people. Her students have been recognized in the dance world at international competitions and in the local community. 

One of Sara's greatest skills is creating entertaining performances. The greatest example is her show, “An Interactive Nutcracker”—a Nutcracker performance unlike any other where audience children get a chance to go on stage, see the production up close, and feel what it's like to be onstage. 

Sara's life was changed by dance, and she is passionate about giving that to as many children and adults as possible. She teaches her students and staff that the way you treat others matters—that is the magic, not perfect technique.

Ballet During a Global Pandemic
During the beginning of the pandemic, when Ordway Conservatory had to close its doors, students continued to thrive through Sara's leadership. Not a day of classes was missed in the transition to virtual learning.

Sara provided virtual events for the community like Teach Your Family to Dance Night, trivia night, craft night, a fashion show, virtual prom, and more. The overwhelming feedback at that time was that dance was what the kids looked forward to more than anything else—that it made them happy and gave them a sense of normalcy. 

When doors could reopen, Sara worked with a local park to move all performances to an amphitheater. Throughout the 2020-2021 school year, Sara worked to help students excel in and out of the studio. She started creating affirmations for her students and having them journal at the start and end of each class. This taught them about goal setting and gave them an opportunity to check in with themselves after being in quarantine for so long.

During the 2021-2022 school year, Sara's business skills began to shine. She created new programs including a mommy-and-me class and an adult ballet program. She also created new revenue streams through events such as a studio-wide movie night and parent's night off. 

At a time when performances around the world were being canceled, even by top-tier companies with endless resources, Ordway Conservatory continued to perform. Many dance studios did not survive the pandemic, but Ordway Conservatory thrived and continued to grow while entertaining the local community.

Expanding Programs for the Community
Sara is currently creating a preschool program with the hope that she can touch more lives with the many benefits of dance such as increased confidence, health and leadership skills, and improved brain function.

Most dance studios are satisfied with only providing a great dance education. Sara wants more for her students and her business. She continues to add classes that fill up, create events that increase revenue, and start new programs that will reach more of the community and change their lives for the better through dance. All while increasing revenue to be able to support the growth her business is seeing.

Sara continues to educate herself by attending classes and workshops on business, childhood development, and dance. She consistently goes above and beyond to enhance the customer journey in her business and to improve the workplace for her employees.

Artistic Director and Founder of Ordway Conservatory of Classical Ballet, Sara Ordway won a Bronze Stevie^®Award for Best Female Entrepreneur in the 2022 Stevie Awards for Women in Business. 

Interested in entering the 2023 Stevie Awards for Women in Business? 

An esteemed financial planner and the Founder and CEO of Australia-based Endurance Financial, Stevie-winner Amanda Thompson excels at delivering strategic and tailored advice to businesses and individuals, drawing upon almost two decades of experience. 

She isn’t afraid to share that she is also a survivor of sexual assault, a heart attack, and melanoma. She says that “while I do not let these experiences define me, they have taught me invaluable life lessons that I apply to the way I run my own business as well as my mentorship of other women in business. The challenges I have faced have gifted me grit, determination, and passion.” She attributes these gifted lessons as enabling her to qualify three times for the Ironman World Championships.

As a keynote speaker at events around the country, she is committed to sharing her experiences with others. She is particularly driven to help women overcome the gender biases that stand in the way of personal achievement. Through the lessons she learned thriving in typically male-dominated environments, her goal is to mentor others to find the power of resilience, determination, and dedication.

Leveraging Lessons Learned to Educate Others
In Australia, more than one in three business owners are women. Despite this, the odds are stacked against them. Institutional and market failures create more financial barriers for women in business and limit access to resources, skills, credit, and/ or capital to enable their businesses to grow. According to the Australian Women Chamber of Commerce and Industry, less than half of women business owners actually pay themselves a wage. 

She recognized that she couldn’t help the hundreds of thousands of her fellow Australian women business owners struggling to achieve financial freedom on a one-on-one basis; in part, because so many of them simply don’t have the means to access one-on-one consulting. Thus, she set out to innovate and develop a scalable, comprehensive, accessible, and low-cost product. 

Launched in February 2022, Financially Fit Women provides education, mentoring, and coaching for women business owners who:

• know they need to understand the numbers but don’t know where to start;
• are working really hard but don’t seem to be making a profit;
• wish they had a full-time finance department; and
• are feeling alone and potentially vulnerable – and would love to connect with a network of similar-minded women who are all looking to grow.

The 12-week online course includes six self-paced digital modules, six group sessions connecting participants with their peers, and three one-on-one mentoring sessions with Amanda. The course was born from extensive research and consultation, including market research, situation analysis, and consultation with clients and prospects to assess knowledge gaps.

The course content was developed from Amanda’s expertise in business and finance in addition to collaborating with experts in other fields such as legal, marketing, and mortgage brokering to provide a holistic financial education offering.

Financially Fit Women is the first-ever financial education course developed specifically for women business owners in the Australian market.

To make the course accessible to those who can benefit most, they offer a fully sponsored position in each course to a woman who is not able to pay. This position is filled based on nominations from the business community. An ongoing membership community is available to participants who would like continued coaching and support, and all membership revenue is donated to organizations working to support victims of domestic violence.

Above all, the Financially Fit Women program is grounded in a desire to create long-lasting social impact by contributing to: 

• Women business owners paying themselves a proper wage, leading to financial freedom and independence 
• Women-led businesses being afforded opportunities to secure capital and resources, enabling them to grow
• Women-led businesses experiencing more growth, creating more jobs and having a positive economic impact 
• Improved workforce participation with less women dropping out of self-employment 

It is Amanda’s aim that Financially Fit Women will turn women business owners and entrepreneurs into astute CFOs with focus, direction, and a tailored game plan. 

Recently, to complement the course, Amanda’s team developed and launched a Financial Bootcamp aimed at all females to be able to access a base of information with ease and affordability, slowly but very surely closing the gaps within all aspects of finance for women.

Amanda also launched a new book titled Financially Fit Women, which helps women understand what truly matters when looking at their numbers, giving them the confidence, knowledge, and power to be financially fit.

Endurance Financial Founder & CEO Amanda Thompson won a Gold Stevie Award for Women Helping Women - Business in the 2022 Stevie® Awards for Women in Business.

Interested in entering the 2023 Stevie Awards for Women in Business? 

Mahe Zehra Husain, aka “MZ,” is a trained mathematician, data scientist, serial entrepreneur, and artist. At the age of 31, MZ became Pakistan’s youngest woman tech CEO, leading an award-winning software house, FiveRivers Technologies (FRT) in Pakistan, dominating a heavily male-dominated space and rewriting history.

Since then she has led the company to catapult to the eight-figure mark with 400% growth in a short span of five years. From a small services firm, with a handful of employees, they now stand at 170 employees, encouraging diversity and inclusion and promoting women technologists. Very few tech firms have woman-friendly policies in Pakistan, but MZ made sure FRT didn’t follow suit. She has mentored over 124 women technologists and grew her female workforce by 50%.

FRT has become one of the top software firms in Pakistan, winning several national and international awards. They provide data science analytics, develop e-learning software, and have now ventured into virtual reality, artificial intelligence, and the Internet of Things.

Her work gained international recognition when two of their mobile applications for Blackberry ranked number one globally. Their principled work ethics and unmatched creative work caught the interest of big names like Samsung, United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, First Detect, Dell, and Wateen, who became clients.

FRT’s Recent Projects
MZ launched an innovative new software product SmartWindows (patent pending), which is a desktop software utility to make Windows 10 smarter by increasing the productivity of remote workers. It has over 6,000 downloads and 145,000+ impressions on Google.

MZ’s latest startup, which has piqued the interest of the national media and local entrepreneurs alike, is PakistanCreates (PKC; PakistanCreates.com) launched in January 2022. PKC is a venture that serves to drive positive, sustainable change through technological inclusion and women empowerment. Through this startup, MZ wants to support small women-owned businesses and give back to society. She commented:

“Pakistan has an amazing and inspiring talent, and I have always wanted to highlight our local products globally. There are thousands of young creative entrepreneurs and micro-business owners, especially women, who need a platform to represent their creativity. PakistanCreates is a small way for us to contribute to this massive local industry with huge potential. Anyone can open their free e-shop on PakistanCreates. We want ideas to become potential successful businesses. To encourage maximum participation, we have kept the registration quite simple with no fees, no subscriptions, no commission, and no hidden charges.” 

Since Winning a Stevie Award
MZ is working on developing a hands-on learning book and workbook combo to teach young women entrepreneurship skills, how to manage finances, budgeting, ways to promote and market their products, how to develop their own brand, etc. It includes all of the important aspects related to business to get a better standing in the supply chain based on MZ’s personal experience and successes.

This will be the first-of-its-kind guidebook in Pakistan. MZ also plans to translate this book into the national language Urdu and the regional language Punjabi to maximize the benefit and reach.

MZ is on the Board of Alif Laila Book Bus Society (ALBBS), a nonprofit working toward literacy for young girls. She mentors these girls and has given them access to maker-space technical training, which helps them consider a career path in electronics, computers, arts, crafts, and photography.

Recently (July 2022), FRT in collaboration with ALBBS conducted relief work in Sindh and Balochistan, Pakistan, where thousands of families lost their homes and livestock to catastrophic floods. They provided dry food items to over 400 families in 16 communities. 

FiveRivers Technologies CEO Mahe Zehra Husain won a Silver Stevie Award for Best Female Entrepreneur in Business Services among organizations with 11 to 2,500 Employees in the 2022 Stevie Awards for Women in Business.

Interested in entering the 2023 Stevie Awards for Women in Business? 

Long before corporations were focusing on creating caring cultures—or even thinking about it—Jeffrey Deckman was at the forefront, educating CEOs and other senior leaders to give up the old “power and control” mindset and replace it with one that focuses upon leaders being high-level communicators, collaborators, and facilitators of their organization’s human capital.

Jeffrey Deckman has 45 years of management experience, 40 of which have been as a serial entrepreneur, having built two multi-million dollar companies in the technology sector before becoming a leading consultant on the next evolution of leadership.

He offers powerful and transformative coaching, consulting, and training programs based upon his award-winning Amazon best-selling book Developing the Conscious Leadership Mindset for the 21st Century.

Deckman has won multiple Stevie® Awards for Best Business Book and Best E-Book in both The International Business Awards® and The American Business Awards®. He also has won Innovator of the Year in The International Business Awards.

Below is an inspiring blog that Jeffrey Deckman recently published and sent to his growing following of leaders and that is now re-published here with his permission. May you find it as inspiring as so many already have!

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3 Lessons Cancer Taught Me About Leadership and Life

Today is the 79^th anniversary of D-Day. It also marks the 7^th anniversary of my final radiation treatment in my “battle” with stage 4 cancer.

Since that day, and my second chance at life, my life has been catapulted to a whole new level. I walked my daughter down the aisle. I have become a grandfather twice! I have seen both my sons buy homes, get engaged and blossom in their careers. I wrote my book that went on to win two national and two international Stevie awards, created a leadership process that won IBA’s bronze Innovator of the Year award. I also met and married the woman of my dreams who is my best friend and my unicorn!

Life is good. I am so very thankful to still be here.

The Beginning
During Thanksgiving of 2015 my daughter saw a marble-sized lump in my neck that I had been watching for a few weeks, hoping it would go away. She is a massage therapist, reiki practitioner and an energy healer. When she saw it, she intuitively knew, as she told me later, that I had cancer, and it was stage 4.

“What’s that lump, dad?” was the sentence that started a year-long journey that forever changed my life.

After the holidays, I put the ball in motion and by February my biopsy and PET scan revealed the diagnosis of stage 4 squamous cell carcinoma. Nice call Allison!

From that moment, I knew I was going to have to both learn and demonstrate a new level of self-control and leadership that was very different than the type required of me as a father and business owner over the previous 40 years.

While much of what I had learned through my career gave me a solid foundation from which to work, this powerful experience taught me even more. Below are three of the biggest lessons I learned.

1. Develop a plan. Be creative. And choose your partners wisely.

Between February and my first day of treatments, April 18^th of 2016, which fittingly was the same day as the Boston Marathon, I developed my treatment strategy. I chose an innovative approach involving both traditional and holistic protocols. I then assembled a team of healing partners which included traditional oncology professionals, holistic practitioners, and Dr. Jody Noe - a world renowned integrative oncologist and healer who was also a Cherokee medicine woman.

2. Life doesn’t happen to me; life happens for me. Every experience is a gift.

After a long series of internal conversations and consciousness work, I came to understand that the primary force in the universe is creation and, what could be called, divine love. (If the primary force was destruction and hate the universe would never have been created in the first place and babies wouldn’t be born pure.)

Therefore, the source of anything which happens to me is a gift of love, not a punishment. With that realization, it became my job to find the gifts in the experience I was having. Seeking them would give me purpose. Finding purpose would give me courage. Embracing both would prevent me from falling into the depths of fear, which could have proven deadly.

3. Every experience is a class.

Joy was an incredibly wise “earth angel” whom I met on my journey. Joy had already lost her husband and daughter to cancer. These experiences led her to immerse herself in the study of spiritual and natural path treatments. Joy’s sage advice was that I had to learn to love the cancer. Her reasoning was that anything other than love in my system was simply another form of cancer. And I already had enough of that in my body.

It seemed like an impossible challenge. But I trusted her wisdom. Over the next few days, I struggled trying to find a way to “love the cancer.” Then I found it.

With my new understanding that everything is a gift of love the question to answer was: If the universe was using cancer as a gift of love how would it show it to me?

The answer that came was that it would appear as a teacher about the value of life and the importance of love, itself. From that moment, I committed to learn as much as possible from this powerful teacher.

As I embraced this truth, every challenge, pain, frustration, and fear became a class on love designed to help me to grow in gratitude, appreciation, and determination. The classes were often very difficult, but the payoffs far exceeded the tuition they extracted.

Conclusion
To this day, every time I am challenged, frustrated or fearful I ask myself: “What class am I in?” The moment I pose that question my stress begins to lessen and a sense of curiosity, purpose, and empowerment appears. This gifts me with a mindset which allows me to make my decisions with a clear mind and an open heart, which is the best mindset to have when the stakes are incredibly high.

In addition, I’ve learned beautiful lessons about compassion, empathy, and gratitude that I would never have without the gift of the perspective I received through my cancer experience.

Finally, I learned that if I could find the love in the cancer experience, I could find it in any experience. To this day that is the gift that keeps giving.

To learn more life changing lessons the cancer experience gifted me with I invite you to watch this interview.

www.jeffreydeckman.com

Stevie-winner Talenya (a Paycor company) offers the world's first AI-powered, fully-automated talent sourcing platform. Launched in 2016, Talenya was created in answer to the difficulties recruiters and talent sourcers experience in finding qualified, diverse talent in a competitive candidate market. The industry runs on time-consuming keyword search and one-by-one messaging to potential candidates.

Talenya is the first and only provider of AI technology that automates the sourcing process from search through engagement. It uses machine learning to gauge recruiters’ needs and preferences for each search, and then automatically reaches out to candidates over several channels to ask them to interview for the job opening. It also finds diverse candidates with 98% accuracy and helps level the playing field for underrepresented talent. Talenya is committed to social responsibility and creating a workforce that uplifts people of all identities equitably.

In the past year, Talenya has been recognized several times for its commitment to social responsibility. Vation Ventures acknowledged Talenya in its “Tech For Good” quarterly report for its machine learning functionality, which recognize diverse profiles with 98% accuracy and allow users to boost participation of varying underrepresented identities in their search results without sacrificing quality, and while avoiding the potential for unconscious bias. In this way, Talenya is helping to build a more equitable and inclusive workforce and helping recruiters meet diversity KPIs.

Talenya is committed to creating a more equal world with its Diversity AI, and it tries to live by these same values in its own employee base. Talenya widens the pool of potential diverse candidates by searching and engaging on a multitude of channels automatically, tapping a database of 1.5 billion profiles across the internet.

While many tools can increase a recruiter’s access beyond LinkedIn, none have as large a pool as Talenya. The Sourcing AI scours the internet not only on LinkedIn but on sites like Github, StackOverflow, and a range of others which may not be as obvious. Given the difficulty of finding diverse candidates in general, the wider pool allows for many more identities to be included in every search.

In addition, Talenya software predicts diverse talent at 98% accuracy. It is the first software to find diverse profiles by inferring skills often left off profiles by people of underrepresented groups. Other recruitment tools may allow searchers to filter by identity, but Talenya is the only solution that uses AI to understand and predict a candidate’s identity based on their skills and experience—and to understand that these candidates usually underplay their qualifications which makes them harder to find in Boolean search.

Since Winning Their Stevie Award
In the past 12 months, Talenya has grown to become a leader in a newly created category—automatic talent sourcing. Major brands around the world, such as Xerox, Logitech, and Marvell, have adopted Talenya’s technology to double their interview pipeline. 

Talenya is taking on the herculean mission of developing AI algorithms that can think and operate like a human recruiter in sourcing and engaging with talent. They will continue with efforts to perfect their platform and deliver more qualified and diverse applicants to jobs processed. 

Recently, they have been focused on enhancing the algorithms as well as the user interface that allow recruiters to “train” the software on their preferences and priorities, so that the software can find and fetch high-quality talent to interview. Talenya’s talent database is now the biggest available today and continues to climb beyond 1.5 billion profiles.

Talenya won a Bronze Stevie Award for Most Innovative Tech Company of the Year Among Organizations With Up to 100 Employees in The 2022 International Business Awards®.

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