Kellee Johnson

I think my mother - she was a single mom who raised 4 children, and she always had the attitude that we could do whatever we wanted to do, that she would support us and encourage us to just try. Through her, I learned to always ask questions. I ask all the time - one, you get to know people better, but two, you never know what you're going to find or get if you ask. Another layer to asking is being available to help when others need you, because inevitably I can cite half a dozen stories of where I went to help someone else, but something better actually happened to me. I would have never known that if I had not taken that step to genuinely help somebody else. My first job in Sarasota came from being in a hospital room helping my boyfriend's aunt who had breast cancer - a woman came to visit and asked me what my story was, and within 3 months I was working for my first Fortune 500 job because of that person. My biggest client ever came from helping a girl in Colorado who was making a big transition. I was out there with her for two weeks, and while helping her, I made some phone calls for work, and that ended up being a six-month conversation that led to my biggest client to date. You just never know what's gonna happen if you help somebody else.

Follow your heart first and learn as much as you can. Don't be afraid to ask - ask for help, ask for mentors, ask for an internship, ask people to coffee or lunch. Be assertive without being aggressive, and that's how you're building leadership traits. One thing that happened to my sister and I is that girls who play sports get this confidence that becomes innate. It's amazing. If you like it and you can be good at it and you have thick skin, you're not afraid to lose, you're not afraid to get injured. Sports can shape a woman around teamwork, around confidence, and around capability, learning and doing and having fun and being competitive at the same time.

AI. Nothing's ever affected the world so fast across and horizontally, not just vertically in one industry, but everything. I'm not a spring chicken anymore, and it goes back to that learning something major each decade. Well, I'm taking it full on. I hired an AI consultant for my team two years ago, and now we're implementing a lot. I'm gonna learn how to build agents, and I'm a marketing person, I'm not a computer science or a finance person. You just have to keep learning, you have to try, you have to be curious about it. Go get a laptop with nothing on it, and if a bot goes rogue, it won't touch anything on your laptop. It's bigger than the internet, it's bigger than anything that's ever been introduced, so it's going to be a way of life, so embrace it. That's how I always look at new things that some people might be afraid of - I look at it as an opportunity.

I put my values in place 8 or 9 years ago. The first two seem obvious, but it's honesty and transparency. Then, believe it or not, I do think of curiosity as a value, because if you have it, it just leads to so many different things. Accountability - do what you say you're gonna do. And then teamwork - always know what your role is, but be willing to jump in and help each other out. That started from sailing. I was on a big boat sailing before I started single-handed sailing, and there's 8 people, and you know what your role is, but when the wind really pipes up, you can't hear things, things happen 10 times as fast, and you have to just be ready to jump in and help. So, honesty, transparency, curiosity, accountability, and teamwork - those are my five life and work values.