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? 

Die Anmeldung für die 6. jährliche Women|Future Conference, die vom 1. bis 2. August online stattfindet, ist ab sofort möglich. Die Teilnahme an der Konferenz 2023 ist kostenlos, Teilnehmerinnen müssen sich aber im Voraus anmelden, um Zugang zur virtuellen Plattform und den Sitzungen zu erhalten.

Die Women|Future-Konferenz ist eine Veranstaltung zur beruflichen Weiterentwicklung, zum Lernen und zum Knüpfen von Kontakten, die Unternehmerinnen, Führungskräfte und Frauen, die an einer Unternehmensgründung interessiert sind, zusammenbringt.

Die Women Future Conference wurde im Jahr 2018, in Verbindung mit dem äußerst erfolgreichen Stevie® Awards for Women in Business-Programm ins Leben gerufen, um hochrangigen weiblichen Fachkräften, Vordenkerinnen und Unternehmerinnen einen Ort zu bieten, an dem sie zusammenkommen, Ideen austauschen und sich vernetzen können.

Seitdem wurde dieses Ziel übertroffen und die Konferenz auf viele ehrgeizige, zukunftsorientierte Fachleute aus verschiedenen Branchen und Karrierestufen ausgeweitet. Die Teilnehmerinnen sind eine Mischung aus CEOs, Gründerinnen, Unternehmerinnen, Führungskräften, Direktorinnen und Managerinnen sowie Frauen, die sich zwischen zwei Jobs oder in einer Übergangsphase befinden und ein Mentoring suchen.

Renommierte Stevie Award-Gewinner geben Tipps für die Einreichung von Bewerbungen
Das Programm der Konferenz 2023 umfasst zwei Tage mit Podiumsdiskussionen, Workshops und Breakout-Sitzungen, die von über 30 hochkarätigen Rednerinnen, darunter CEOs, Gründerinnen, Unternehmerinnen, Vordenkerinnen und Beraterinnen für kleine Unternehmen, gehalten werden.

Neu im Programms ist im Jahr 2023 ein Workshop zum Thema "How to Write a Winning Stevie Awards Nomination" unter der Leitung von Denise O'Leary, MBE. Denise O'Leary ist 21-fache Stevie-Awards-Gewinnerin und wird ihre Erfahrungen bei der Erstellung einer erfolgreichen Stevie-Awards-Nominierung weitergeben. Denise wird Einblicke aus ihrer jahrelangen Erfahrung mit Stevies-Bewerbungen und Hinweise darauf geben, was die Jury wirklich sehen will.

Viele Rednerinnen des Jahres 2023 sind ehemalige und aktuelle Stevie Award-Gewinnerinnen, die in einem (oder mehreren) unserer acht Stevie Award-Programme ausgezeichnet wurden. Zu den diesjährigen Rednerinnen, die ehemalige Gewinnerinnen der Stevie Awards for Women in Business sind, gehören:

• Viola Palescandolo, Founder & CEO, Black Platinum Gold B.V.
• Marnie LeFevre, Founder & CEO, Fempire
• Etosha Thurman, Chief Marketing and Solutions Officer, SAP
• Mez Gallifuoco, Founder & CEO, The Mad Ones
• Kathleen Mitford, Corporate Vice President of Global Industry - Marketing, Microsoft
• Jennifer Harris-Kroll, Director of Growth, Anthill
• Bridgett McGowen, Speaker/Author/Publisher, Press 49, a part of BMH Companies
• Valeria Jennings, CEO, Jennings Social Media & MarTech 
• Jennifer Cloer, Founder & CEO, Story Changes Culture
• Lauren Clemett, Managing Director, The Audacious Agency
• Annette Densham, Creative Director, Audacious Agency

Zu den Rednerinnen, die einen Stevie Award in einem unserer anderen sieben Awardsprogramme gewonnen haben, gehören:

• Safiya Johnson, Leadership Strategist & CEO, Safiya Group
• Ciara Ungar, Founder & CEO, The Why Group, Inc.
• Alycia Huston, Founder & CEO, The Culture Cru
• Brenda Jimenez, CEO, MENTOR New York
• Christina Helena, Public Speaking & Communications Coach, Mental Health Speaker, My Scar is Sexy

Frauen aus den Vereinigten Staaten, Kanada, Australien, Asien und Europa nehmen Jahr für Jahr an der Konferenz teil, um sich inspirieren zu lassen, ihre Widerstandsfähigkeit zu stärken und sich über Veränderungen auszutauschen, die sich auf ihre Branche, ihre Karriere und ihr Leben auswirken.

Im Folgenden finden Sie einige der Veranstaltungen der Women|Future Conference 2023:

• From Wages to Wealth: Making the Shift from Employee to Entrepreneur
• Taking the Leap: How to Transfer Your Skills from One Role to the Next
• Funding Female Futures: Navigating the Investment Landscape and Bootstrapping Success
• Unveiling the Unspoken: Candid Conversation on Workplace Inclusivity Issues for Women in Business
• From Idea to Empire - Lessons in Branding
• The Must-Have Money-Marketing Marketing Tool…That Few Businesses Have but that Every Single One of Them Needs

Um mehr über die  Women|Future Conference und deren Sprecherinnen zu erfahren, sowie das vollstänndige Programm einzusehen, besuchen Sie uns unter: www.womenfutureconference.com. 

Kostenlose Registrierung
Um an der Konferenz teilzunehmen und Zugang zur virtuellen Veranstaltungsplattform zu erhalten, müssen sich alle Teilnehmer im Voraus anmelden. 

Für Partnerschafts-, Presse- und Medienanfragen wenden Sie sich bitte - in englischer Sprache - an Nina@stevieawards.com.

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? 

The 10th annual Asia-Pacific Stevie® Awards ceremony took place virtually on 27 June. The ceremony was live-streamed to over 250 Stevie Award winners and their guests. 

The ceremony replay is available on the Stevie Awards YouTube channel.  

High-achieving organizations and professionals from organizations in 19 nations and territories in the APAC region were named Stevie Award winners this year, and 34 winning organizations participated in the virtual festivities.

How the Awards Were Presented

Each organization was announced once during the virtual presentations. A short video about the winning organization produced by the Stevie Awards was played, followed by a pre-recorded acceptance speech video supplied by the winning organization. The virtual ceremony was live-streamed via YouTube Live at 2:00 pm KST.

Within the virtual event platform, attendees had the ability to interact in the live chat, learn about and engage with sponsors, take photos, and submit interviews on the virtual red carpet.

"Since 2020, the Stevie Awards have staged virtual Asia-Pacific Stevie Awards ceremonies, though we hope to return to the region with a live awards ceremony in 2024. In the past, we've staged the event in Hong Kong, Seoul, Shanghai, Singapore, Sydney, and Tokyo," commented Stevie Awards Founder, Michael Gallagher, during the live chat. 

The following organizations participated in the virtual ceremony. Only winning organizations that registered for the virtual ceremony were recognized.

Individual Virtual Acceptance speeches and red-carpet interviews are available on the Stevie Awards Youtube channel. View and download photos from the virtual red carpet album below:

 

Winner Highlights

Stevie-winner Scaffad of Lidcombe, New South Wales, Australia, was the first organization that was honored during the ceremony. Scaffad won a Gold Stevie Award for Innovation in Human Resources Management, Planning & Practice, among all other industries. Scaffad is Australia's leading early works construction and development signage pacemakers. Scaffad partners with top Australian and global companies to bring their branded spaces and places to life. Accepting the award virtually were Scaffad Directors Lachlan Bell and David Montgomery, along with Finance Manager Rachel Bohr.

"It's an award that means a lot to us as a company, as it's something we believe strongly in...that we're making positive steps towards bringing the best out of our staff and how we all interact with each other and how we motivate each other," Lachlan said during his virtual acceptance speech.

A multiple Stevie Award winner and People's Choice winner that was honored during the virtual awards was M360, Inc., of Mandaluyong City, Metro Manila, Philippines. M360 won two Bronze Stevie Awards for Most Innovative Startup of the Year in both Business Product Industries and Services categories, and a third Bronze Stevie Award for Innovation in Business-to-Business Services. M360 also won two People's Choice Stevie Awards for Favorite Companies in both the Startup Business Products and Tech Startup Services categories. M360's powerful mobile technology is recognized for being cost-effective, quick, and proven to deliver results so that businesses of all sizes can use SMS marketing quickly, easily, and at low cost. 

Other multiple Stevie Award winners that were recognized during the awards included Cisco Systems India Pvt Ltd, of Bangalore, India; HP of Australia and New Zealand; Metro Pacific Water of Makati City, Metro Manila, Philipines; and PT Pupuk Indonesia of Jakarta Barat, Indonesia.

One of the more creative virtual acceptance speeches came from Fuji Television Network Inc. of Minato, Tokyo, Japan, the nation's largest television network. Fuji Television Network won a Silver Stevie Award for Innovation in Entertainment Events for the Tokyo Idol Festival 2022. With his Stevie Award in hand and surrounded by balloons, the Executive Producer of the Tokyo Idol Festival acknowledged his team and the award. View his acceptance speech and others on the Stevie Awards YouTube channel, linked below.

 

About the 2023 Asia-Pacific Stevie Awards

The 2023 Asia-Pacific Stevie Awards have recognized organizations in 19 nations and territories, including Australia, Cambodia, Canada, China, Hong Kong, India, Indonesia, Japan, Korea, Malaysia, New Zealand, Philippines, Romania, Singapore, Taiwan, Thailand, United Kingdom, the United States, and Vietnam.

More than 800 nominations about innovative achievements in the 29-nation APAC region were considered by the judges this year in categories such as Award for Excellence in Innovation in Products & Services, Award for Innovative Management, and Award for Innovation in Corporate Websites, among many others.

The Official Creative Media Partner of this year's awards is Adobo Magazine, and the Official News Release Distribution Partner is PR Newswire, a Cision company. 

Eighth Annual Awards Honoring World's Best Workplaces and HR Professionals Continues to Accept Nominations

The Stevie® Awards, organizer of the Stevie Awards for Great Employers, announced today that the final entry deadline for the eighth annual competition has been extended to Wednesday, July 19. The Stevie Awards for Great Employers honors the world’s best companies to work for and the human resources (HR) teams and professionals, HR achievements, new products and services, and suppliers that help to create and drive great workplaces.

“After many requests for individual deadline extensions, we have decided to extend the deadline for everyone,” said Stevie Awards President Maggie Miller. The original final deadline was June 27. Miller emphasized that no additional late fees will be charged for entries submitted through July 19, and late entries will not be penalized in the judging process.

All organizations now have three more weeks to prepare and submit their entries. All individuals and organizations worldwide - public and private, for-profit and non-profit, large and small - may submit nominations to the Stevie Awards for Great Employers.

The 2023 awards will honor achievements since the beginning of 2021. Entry details are available at http://www.StevieAwards.com/HR.

The Stevie Awards for Great Employers recognize achievement in many facets of the workplace. Categories include:

• Employer of the Year Awards
• HR Achievement Awards
• HR Individual Awards
• HR Team Categories
• Solution Provider Awards
• Solutions, Implementations, and Training Programs or Media Awards
• COVID-19 Response Awards
• Thought Leadership Categories

Fourteen of the 16 HR Individual categories do not require payment of entry fees. Winners in the 31 industry-specific Employer of the Year categories will be determined by a unique blend of public votes and professional ratings. Public voting is ongoing from June 29 – July 27.

More than 100 professionals worldwide, working on several juries, will determine the Stevie Award winners. Finalists in the 2023 Gold, Silver, and Bronze Stevie Awards will be announced on August 7, and celebrated during a gala banquet, conditions permitting, on September 18 in New York, NY.

A sponsor of the 8th annual Stevie Awards for Great Employers is HiBob.

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®.

Interested in entering The 2023 International Business Awards? 

Established in 2010 by a Euro-Filipino team to help foreign companies tap into the rich Philippine talent pool, Eastvantage has since grown and now provides business solutions to global companies. It enables offshore operations from its locations in the Philippines, India, Bulgaria, and Vietnam.
The management team brings a wealth of global insights and local knowledge in the areas of digital transformation, customer experience, and business support. Combining expertise with a hands-on approach to managing client relationships, Eastvantage aims to make outsourcing simple and seamless.

Eastvantage has grown steadily through the years until 2018 when the company realized it needed to strengthen its operations for it to be able to cope with the heightened requirements of its clients and the market as a whole. Thus, later that year, the company brought in Kamal Asarpota, a seasoned executive with a successful track record of delivering financial and business results with global organizations in the ITES/BPM Industry.

Supported by top management, Kamal began promoting an engaged and empowered team culture. In 2019, the company strengthened its core by improving operational efficiencies and getting the right people. The strategy established Eastvantage as a reliable partner, validated by seamless business continuity during the pandemic lockdowns.

When the pandemic struck the Philippines in early 2020, Eastvantage immediately put measures in place to minimize the impact on the company’s gains from the previous years and garnered a Silver Stevie Award for its COVID-19 response efforts.

The company continued strengthening its operations and sales team throughout 2020 and 2021. It reinforced its #everybodysells 360°+ business development cycle strategy, which covers pre-sales to operations. The strategy involves not only the sales and marketing teams but the whole operations support team, including HR, recruitment, IT, finance, and administration.

This, together with the entry of a seasoned investor in 2021 who brought in a deep understanding of scaling service operations, incentivized internal stakeholders to be aligned with company growth goals. Further, the company expanded its IT Managed Services.

These measures enabled the company to grow its existing business simultaneously with new business acquisitions, at an increased win rate of 19% compared to 5% in 2020. By the end of 2021, the company:

• had an accounts portfolio of 50 clients, a 70%+ increase from 29 clients in 2020;
• grew its headcount by 70%+, from 473 full-time employees to 815;
• exceeded its EBITDA target;
• closed the year at a 12% revenue growth; and
• earned the highest annual income in its 11 years of operations.

Eastvantage has not only survived the threats to general business stability brought about by the pandemic, but it has evidently also outgrown the startup phase. Now in the expansion stage of the business, the company has opened up additional delivery centers in the Philippines, India, Bulgaria, and Vietnam. Further, it now has a US-based Business Strategy Advisor for its diversification in North America.

The growth is expected to continue, as Eastvantage is bent on seizing opportunities by continually evolving in line with market demand. The higher focus on complex and digital services is one of the initiatives in this direction and is expected to contribute high value to the business. The direction is to further expand globally and be the Managed IT Services partner of choice.

Eastvantage won a Gold Stevie Award for Achievement in Sales or Revenue Generation in The 2022 International Business Awards®.

Interested in entering The 2023 International Business Awards?