Sowing the Seeds of Sisterhood

Sowing the Seeds of Sisterhood is the beautiful collaboration between the talented Artist and Graphic Designer, Gina Benson and the gifted Healer and Transformation Life Coach, Misty Blakesley. 

As Gina and Misty traveled the path of Solopreneurship, they realized just how lonely and difficult starting a business can be. And as they worked together towards their individual goals, something amazing emerged as they realized that they were better together than alone.  

And that is how Sowing the Seeds of Sisterhood was born. Together Gina and Misty have launched a Podcast with the mission to encourage and support women as they strive to serve with greatness as entrepreneurs or employees, daughters, sisters, wives, mothers, friends, mentors and more. Gina and Misty also wanted to create an opportunity for everyone to access coaching regardless of where you may be in your journey, budget, or time zone. So Misty and Gina have also launched multiple ways for their audience to participate via the podcast and memberships which include digital library of courses, live groups, and 1:1 sessions.

Co-Founder

Lemonade with Love

I started coaching because I know we are all powerful enough to create the life we want. I am living my dream and now I help people like you find and live your dream as well. Sometimes we just need someone else to help break down the barriers.

Founder

relode

In my most recent position, I was tasked with developing and building processes and systems to support Relode’s first Customer Success Organization, hiring and developing a client success and delivery team. In more detail, I sourced and ramped up a team of 10 (4 Client Success Managers, 4 Job Managers, and 2 Candidate Success Associates) during a high growth year of 84% YOY revenue growth and 4X customer logo increase.  I also implemented and documented scalable processes for all roles including Customer Success Managers and Job Managers, rejuvenating client kick off and on-boarding. In addition, I performed monthly ROI calls, and QBR’s with client senior leaders and decision makers, tracking performance and coaching for improvement and career growth. I authored and executed upselling and cross-selling processes, increasing sales. Moreover, I created accountability for Customer Success Managers tied to net & gross logo and revenue retention. I also designed a job intake PowerPoint and process, optimizing the Job Manager process, slashing candidate wait time in funnel. In a few measurables, I skyrocketed the crowd client NPS score from -11 to +64 and improved crowd client engagement $2M to $3.1M, with a predicted $1.2M in Q3 of 2022.  I also created processes and procedures, leveraging Salesforce and Power BI, exceeding all objectives in less than 8 months. Finally, I created an inspirational culture with zero team turnover as well as phenomenal client experience leading to client retention.

VP of Client Success

Apex HCM

For these three years, I was charges with New Sales, Account Management, Implementation and Onboarding, and the Marketing departments. I managed and motivated a team with a $1.2M team quota. In more detail, I :
•	Achieved a $1M pipeline during the Pandemic while recovering from an extreme 2019 ransomware attack. 
•	Focused on retaining the $10.5M client base and converted 1300 EINS and 87,000 EEs to the Apex Platform.
•	Achieved $850K in new sales and retained a $11.5M client base while growing ancillary and partnership revenue $600K.
•	Rejuvenated processes, implemented a sales funnel, and redefined sales opportunities escalating closing ratios from 18% to 35%.
•	Developed the Client Success Program, expanding recognized revenue from 72% to 89%.
I also completed an in-depth analysis of the conversion back log and recurring revenue, partnering with the CFO. In addition, I analyzed TAM and determined the market, understanding the competitive landscape and refining the value proposition.  I also identified new product requirements and prioritization for quarterly planning for the development team (Agile). I carefully created a new Sales Playbook, reducing the sales process time by half. Finally, I improved cross functional communication and escalated the new client on-boarding experience.

VP of Sales

Heartland Payment Systems

Here, I lead the charge of increasing sales in payroll and HR services and referrals to merchant services, e-commerce, and lending. I recruited, hired, trained, and developed sales professionals and sales leaders, conducted weekly team calls, 1:1s, and team building events. I supported the team with on-going mentoring and coaching, leading to promotions. Behind the scenes, I inspected the pipeline, managed forecasting and division budgets and produced production and forecasting reports for the Regional VP. Finally, I created 55% of the Diamond level performers in the top 25% of revenue producers in the enterprise.

Payroll Division Manager

As the Global Ancillary Sales Manager, I managed a team charged with increasing sales in consumer health spending account services, absence management services, dependent verification audits, total reward statements and custom communications in a dual hunter and partnership role. I profiled, prospected, and executed marketing and sales campaigns gaining top prospects and accounts in GA, FL, SC and NC, creating 25 opportunities in 9 months. I also repaired cross functional upper manager relationships in 9 months’ time, leading to better collaboration and a positive impact on results.

Ancillary Sales Manager

Becker Professional Education

SENIOR ACCOUNT MANAGER, 2014 – 2015

For this fast-paced year, I mentored and coached 55, with clients including Price Waterhouse, KPMG, Deloitte, Ernst & Young (EY), and Grant Thornton, underpinning company growth of 12-14% YOY.

ACCOUNT MANAGER, ATLANTA METRO, 2010 – 2014

I managed 70+ accounts producing $3.5M+ in revenue.  I was honored as a member of the Growth Initiative Counsel propelling new growth by developing targeted tools for online classes.

Sr. Account Manager

Helping people transform their life through healing | Intuitive | CPO | CHO (Chief Happiness Officer) | Boy Mom | My Husband's Biggest Fan

I work with individuals by leveraging my passion to help people transform their lives by guiding them to self-healing of their trauma and wounds allowing happiness, abundance, and love to flow. I am passionate about the potential living within each of us and activating that potential so every person can the life they dream of!  

I also partner with Founders and CEOs to support his or her vision by optimizing individuals and teams through coaching, providing valuable insights and best practices to create a culture of highly engaged and energized employees . I lead through example and inspire through my passion. 

Lemonade with Love: As I received my calling to transform people and businesses through healing, I founded Lemonade with Love. I merged my spiritual gifts with the science of meta cognitive programming to help people transform their lives through consulting, group/community sessions, and one-on-one sessions. I would love to help you unleash your potential and find happiness today. Message me to get started. 

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CLIENT TESTIMONIALS

LEADERSHIP WITH LOVE
"Misty was a spark of courage that I needed personally. Having a leader that pours into you and points out your strengths while acknowledging the weakness is what I needed. Most leadership I have experienced were not so uplifting, they only pointed out the bad and basically stated "Do better". You made me feel like I could definitely do well and go far in this position and any position I set my mind to. You have provided me vision. I greatly appreciate that."  - Joseph Smith

FINDING YOUR WAY THROUGH TRAUMA 
"Misty is without a doubt one of the most gifted souls that I have had the luck to encounter and know in my life. Her counseling and guidance have been vital to my personal healing from childhood trauma and relationship trauma. She is patient, nonjudgmental and genuine. She has a unique ability to give the right messages at the right time, and coupled with that she suggests practices for everyday life that further you along your path. I can honestly say, that I would not be the same person, mother, parter, friend and employee without the divine guidance I have received through Misty." -Dara Vaughan Peck

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Find out more at www.lemonadewithlove.com. 

For daily personal development tips and motivational guidance, FOLLOW ME on LinkedIn.

Misty Blakesley

Graham Lutz

Graham Lutz, LLC

The World is BONKERS!

Between AI, layoffs, misinformation, polarization, chaos, and constant change, it's harder than ever to create the environments where you, your leaders, and your teams can perform their best. 

I help you build the mental architecture to maximize creativity, effectiveness, and performance in the face of constant change at every level of the org chart.

Professional Keynote Speaker | Author | Educator | Coach

Southeast Coalition of Psychadelic Practitioners

Our Goals:

- Educate and inform the public about the efficacy of psychedelic-assisted therapy through workshops, speaker engagements, public presentations and marketing.

- Fundraising to provide a pool of funds to be divided as 80% toward financial cost of psychedelic-assisted therapy to individuals, and 20% to be provided to therapists seeking assistance with training that facilitates psychedelic-assisted therapy. Types of training include but are not limited to; Internal Family Systems, EMDR, Somatic-Informed Therapy models, Trauma-Informed Therapy models.

 - Provide a Southeast hub to assist psychedelic assisted therapists and practitioners with a network for consultation, staffing, and partnership.

 - Legislative watch of states in the Southeast region and active participation in the formation of supportive legislation.

Board Member

VMware Tanzu

- Streamlined and automated release process for Tanzu Application Service from 5 FTE to <1FTE
- Led Kubernetes learning week for the Tanzu organiation
- Reduced total CVEs in TAS by 88%
    - Developed standardized CVE tooling to shift-left on scanning for CVE identification and mitigation

Engineering Leader

Plethora

Senior technical employee, part of the executive leadership team reporting directly to the CEO.

Managed Vendor relationships and Reduced infrastructure spending by 29%
Hire, manage and mentor direct reports
Subject matter expert for internal and external systems
Design and implement software architecture for critical new projects
Maintain released systems ensuring internal and external customers are supported
Lead daily standup
Product leadership/planning
Work closely with leadership and the cross functional team to develop/manage project timelines and deliverables.
Guide projects towards most efficient path, considering implementation
Clarify project interdependencies to aid in sequencing
Use knowledge of context of system to help clarify project designs
 Led the creation and building of UX/UI Design System, utilizing Figma, Storybook, and Chromatic.
 Consistently drove our engineering culture forward with highly tested, performant typescript

Director Of Engineering

Monstro

Senior technical employee, part of the executive leadership team reporting directly to the CEO.
 
- Laid the framework for a complex TypeScript React/Redux application in the fintech space, focussed on ultra-high-networth wealth management. 
 - Lead the creation and building of UX/UI Design System, utilizing Figma, Storybook, and Chromatic.
 - Consistently drove our engineering culture forward with highly tested, performant typescript
 - Achieved 100% code test coverage with Jest and React Testing Library
 - Engaged in weekly training/mentoring sessions with employees to increase skills and encourage/facilitate developer growth.
 - Built the team’s Agile/Scrum process from scratch, utilizing Jira and showing consistent velocity improvements sprint over sprint.
 - Streamlined weekly meetings to protect team members development time and avoid unnecessary context switching.
 - Managed product definition and design process, allowing for engineering feedback early in the process to achieve increased clarity and development velocity. 
 - Lead SOC1 and SOC2 planning and implementation as it related to engineering requirements. 
 - Implemented technology management software and streamlined the onboarding/offboarding process.

BCD Travel

Oversaw front-end and back-end engineering operations supporting start-up company’s business travel management application managing $27B in travel bookings, leading 9 teams of engineers in building and improving data-heavy software product to align with individual requirements of global business clients and regional regulations while meeting ambitious revenue goals.
Led highly complex upgrade project to replace legacy React 16 codebase to React 17, completing 1 month early. Provided strategic direction to engineering teams to ensure efficient update of 10s of thousands of lines of code, and ensured consistent team commitment to project through impactful influence and leadership.
Increased code test coverage by 19% by adding processes to automatically decline code that reduced test coverage.

Lead Software Engineer

Georgia Tech Professional Education

I'm teaching a 6 month, full-stack web development coding bootcamp course featuring 250+ hours of in-class full stack web development exposure and a curriculum using HTML5, CSS3, JavaScript, jQuery, Git, GitHub, Heroku, Node, Express, React, MongoDB, MySQL, C#/.NET, Python, Ruby.

For more information, see https://codingbootcamp.pe.gatech.edu/

Lead Instructor - Full Stack Web Development Coding Bootcamp

- Supported the Instructors of the inaugural GT Cohort of 55 Students
 - Provided instruction, tutoring, and code review  in 1-on-1 and group settings
 - Acted as “team lead” for group projects, giving technical and architectural direction
 - HTML5, CSS3, JavaScript, jQuery, Bootstrap, Express.js, React.js, Node.js, Database Theory, Bookshelf.js, MongoDB, MySQL, Command Line, Git, computer science basic, and more

Coding Boot Camp - Primary Teaching Assistant

Currently working on an internal framework, MDF, that creates views in React from JSON configuration files or a wysiwyg admin editor.  Technologies include React, Redux, Webpack, Node, and others. 

Created custom, flexible, extensible,  and semantic React components for applications in use by 50,000+ client companies. 

Created command line interface tool with Node to streamline new app creation with our internal framework, MDF 6.

Lead Application Developer

Brain Bytes Creative LLC

- Directed full life cycle  projects ($200K+) from SOW through delivery and support.
 - AWS infrastructure transition using EC2, S3, Lambda, IAM, RDS, and other AWS products
 - Built and deployed SMS Contest for a national retail chain using Node, Javascript, SQL, and Twillio
       - Used in shadowbox on website with over 3MM views per month
 - Implemented a product feed API using Node, Javascript, and SQL - deployed on Amazon EC2
       - built front end, including Wordpress Shortcode for use by client’s internal marketing
 - Lead the Marketo integration for all customer sites, using PHP, Javascript & RESTful API

Director, Web Development

I provide full-stack development using HTML, CSS, Javascript,  PHP, C#, SQL, Google's BigQuery, and more to create dynamic, responsive websites and web applications.  

 - Built and maintained ecommerce and lead generation websites, using Javascript, PHP, SQL, HTML & CSS
 - ETL project with Google Analytics Data using SQL, Google BigQuery,  and PeriscopeData
    - denormalized day-separate data to get sums and averages across across 10 unique fields 
    - made graphs filterable by device, domain, medium, geolocation, date range, etc.
 - Built Continuing Education Single Page Application for The CDC, using Angular 1.4 & MediaElement.js

Web Developer

Formula Athletics

Formula Athletics is not a gym.  We are a training facility. We don’t compete on cost, we compete on quality; quality staff, quality training, quality customer service, quality PERIOD. If you are looking for bargain priced fitness, please check the others out before visiting our community so that you can see and feel the difference.

Our packages come with the support and training of our coaches along with our wonderful community that will motivate and help you to reach your goals. Our training packages provide all this at a fraction of the cost of a private session at a typical commercial gym. Training packages are determined depending on your dedication and commitment level.

We lift heavy things.  We work hard.  We cheer each other on.  We Get Results.

Owner/Head Trainer

Actionable science-based strategies to build exactly the life you want | Professionally Curious | Author | Keynote Speaker | 166K on TikTok

I am a builder. 

I build beautiful software.
I build cultures that propel organizations forward. 
I build software teams who achieve more together than they ever could separately. 

If your engineering department were a rock band, I'd be the producer who turns talented individuals into chart-topping legends. I've got the technical chops to lay down killer tracks, the vision to create anthems that resonate, and the leadership skills to keep the band together when egos and deadlines clash. Ready to make some noise?

taplio

The Battle

Misty Blakesley

Graham Lutz

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