Lay of The Land

Angie Dianetti — President and driving force behind Radcom, a company specializing in performance improvement consulting, which she founded back in 1996.Under Angie's guidance, Radcom has earned the distinction of a Weatherhead 100 Outstanding Growth Company seven times over since then as one of Northeast Ohio’s fastest-growing companies that Angie has successfully navigated through various challenges over the years spanning the dot-com bubble burst, offshoring, reshoring, the Great Recession, the pandemic and more.Angie is fervent about assisting business leaders in fostering a performance culture, where engaged employees adhere to high standards and hold themselves accountable — and with a unique combination of training expertise and technical documentation know-how, for more than 20 years, Angie and her team at Radcom have helped clients do just this and solve their most pressing problems by empowering their teams to carry out their jobs more efficiently, drive positive results, and infuse continuous innovation into their daily lives.Today, we're also joined by guest-co-host, Dan Isenberg, a familiar name from Lay of The Land’s 112th conversation with Daniel Hampu, President of the Burton D. Morgan Foundation. Dan, a professor at Columbia Business School and a former Harvard Business School professor, is the founder of Scalerator NEO. Dan and Angie's paths intersected in 2021 when Angie enrolled in the Scalerator program, designed to support organizations with sales between $5 million and $15 million in navigating growth and scaling challenges.Angie's passion for her business is inspiring, and it was a pleasure to delve deeper into Radcom's evolution, driven by Angie's adaptability and resilience.-----Lay of The Land is brought to you by Ninety. As a Lay of The Land listener, you can leverage a free trial with Ninety, the platform that helps teams build great companies and the only officially licensed software for EOS® — used by over 7,000 companies and 100,000 users!This episode is brought to you by Impact Architects. As we share the stories of entrepreneurs building incredible organizations throughout NEO, Impact Architects helps those leaders — many of whom we’ve heard from as guests on Lay of The Land — realize their visions and build great organizations. I believe in Impact Architects and the people behind it so much, that I have actually joined them personally in their mission to help leaders gain focus, align together, and thrive by doing what they love! As a listener, you can sit down for a free consultation with Impact Architects by visiting ia.layoftheland.fm!-----Connect with Angie Dianetti on LinkedIn — https://www.linkedin.com/in/adianetti/Follow Angie on Twitter @adianetti — https://twitter.com/adianettiLearn more about Radcom — https://radcomservices.com/-----For more episodes of Lay of The Land, visit https://www.layoftheland.fm/Past guests include Cleveland Mayor Justin Bibb, Steve Potash (OverDrive), Ed Largest (Westfield), Ray Leach (JumpStart), Lila Mills (Signal Cleveland), Pat Conway (Great Lakes Brewing), Lindsay Watson (Augment Therapy), and many more.Stay up to date on all our podcasts by signing up for Lay of The Land's weekly newsletter — sign up here.Connect with Jeffrey Stern on LinkedIn — https://www.linkedin.com/in/jeffreypstern/Follow Jeffrey Stern on Twitter @sternJefe — https://twitter.com/sternjefeFollow Lay of The Land on Twitter @podlayofthelandhttps://www.jeffreys.page/

Andrew Spott — Founder & President of HR Signal, and the Founder & Chairman of the VividFront.Andrew founded VividFront back in 2009, growing it to become the acclaimed strategic Cleveland marketing agency it is today with recognition spanning The Inc 5000 fastest-growing companies and Northcoast 99 Top Employer awards multiple times over while driving success and impact for dozens of Ohio-based organizations and beyond. After transitioning from CEO to Chairman of VividFront, Andrew shifted his attention towards his latest project, HR Signal, a venture-backed HR Tech company based here in Cleveland, which he co-founded back in 2020 and has since raised $1.6 million in pre-seed funding.The mission at HR Signal is to address the critical issues of employee retention, workforce planning, and culture. High employee turnover often indicates issues within a company's HR strategy, and discerning which employees are considering departure is often a complicated and challenging task for managers.HR Signal aims to mitigate this problem through predictive analytics by deploying a set of algorithms which analyzes billions of data points from public sources, market data, and peer career path data, including hundreds of millions of anonymized resumes — Importantly, the process uses minimal internal data from clients to uphold the privacy of employees and to faciliate onboarding.Really enjoyed this conversation with Andrew — spanning his work across VividFront to HR Signal and beyond — and learned a lot from his reflections on it — I hope you all enjoy it as well!-----Lay of The Land is brought to you by Ninety. As a Lay of The Land listener, you can leverage a free trial with Ninety, the platform that helps teams build great companies and the only officially licensed software for EOS® — used by over 7,000 companies and 100,000 users!This episode is brought to you by Impact Architects. As we share the stories of entrepreneurs building incredible organizations throughout NEO, Impact Architects helps those leaders — many of whom we’ve heard from as guests on Lay of The Land — realize their visions and build great organizations. I believe in Impact Architects and the people behind it so much, that I have actually joined them personally in their mission to help leaders gain focus, align together, and thrive by doing what they love! As a listener, you can sit down for a free consultation with Impact Architects by visiting ia.layoftheland.fm!-----Connect with Andrew Spott on LinkedIn — https://www.linkedin.com/in/andrewspott/Learn more about HR Signal — https://www.hrsignal.com/Learn more about VividFront — https://www.vividfront.com/Follow VivdFront on Twitter — https://twitter.com/vividfront-----For more episodes of Lay of The Land, visit https://www.layoftheland.fm/Past guests include Cleveland Mayor Justin Bibb, Steve Potash (OverDrive), Ed Largest (Westfield), Ray Leach (JumpStart), Lila Mills (Signal Cleveland), Pat Conway (Great Lakes Brewing), Lindsay Watson (Augment Therapy), and many more.Stay up to date on all our podcasts by signing up for Lay of The Land's weekly newsletter — sign up here.Connect with Jeffrey Stern on LinkedIn — https://www.linkedin.com/in/jeffreypstern/Follow Jeffrey Stern on Twitter @sternJefe — https://twitter.com/sternjefeFollow Lay of The Land on Twitter @podlayofthelandhttps://www.jeffreys.page/

Justin McLoughlin — Founder & CEO of airCFO — on building a bootstrapped company, scaling a professional services organization, the future of work, the importance of taking care of your employees, and finance!Justin McLoughlin is a midwesterner who fell in love with the tech startup scene and turned entrepreneur when he realized that when other people start startups, payroll, back-office management, account reconciliation, taxes, and general accounting is not what they have in mind.Justin started airCFO to deliver entrepreneurs and growing companies peace of mind by taking ownership of these accounting responsibilities — maintaining the books so they can focus on maintaining the business.Originally published as episode 23 back in May 2021, this conversation with Justin McLoughlin offers unique perspective on company building— please enjoy!-----This episode is brought to you by Impact Architects and Ninety. As we share the stories of entrepreneurs building incredible organizations throughout NEO, Impact Architects helps those leaders — many of whom we’ve heard from as guests on Lay of The Land — realize their visions and build great organizations. I believe in Impact Architects and the people behind it so much, that I have actually joined them personally in their mission to help leaders gain focus, align together, and thrive by doing what they love! As a listener, you can sit down for a free consultation with Impact Architects or leverage a free trial through Ninety, the software platform that helps teams build great companies, by visiting ia.layoftheland.fm!This episode is also brought to you by airCFO, featured in the episode!-----Connect with Justin McLoughlin on LinkedIn — https://www.linkedin.com/in/jmmcloughlin/Learn more about airCFO — https://aircfo.com/Follow airCFO on Twitter — https://twitter.com/aircfo-----For more episodes of Lay of The Land, visit https://www.layoftheland.fm/Past guests include Cleveland Mayor Justin Bibb, Steve Potash (OverDrive), Ed Largest (Westfield), Ray Leach (JumpStart), Lila Mills (Signal Cleveland), Pat Conway (Great Lakes Brewing), and many more.Stay up to date on all our podcasts by signing up for Lay of The Land's weekly newsletter — sign up here.Connect with Jeffrey Stern on LinkedIn — https://www.linkedin.com/in/jeffreypstern/Follow Jeffrey Stern on Twitter @sternJefe — https://twitter.com/sternjefeFollow Lay of The Land on Twitter @podlayofthelandhttps://www.jeffreys.page/

Tory and Michael Waxman — the founders of Sundays (>$14 million raised, Cleveland-based) — on building Sundays for Dogs to become a leading dog food brand offering the first human-grade, air-dried dog food, made with 100% all-natural ingredients, that is healthier than kibble, but easier than refrigerated foods since it doesn’t require a freezer, prep, or clean-up.In pursuit of their mission to make it easier to be an awesome dog parent and feed millions of dogs, Tory and Michael have grown the business to offer modern dog parents everything they’re looking for including quality, taste, convenience, and affordability — and the proof is in the dog food as, in a blind taste test, dogs preferred Sundays 20 to 0 over the best selling dry dog food.Dr. Tory Waxman, a practicing small-animal veterinarian, and Michael Waxman, an engineer, and serial entrepreneur, founded Sundays when their dog, Mabel — who may make brief cameos in this episode today — became sick. Together, they became obsessed with finding dog food that could improve Mabel’s health. Although they searched, which you’ll hear all about in our conversation today — they couldn’t find dog food that was healthier than kibble, but easier to feed than home-cooked foods. Sundays was born.This conversation was a ton of fun — Tory and Michael have an amazing story, exude such a passion for their work, and are building an incredible company with Sundays —  I hope you all enjoy and learn from it as much as I did!-----This episode is brought to you by airCFO — whose story we actually shared back on Episode 23 of Lay of The Land with airCFO’s founder and CEO, Justin McLoughlin! For many founders, dealing with finance and taxes is stressful, confusing, and time-consuming. Yet without paying proper attention to your finances and taxes, you won’t be able to produce accurate nor timely financials and forecasts for your team or investors. Even worse, if you miss critical tax deadlines, you'll get hit with unnecessary penalties from the IRS — these kinds of financial and tax missteps can jeopardize your entire startup and your vision.Running a startup is hard enough — work with airCFO and you’ll get best-in-class finance, accounting, HR, and tax support. airCFO takes care of your back office so you can focus on growing from startup to scale-up. As a Lay of The Land listener, visit aircfo.com for more information and to set up a call and tell them Lay of The Land sent you!-----Connect with Tory Waxman on LinkedIn — https://www.linkedin.com/in/tory-waxman-87781b176/Connect with Michael Waxman on LinkedIn — https://www.linkedin.com/in/michaelewaxman/Learn more about Sundays for Dogs — https://sundaysfordogs.com/aboutFollow Sundays for Dogs on Twitter — https://twitter.com/sundaysfordogs-----For more episodes of Lay of The Land, visit https://www.layoftheland.fm/Past guests include Cleveland Mayor Justin Bibb, Steve Potash (OverDrive), Ed Largest (Westfield), Ray Leach (JumpStart), Lila Mills (Signal Cleveland), Pat Conway (Great Lakes Brewing), Lindsay Watson (Augment Therapy), and many more.Stay up to date on all our podcasts by signing up for Lay of The Land's weekly newsletter — sign up here.Connect with Jeffrey Stern on LinkedIn — https://www.linkedin.com/in/jeffreypstern/Follow Jeffrey Stern on Twitter @sternJefe — https://twitter.com/sternjefeFollow Lay of The Land on Twitter @podlayofthelandhttps://www.jeffreys.page/

Dom Raban — Founder and CEO of Xploro®While originally founded in the UK, Xploro has recently established its headquarters here in Cleveland accompanying the closing on over $1.7mm in funding in a round led by local investors including Comeback Capital, University Hospitals Ventures and JumpStart Ventures! Xploro is an award-winning and clinically validated health information platform that uses augmented reality, gameplay, and artificial intelligence to deliver health information to young patients, in a way that makes them feel empowered, engaged, and informed, whilst having fun at the same time.By putting health information in the hands of children, using language they understand, and interaction paradigms that they are familiar with, Xploro aims to reduce their stress and anxiety and improve their clinical outcomes all while improving child health literacy!Dom founded Xploro when he realized that the provisioning of information preparing children for hospitalization is quite poor when his daughter at the age of 13 was diagnosed with Ewing’s Sarcoma and had to navigate this whole process. Fortunately, she is now cancer-free but when she was ill nobody told her what to expect which made her feel scared, anxious, and alone — Dom honed in that this problem is not unique to their experience, and so he founded Xploro to provide children with the information they need and deserve.Really enjoyed this conversation with Dom as we explore his commitment to user-centric design, the power of gamification, the transformative implications of Xploro, and his broader vision beyond pediatric cancer to build a health information platform for any patient of any age with any condition — hope you all enjoy it as well!-----This episode is brought to you by airCFO — whose story we actually shared back on Episode 23 of Lay of The Land with airCFO’s founder and CEO, Justin McLoughlin! For many founders, dealing with finance and taxes is stressful, confusing, and time-consuming. Yet without paying proper attention to your finances and taxes, you won’t be able to produce accurate nor timely financials and forecasts for your team or investors. Even worse, if you miss critical tax deadlines, you'll get hit with unnecessary penalties from the IRS — these kinds of financial and tax missteps can jeopardize your entire startup and your vision.Running a startup is hard enough — work with airCFO and you’ll get best-in-class finance, accounting, HR, and tax support. airCFO takes care of your back office so you can focus on growing from startup to scale-up. As a Lay of The Land listener, visit aircfo.com for more information and to set up a call and tell them Lay of The Land sent you!-----Connect with Dom Raban on LinkedIn — https://www.linkedin.com/in/domraban/Learn more about Xploro Health — https://xploro.health/Follow Xploro Health on Twitter — https://twitter.com/xploro_health-----For more episodes of Lay of The Land, visit https://www.layoftheland.fm/Past guests include Cleveland Mayor Justin Bibb, Steve Potash (OverDrive), Ed Largest (Westfield), Ray Leach (JumpStart), Lila Mills (Signal Cleveland), Pat Conway (Great Lakes Brewing), Lindsay Watson (Augment Therapy), and many more.Stay up to date on all our podcasts by signing up for Lay of The Land's weekly newsletter — sign up here.Connect with Jeffrey Stern on LinkedIn — https://www.linkedin.com/in/jeffreypstern/Follow Jeffrey Stern on Twitter @sternJefe — https://twitter.com/sternjefeFollow Lay of The Land on Twitter @podlayofthelandhttps://www.jeffreys.page/

Mike Bruckman, CEO of Haima Therapeutics.With a PhD in organic chemistry and additional training in biomedical engineering and management, Mike joined the founding team at Haima as CEO in 2018 and has led their commercialization. Having brought in over $13mm in government funding to support their program over the last 5 years, Haima was the sole team selected by DARPA to receive funding in pursuit of manufacturing a fully-dried whole-blood product.Haima is a biopharma Cleveland-based company developing cell and platelet-inspired therapies for the treatment of bleeding and a variety of other blood-related ailments where Haima’s initial focus is on the application of their platelet-inspired therapies to mitigate active bleeding and bleeding risks after traumatic injury, surgery, thrombocytopenia, and rare bleeding disorders. Haima’s lead technology, called SynthoPlate, is a novel, fully-synthetic hemostatic agent that mitigates bleeding by acting at the site of injury and amplifying your body’s natural clotting mechanisms.I learned a great deal from this conversation with Mike — we cover everything from his path from academia to entrepreneurship, to the basics of platelets and blood biology, to the vast implications that Haima’s synthetic platelet technology can have on the field of blood-related diseases. Please enjoy my conversation with Mike Bruckman.-----This episode is brought to you by airCFO — whose story we actually shared back on Episode 23 of Lay of The Land with airCFO’s founder and CEO, Justin McLoughlin! For many founders, dealing with finance and taxes is stressful, confusing, and time-consuming. Yet without paying proper attention to your finances and taxes, you won’t be able to produce accurate nor timely financials and forecasts for your team or investors. Even worse, if you miss critical tax deadlines, you'll get hit with unnecessary penalties from the IRS — these kinds of financial and tax missteps can jeopardize your entire startup and your vision.Running a startup is hard enough — work with airCFO and you’ll get best-in-class finance, accounting, HR, and tax support. airCFO takes care of your back office so you can focus on growing from startup to scale-up. As a Lay of The Land listener, visit aircfo.com for more information and to set up a call and tell them Lay of The Land sent you!-----Learn more about Haima Therapeutics — https://www.haimatherapeutics.com/about Follow Haima Therapeutics on Twitter — https://twitter.com/HaimaThrConnect with Mike Bruckman on LinkedIn — https://www.linkedin.com/in/mikebruckman/ Follow Mike Bruckman on Twitter — https://twitter.com/mikebruckman-----For more episodes of Lay of The Land, visit https://www.layoftheland.fm/Past guests include Cleveland Mayor Justin Bibb, Steve Potash (OverDrive), Ed Largest (Westfield), Ray Leach (JumpStart), Lila Mills (Signal Cleveland), Pat Conway (Great Lakes Brewing), Lindsay Watson (Augment Therapy), and many more.Stay up to date on all our podcasts by signing up for Lay of The Land's weekly newsletter — sign up here.Connect with Jeffrey Stern on LinkedIn — https://www.linkedin.com/in/jeffreypstern/Follow Jeffrey Stern on Twitter @sternJefe — https://twitter.com/sternjefeFollow Lay of The Land on Twitter @podlayofthelandhttps://www.jeffreys.page/

Brendan Anderson and Donnie Bedney on their work at ScaleCo — a Cleveland-based entrepreneurship-through-acquisition organization that has invested more than $165 million in over 20 regional companies.In our conversation today, we explore what entrepreneurship-through-acquisition even is, the advantages of buying a business over starting one from scratch, ScaleCo’s unique approach to unlocking value in partner companies, and why Donnie and Brendan have double-downed in ScaleCo’s commitment to investing locally in the Northeast Ohio region A long-time student of emerging business, Brendan Anderson began his entrepreneurial career in 1995 when he formed The Mast Group to provide management services across various industries. Later in 1996, he formed the Heartland Companies to purchase a distressed industrial park, and in 1998 he purchased Stam, Inc., a manufacturing company which he lead until 2005 as CFO, VP Sales, and Director. Transitioning from the operating world, in 2006, he founded Evolution Capital Partners to provide capital to growing companies where he invested over $100 million in 16 platform companies across three committed capital funds, and most relevant to our conversation today, in 2018, he formed ScaleCo to support the Evolution Capital portfolio companies. Now serving as Chairman of ScaleCo, Brendan is also an active member of the Entrepreneurs Organization of Cleveland and Entrepreneurs Across Borders, in addition to serving on the board of SOAR, an organization that helps young adults with ADD & ADHD.Joining Brendan to represent ScaleCo, Donnie Bedney has spent his career across prestigious consulting and healthcare organizations, including Gallup and Press Ganey, as a workforce, human capital, and sales executive. Donnie joined ScaleCo in 2020 as an Operating Partner, taking on business development responsibilities in ScaleCo’s investment thesis around the human capital management business. In 2021, ScaleCo purchased PSP Metrics, Inc., a provider of employee assessment tools, where Donnie was named President.Please enjoy my conversation with Brendan Anderson and Donnie Bedney-----Lay of The Land is brought to you by Ninety. As a Lay of The Land listener, you can leverage a free trial with Ninety, the platform that helps teams build great companies and the only officially licensed software for EOS® — used by over 7,000 companies and 100,000 users!This episode is brought to you by Impact Architects. As we share the stories of entrepreneurs building incredible organizations throughout NEO, Impact Architects helps those leaders — many of whom we’ve heard from as guests on Lay of The Land — realize their visions and build great organizations. I believe in Impact Architects and the people behind it so much, that I have actually joined them personally in their mission to help leaders gain focus, align together, and thrive by doing what they love! As a listener, you can sit down for a free consultation with Impact Architects by visiting ia.layoftheland.fm!-----Learn more about ScaleCo — https://scaleco.com/Connect with Brendan Anderson on LinkedIn — https://www.linkedin.com/in/andersonbrendan/Connect with Donnie Bedney on LinkedIn — https://www.linkedin.com/in/thedonniebedney/-----For more episodes of Lay of The Land, visit https://www.layoftheland.fm/Past guests include Cleveland Mayor Justin Bibb, Steve Potash (OverDrive), Ed Largest (Westfield), Ray Leach (JumpStart), Lila Mills (Signal Cleveland), Pat Conway (Great Lakes Brewing), Lindsay Watson (Augment Therapy), and many more.Stay up to date on all our podcasts by signing up for Lay of The Land's weekly newsletter — sign up here.Connect with Jeffrey Stern on LinkedIn — https://www.linkedin.com/in/jeffreypstern/Follow Jeffrey Stern on Twitter @sternJefe — https://twitter.com/sternjefeFollow Lay of The Land on Twitter @podlayofthelandhttps://www.jeffreys.page/

Tanya Budler, Founder of Rise Together, on building an impact consulting firm based here in Cleveland that partners with civic, public, private, and nonprofit organizations to create systems-level change that enables and empowers international newcomers to join the local workforce.Tanya is a people-centric problem solver with a unique background that blends private sector, government, and non-profit experience. She started her career building global youth programs, crafting international events, and facilitating leadership workshops in eight different countries. While the Harvard Graduate School of Education, she began exploring other sectors, including impact consulting for nonprofits. Tanya has since served in various levels of government, first as an Economic and Social Recovery Fellow in the Office of the Governor of Connecticut and most recently supporting workforce efforts in the US Department of Transportation.Through these experiences, Tanya saw great power and opportunity in working at the intersection of all these sectors and decided to move back to the Midwest, originally from the farmlands of Nebraska and Missouri, after 10+ years on the East Coast — based here in Cleveland and serving the larger Northeast Ohio region, she launched Rise Together in January of 2022. Since then, she and her team have been working to create a welcoming workforce for international newcomers by developing policies, coalitions, and workshops that play to the community's assets and strengths.In our conversation, we dive into Tanya's background and path to entrepreneurship and Cleveland, founding Rise Together, creating and growing a for-profit service organization, and her reflections and learnings throughout the journey. Please enjoy my conversation with Tanya Budler.-----This episode is brought to you by Impact Architects and Ninety. As we share the stories of entrepreneurs building incredible organizations throughout NEO, Impact Architects helps those leaders — many of whom we’ve heard from as guests on Lay of The Land — realize their visions and build great organizations. I believe in Impact Architects and the people behind it so much, that I have actually joined them personally in their mission to help leaders gain focus, align together, and thrive by doing what they love! As a listener, you can sit down for a free consultation with Impact Architects or leverage a free trial through Ninety, the software platform that helps teams build great companies, by visiting ia.layoftheland.fm!-----Learn more about Rise Together — https://www.risetogethercle.com/Connect with Tanya Budler on LinkedIn — https://www.linkedin.com/in/tanyabudler/-----For more episodes of Lay of The Land, visit https://www.layoftheland.fm/Past guests include Cleveland Mayor Justin Bibb, Steve Potash (OverDrive), Ed Largest (Westfield), Ray Leach (JumpStart), Lila Mills (Signal Cleveland), Pat Conway (Great Lakes Brewing), Lindsay Watson (Augment Therapy), and many more.Stay up to date on all our podcasts by signing up for Lay of The Land's weekly newsletter — sign up here.Connect with Jeffrey Stern on LinkedIn — https://www.linkedin.com/in/jeffreypstern/Follow Jeffrey Stern on Twitter @sternJefe — https://twitter.com/sternjefeFollow Lay of The Land on Twitter @podlayofthelandhttps://www.jeffreys.page/

Our conversation this week is with Lindsay Watson, CEO & Founder of Augment Therapy.Augment Therapy was founded in 2017 when Lindsay — who is a pediatric physical therapist from Chagrin Falls, Ohio — was searching for a way to solve the problems she was experiencing in her own physical therapy practice. Lindsay had spent years working with children and was frustrated with the inefficiency of treating kids once a week, with no way to help them exercise on a daily basis for faster progress. And with that, Lindsay set out to find a way to encourage and motivate them to exercise and Augment Therapy was born.Augment Therapy is an interactive software that uses the medium of augmented reality to engage kids to exercise. Using depth-sensing camera technology, Augment Therapy functions as a motivational tool, exercise prompt, and progress tracker for children needing therapeutic exercise – with no headsets or other wearables required. It can be used in the hospital and clinical setting or in the home environment – any place where added motivation is needed.Augment Therapy looks like a game to the child, but solves real problems of exercise adherence – its portability and anywhere/anytime access make the completion of daily therapeutic exercise simple, convenient, and fun!Originally published as episode 30 back in July of 2021, this conversation with Lindsay Watson was one of my favorite conversations to date! Lindsay’s passion for her work is infectious and I learned a lot from her story — when I re-listened to it in advance of republishing it today, I was struck by how inspiring and forward-thinking Lindsay’s work through Augment Therapy was, and still is today as she’s continued to grow the business and raised an additional million dollars of funding — all with the goal of improving the therapy experience for children and bringing increased innovation to the pediatric market at large. Please enjoy!-----This episode is brought to you by Impact Architects and Ninety. As we share the stories of entrepreneurs building incredible organizations throughout NEO, Impact Architects helps those leaders — many of whom we’ve heard from as guests on Lay of The Land — realize their visions and build great organizations. I believe in Impact Architects and the people behind it so much, that I have actually joined them personally in their mission to help leaders gain focus, align together, and thrive by doing what they love! As a listener, you can sit down for a free consultation with Impact Architects or leverage a free trial through Ninety, the software platform that helps teams build great companies, by visiting ia.layoftheland.fm!-----Learn more about Augment Therapy — https://augmenttherapy.com/Follow Augment Therapy on Twitter — https://twitter.com/augment_therapyConnect with Lindsay Watson on LinkedIn — https://www.linkedin.com/in/lindsay-watson-pt-mpt-68103a134/ Follow Lindsay Watson on Twitter —  https://www.twitter.com/@lindsaywatson26-----For more episodes of Lay of The Land, visit https://www.layoftheland.fm/Past guests include Cleveland Mayor Justin Bibb, Steve Potash (OverDrive), Ed Largest (Westfield), Ray Leach (JumpStart), Lila Mills (Signal Cleveland), Pat Conway (Great Lakes Brewing), and many more.Stay up to date on all our podcasts by signing up for Lay of The Land's weekly newsletter — sign up here.Connect with Jeffrey Stern on LinkedIn — https://www.linkedin.com/in/jeffreypstern/Follow Jeffrey Stern on Twitter @sternJefe — https://twitter.com/sternjefeFollow Lay of The Land on Twitter @podlayofthelandhttps://www.jeffreys.page/

Dr. Onas Bolton — Founder and CEO of Octet Scientific, a specialty Cleveland-based chemical manufacturer unlocking the full power of safe, economical, and sustainable energy storage by providing better electrolyte chemistry for zinc and other aqueous batteries — on the potential for zinc-based batteries, the history of energy production, storage, and use, and how the work Octet Scientific is doing will facilitate our transition to carbon-neutral sustainable power!Dr. Bolton is a 14-year veteran of the specialty chemicals industry with a PhD in materials science and specific expertise in organic electrochemistry. He is an experienced organic and materials chemist whose work has been published in prestigious scientific journals like the Journal of the Electrochemical Society, Journal of the American Chemical Society, and highlighted on the cover of Nature Chemistry and in the Economist. Prior to founding Octet, Dr. Bolton created new organic additives for Atotech, the world’s largest producer of chemicals to the electroplating industry.At Octet, he and his team are working closely with a wide variety of zinc battery chemistries and manufacturers worldwide to continue to perfect zinc battery chemistry through novel additive development. Dr. Bolton began Octet by winning two highly competitive funding awards from the US National Science Foundation, based on the idea that establishing safe and sustainable zinc-based energy storage will require optimized additive chemistry and more recently, has closed over an additional $1 million in traditional venture funding led by Jumpstart here in Cleveland. Please enjoy!-----This episode is brought to you by Impact Architects and Ninety. As we share the stories of entrepreneurs building incredible organizations throughout NEO, Impact Architects helps those leaders — many of whom we’ve heard from as guests on Lay of The Land — realize their visions and build great organizations. I believe in Impact Architects and the people behind it so much, that I have actually joined them personally in their mission to help leaders gain focus, align together, and thrive by doing what they love! As a listener, you can sit down for a free consultation with Impact Architects or leverage a free trial through Ninety, the software platform that helps teams build great companies, by visiting ia.layoftheland.fm!-----Learn more about Octet Scientific — https://www.octetsci.com/about-octet/Connect with Dr. Onas Bolton on LinkedIn — https://www.linkedin.com/in/onas-bolton-693ba319/-----For more episodes of Lay of The Land, visit https://www.layoftheland.fm/Past guests include Cleveland Mayor Justin Bibb, Steve Potash (OverDrive), Ed Largest (Westfield), Ray Leach (JumpStart), Lila Mills (Signal Cleveland), Pat Conway (Great Lakes Brewing), Lindsay Watson (Augment Therapy), and many more.Stay up to date on all our podcasts by signing up for Lay of The Land's weekly newsletter — sign up here.Connect with Jeffrey Stern on LinkedIn — https://www.linkedin.com/in/jeffreypstern/Follow Jeffrey Stern on Twitter @sternJefe — https://twitter.com/sternjefeFollow Lay of The Land on Twitter @podlayofthelandhttps://www.jeffreys.page/