Michelle was a huge asset for our company during a period of introspection and transition. Her proven process for evaluating the health of the marketing department and the overall company was exceptional. She is a strong communicator, quickly understands concepts and has excellent memory recall. I was most impressed with her ability to communicate our company message, culture and vision in such a short period of time.
Moreover, Michelle is a kind, thoughtful and enjoyable person to work alongside. She brings great ideas to the table and will challenge the status quo. I was able to trust Michelle with our most valued clients and knew she would represent us well. The contributions Michelle made to Luxury Living Chicago will be positively felt for years to come.
Aaron Galvin
CEO/Founder, Luxury Living Chicago Realty
Over the years, I’ve been the appreciative recipient of Jeff’s professional coaching. He taught me to evaluate circumstances, identify underlying issues, and hone in on solutions. Moreover, his coaching style allowed me to draw my own conclusions and chart my own path forward, all the while ensuring my ownership and accountability of the identified solutions.
Jeff is also a powerful public speaker. Whether he’s conducting a small workshop or delivering a keynote address to a crowd, Jeff personally connects with each and every individual in the room. When he speaks, people are motivated, energized, and inspired!
Todd Ferguson
CEO, Primera
Jeff is an amazing executive coach. Through our years of one-on-one sessions, he has given me the tools to become a stronger person, manager, and leader. His approach is genuine and compassionate which is why he has earned my full trust to share and explore with him my biggest fears, issues, and weaknesses. Not only professionally, but personally.
His impact has been nothing short of life changing. He has a magical ability to get underneath the hidden issues while offering perceptive and insightful solutions that are practical.
He is equally exacting as he is compassionate and holds me accountable to every commitment. From our first meeting, he unapologetically set expectations extremely high and continues to challenge me towards constant improvement and commitment. Jeff is a coach, a mentor, and respected friend. I am deeply fortunate to have him in my life!
Aaron Miller
CEO, The Xcel Group
I’m lucky to have worked with Jeff, a leader who’s not only interested in the company’s bottom line, but also in his employees’ professional growth.
I have known Jeff for more than 15 years and I have met many people in my 40-year career many of these people talk a good talk but it is rare that you come across someone with as much ambition, positive energy, passion and great leadership as you do with Jeff.
Over the years I was particularly impressed by Jeff’s ability to engage with all levels within the company whether it is a service employee, sales representative or the manager of a business unit.
Jeff motivated me and my teams through his open and honest leadership style, inspiring speeches and unwavering commitment to our common goals.
Cees Podt
Area Managing Director, Ambius Netherlands
I had the pleasure of working with Jeff at Rentokil-Initial in a variety of positions for almost 20 years. He is a high energy leader that has the unique ability to have a vision for the company and then drive results through getting people to buy in on a personal level. I have always greatly admired his integrity, work ethic and ability to connect with people.
Doug Longfellow
President NaturZone Pest Control
Michelle Mariola’s work is fresh, relevant and unique which in turn produces business results. She was able to update our brand, provide consistency throughout company, add new perspective to our go to market approach that all resulted in New Business. Her ability to stay in line with budget and timeline is incredible. I would recommend her to both my network and customer base. We will continue to utilize Michelle in our on-going Marketing initiatives.
Jodi Keller
Vice President, United Scrap Metal, Inc
Michelle has been an invaluable partner to our organization. While her work began with supporting branding and marketing initiatives, she has transformed into a key contributor in the areas of training, team building, leadership development and culture.
She has been instrumental in developing leadership workshops and training programs for emerging managers at our organization, and the result has been powerful. She was instrumental in helping develop the content from the ground up, and subsequently supporting the facilitation of these workshops for a diverse team.
Lastly, we are very thankful for her support in helping the organization advance our already strong culture. As a result of her work surrounding “intentional culture” we have been able to derive various initiatives to enhance workplace satisfaction and better understand team member engagement.
Sean Story
Vice President, Strategic Development, United Scrap Metal
Working with Michelle Mariola was a terrific experience, she was able to organize and motivate our team members into different working committees and action item focused task forces. This created more structure to our existing working committees and also, we were able to utilize additional team members on the action item focused task forces.
We now have a corporate committee structure in place and Michelle also helped us develop a communication process for all LGH employees, which we now use for committee and task force group updates. All of the LGH members involved with the project worked very well with Michelle and we would use her expertise again in the future when needed!
Tony Fiscelli
President, Lifting Gear Higher
It’s been my great pleasure and privilege to attend Jeff’s keynote addresses on numerous occasions. He’s versatile in his subject matter, but his results are consistently dependable: Jeff’s audiences leave the room inspired. Jeff draws from his extensive background in business and personal life which can resonate with anyone who is privileged to hear and share in Jeff’s wisdom
He clearly does his homework to research relevant content and yet he’s such a colorful storyteller that he makes it easy for the audience to embrace so much information. He has a rare gift for drawing in large audiences and making it feel like an inclusive, even intimate, conversation. It’s remarkable the way he can make every single person in a crowd feel like they’re being personally mentored.
Bob Berk
Master Chair, Vistage International, Inc.
Jeff is a truly dynamic leader and talent developer. He has a unique approach – designing an individualized program guaranteed to keep participants engaged and provide context that is relevant in an ever-changing corporate environment.
The leadership program is a win-win for organizations; the participant you feel invested in, build strong peer relationships outside of your own division and can walk away with new leadership techniques and tangible skills to scale within your organization and beyond. The company can leverage the think-tank for new ideas and strategies and has a strong pipeline of talent to support growth and succession planning.
It is with my highest recommendation that any company looking to raise the talent bar, create a more well-rounded manager, retain employees, and/or achieve growth should bring in Jeff from the start.
Betsy Burman
Division Director, Brilliant Staffing LLC
I have had the pleasure of working with Michelle and always look forward to the time we can sit down and strategize together. It can be hard to find time to look at the big picture and develop a more strategic plan for our team and Michelle not only brings great topics for discussion but helps me brainstorm new ideas to take our team to the next level. She has been a tremendous asset to our team and her mentoring sessions with me are easily some of my most favorite meetings each month.
Kathryn Fitzsimmons
Senior Manager Campaign Planning, Q1 Productions
Michelle has given us a new way to look at our message both externally to the markets we serve and internally with our employees. Having very little experience in our industry, Michelle quickly developed an understanding of our brand and market position. She used that knowledge to develop an internal marketing strategy which has been recognized as best in class across our company which employs over 5,000 employees.
David J. Cox
Regional Vice President, Henkels & McCoy
I was very fortunate to have Michelle’s sage counsel in the creation of Big Shoulders Capital branding. She helped us enormously in many aspects of marketing and branding — most importantly in obtaining the customer and partner insights to convey our mission and goals effectively.
