Tanner's Influence Podcast

Introducing Melanie Paris Jones: A Catalyst for Community Connection and Positivity in Utah's Business Scene In a remarkably short time, Melanie Paris Jones has emerged as a transformative figure in the Utah business community. As the Editor of Utah Business, Melanie's journey to this pivotal role has been anything but linear. Her diverse experiences have uniquely positioned her as a powerful connector within the community. Driven by a passion for storytelling and a commitment to highlighting positive developments in Utah's vibrant business landscape, Melanie is dedicated to sharing the good news that fosters growth and unity, creating business opportunities and development in the state.

McKenzie Bauer is one half of the married duo founder team at Utah icon Thread Wallets. With classic startup beginnings – picture them sewing in the parent’s basement, McKenzie is anything but your typical founder. Join us for one of the most authentic and refreshing Influence podcasts yet. McKenzie gets real about everything from mental health to thoughts on the future. For Thread, this is a time of great excitement as they’ve just close on their first large commercial building and have embarked on the monumental task of renovating it. McKenzie and her husband, co-founder Colby Bauer are deeply committed to their Provo roots and infusing Thread with purpose and meaning – think indoor skate park and their foundation “Carry On!” Join us to hear McKenzie’s inspirational journey and perspective.

Allison Roberts embodies the drive and intensity so often associated with successful entrepreneurs. Leveraging out of the industry learnings (when you shiver you burn calories) and applying it cross industry, she’s created an easy path for anyone to engage in regular exercise. Fastercise is a disruptive approach in the crowded genre of app-based exercise focusing on quick bursts of movement. Unlike HIIT style training, Fastercise is accessible to all ages and ability levels. Join us to hear about Allison’s passion and gritty founder journey to bring this unique and powerful product to market.

Misty Frost has emerged as a voice for authentic leadership. She’s an a-typical Utah native with an East Coast vibe and dry wit that kept us laughing. Her experience runs deep and wide as a marketing and leader for several successful companies. As the SVP of Global Marketing on the Instructure rocket ship she helped navigate a successful IPO. She currently serves as CEO for Penn Foster post the Carrus acquisition. Misty also serves as an advisor and board member to several tech companies here in Silicon Slopes. She was named to Utah Business Magazine’s 2021 list of Women to Watch. We will be watching and, in this case, listening to Misty’s unique perspective and treasure trove of expertise!

By Karey Barker’s estimation, she’s only had one job in her entire career. When you found and lead a successful venture firm, you need not apply elsewhere! Garrett sat down with the Cross Creek founder and Managing Director in her Research Park office for a fun and fascinating look at her 25-year journey. Tune in to hear how she got her start, how she navigates the intense world of venture investing and who’s influenced her success. She also shares her wisdom and philosophies on all things venture, her risk appetite and investing philosophies. We are thrilled to showcase Karey's unique perspective.

Dean Brigitte Madrian is the first female Dean of BYU’s Marriott School of Business and is herself an alumna earning her degree in Economics. She went on to get her Ph.D. in Economics from Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Through her illustrious career, Dr. Madrian served on the faculties of several Ivy League schools including, University of Pennsylvania, University of Chicago, and Harvard University. She’s taken active advisory and board roles with several organizations throughout her career. On top of all that she’s a huge Harry Potter fan and when we sat down with her in her office, her passion for it was on full display. After spending several years on the East Coast in her various pursuits, she got the pull to come back home to Utah and take on her next adventure with BYU. We are thrilled to have her on the podcast, and it was nothing short of a miracle to find an hour in her insane schedule. Listen in for a fun and engaging look into Dean Madrian’s fascinating journey!

A HUMBLE VISIONARY: OUR TALK WITH DAVID WRIGHT, CEO OF PATTERN In this Influence Podcast, we have the pleasure of talking with David Wright, the Co-founder & CEO of Pattern. Pattern was a small startup in 2013 but is now recognized as the leader in “growth intelligence” that is helping leading e-commerce brands dramatically increase their online sales. David Wright and Melanie Alder started Pattern in Melanie’s living room.  And as we listened to David describe those humble early years as well as the growth and success that Pattern now enjoys, we had the sense that they never really cared about following the crowd. Pattern is the world's leading company for e-commerce clients that want intelligent strategies that create explosive growth. It’s also a company attracts smart people who are, like David and Melanie, confident in a humble kind of way. The culture and vibe at Pattern is noticeably understated and refreshingly different. This is the story of two ingenious founders who had the discipline to rely o

“FOR EVERYONE’S PITS & STINKY BITS” – A PODCAST WITH LUME In this Influence Podcast, we get to peer into the creative world of Dr. Shannon Klingman, a highly regarded obstetrician and gynecologist, and Jennifer Gibson, her CAO, sister, and earliest supporter. Shannon Klingman is the visionary entrepreneur who created a whole new category in the multi-billion-dollar personal hygiene sector.  It all started when Shannon was doing her residency and read a study that supported her early suspicions that gynecologists misdiagnosed basic odors and itches as bacterial infections. The study findings concluded that 60% to 70% of the time the OB/GYN community was wrong. In Shannon’s words, “It felt wrong.” Crazy smart and obsessively determined, Shannon began experimenting with natural ingredients, free of aluminum and baking soda. A self-described “kitchen scientist,” she developed what she would call Lume (pronounced loo-mee). Version 1.0 of the most innovative natural deodorant ever created was created in Shannon

SALES FREAK, CEO, ADDICT & AUTHOR: A TALK WITH MICHAEL DASH Michael Dash is a sales freak. While attending University of Maryland, Michael sold home improvement services door-to-door on the mean streets of Baltimore and Washington D.C. He is a successful entrepreneur/CEO who moved to Utah where he knew only one person and started Parallel HR Solutions, a company that “pairs individuals and companies that together produce prosperous relationships” that he sold in 2018. Michael sold his thriving company because he believed in F.A.T.E. (“From Addict to Entrepreneur”) more. Now his life mission is to inspire others to see new opportunities and make the world a better place! (see thriveglobal.com) We hope you enjoy this Influence podcast!

“The truth is, we almost didn’t make it.” – Podcast insights from Aaron Suzuki, Founder & CEO of Prowess Consulting and SmartDeploy At the age of 26, Aaron Suzuki found himself growing a regional Internet application development firm in Utah in the ashes of the dotcom bubble. By 2003, Aaron had moved to Seattle and co-founded Prowess Consulting, a dynamic moshpit of software engineers, web developers, writers and graphic designers that help major tech companies sell more. But Aaron wanted more. He started a second company “from scratch”, SmartDeploy, in 2009 because he wanted to build the only product that could easily deploy thousands of Windows-compatible devices from the cloud. Now Prowess is growing rapidly. And SmartDeploy has thousands of customers and millions of endpoints around the world. Both companies were started without the help of venture capitalists or private equity firms. But things didn’t always go so well. They got cocky. Things got hard. They weren’t making enough money to keep going.

Blake Modersitski has an exceptional track record as a software-focused investor that backs great entrepreneurs then helps them achieve extraordinary results. He is also a great human being! Over his 17 years at Pelion Venture Partners, Blake has had a string of top-20 venture hits with remarkable companies: Redhat, Riverbed, Fusion.io, Integral Ad Science, DOMO, enCommerce, Soasta, Metacloud, and others. Q: How can that many great companies that are being chased by so many VC’s, chose to work with Blake? A: It’s rare to find someone so successful yet humble, so analytical yet thoughtfully tuned-in! Great software entrepreneurs want to have Blake’s one-of-a-kind perspective as a VC, software guru, sales & marketing expert, and trusted friend and mentor! I have had my own brief moments of awe and appreciation with Blake Modersitski. I hope you enjoy this podcast!

JD Machine’s Pleasant View office looks like an upscale engineering or architectural firm. It also looks and feels like a one of the most progressive and automated machine shops in the United States. It’s very clean, very cutting edge and enjoys rave reviews from employees on Glassdoor (4.7 out of 5). In 1979 a master machinist named Don Wardle moved to back to Utah from California and settled in Ogden with his growing family. He was 50 years old and couldn’t find a job, so he started his own company, JD Machine. In 1992 the company employed a dozen employees when Don’s son, Matt Wardle, became the President and CEO. This Influence podcast with Matt Wardle is both subtle and powerful. It’s subtle because Matt Wardle is an understated man who is quick to recognize his employees for the successes enjoyed at JD Machine. It’s powerful because Matt is responsible for JD Machine’s explosive growth, now 200 employees, and exceptional clients that are household names: Boeing, Parker Hannifin Corporation, and Northrop

Our most recent Influence interview with Rob Jeppsen and Gary Rhoads, the co-founders of Xvoyant, made me think of the lyrics of David Byrne… Rob Jeppsen is a sales and marketing genius who starts and grows companies like Allegiance Technologies and Xvoyant. And he’s a card-carrying expert at helping big companies like Valvoline, Waste Management, and Adobe win more clients. In short, Rob collects national sales awards—15 Stevie Awards, SAMY Awards, etc.—like Boy Scouts collect merit badges. Gary Rhoads is the revered and highly decorated Steven Mack Covey Professor of Marketing & Entrepreneurship at Brigham Young University. Far from being a typical marketing professor, Gary is one of only two or three marketing PhD’s in the U.S. who wrote his dissertation (Texas Tech University) on sales, not marketing. In his spare time, Gary likes to start and grow cool companies like Allegiance and Xvoyant, then sell them to huge corporations like Computer Science Corporation and Maritz Holdings. This is an amazi

Kory Stevens, the founder and CEO of Taft Clothing, always leads with his heart! It’s the first thing we noticed when we interviewed him and one of many things everyone he meets quickly appreciates. So, when Kory had a dream of starting his own company with his wife, Mallory, it became an obsession. They named their company “Taft” after their son and their shoes after Taft’s friends. Taft began in the living room of their small apartment with a successful Kickstarter Campaign for “no-show socks.” It wasn’t long before Kory was designing and selling high-end men’s shoes, exclusively handcrafted in Spain and Portugal. Small investments from friends and family soon followed. Taft started to grow fast! Kory takes the time to have heartfelt two-way interactions that make Taft’s followers feel special. He works 70-hour weeks as one of the best designers of shoes in the world. Kory and his team are obsessed with design and quality and running Taft with a personal touch. He finds true meaning in his family, his pe

Jonathan Johnson very modestly describes himself as “a recovering lawyer.” A lawyer by training, Jonathan was Overstock.com’s general counsel before becoming president. Jonathan and Patrick Byrne, Overstock.com’s founder and CEO, took Overstock from a private startup to a publicly traded company with over $2 billion in sales and 2,000 employees. They have been good at seeing new opportunities. Overstock.com has never been afraid of making moves. In 2014 they were the first major online retailer to accept bitcoin as a payment, and in the first 22 hours, they received over 800 orders worth $126,000 in bitcoin. Jonathan Johnson (and Patrick Byrne) jumped into the blockchain mosh pit four years ago because they saw big potential in applying the blockchain to financial systems. Jonathan became the president of a new Overstock subsidiary that was created to manage and oversee company investments in innovative companies building blockchain solutions. They called the new company Medici Ventures, named after Medici Ba

Shawn Moon is fully present and fully engaged. He’s not a multitasker. And when you meet him, you quickly sense that you are talking to a very disciplined, very different kind of leader. Part psychologist, part strategist, part Zen Ninja, Shawn is the author of several respected books on leadership, among them The Ultimate Competitive Advantage and Talent Unleashed. He spent most of his career helping Fortune 500 executives get better results. And, before that, Shawn was a Principal with Mellon Financial Corporation, one of the world’s largest money management firms. He now leads a once-obscure carpet cleaning company called Zerorez, perhaps the most innovative, high-growth carpet cleaning company in the world. Zerorez is not a glamorous company. But then Shawn Moon is a different kind of CEO. His franchise partners are fiercely loyal and are willing to follow a new formula for success as they disrupt the home restoration and carpet cleaning industry. They want to be successful, and many of them are becoming

Todd Davis, the Chief People Officer of Franklin Covey, believes “feedback is the breakfast of champions!” More than just a good quote, you can tell he really believes in feedback, feels it in his bones and eats it for breakfast every day. He sets a high personal bar and asks questions out loud that most people seldom dare to think about. “How extraordinary am I in my key roles?” “What are my most important roles?” “Family member, friend, colleague?” One can’t listen to Todd without sensing a genuine humility. His book, GET BETTER - 15 PROVEN PRACTICES TO BUILD EFFECTIVE RELATIONSHIPS AT WORK is a national best seller, yet he is refreshingly modest and compelling. It’s obvious that Todd is not a poser or a pushover. He lives what he teaches and gently encourages us to change the way we see the world so we can live better lives. We hope you enjoy this podcast, where Todd encourages us to “start with humility and intent” and to “carefully calibrate our weeks” so we can live happier lives and find new success is

Bjorn Espenes and Eric Maas met in Park City in 1999. After working together for 10 years to build a successful SaaS eCommerce company, they were frustrated that no one had the ability to provide consistent paid search solutions for their customers. And they began to believe they could somehow build a platform that could predict the profit of any “click” before a customer bought it. They decided they didn’t want any investors and boldly named their little company “Finch” in honor of the small birds that, as Charles Darwin discovered, proved to be the most adaptive species in the world. In little more than a decade, Finch has become one of the fastest growing private companies in the United States. Their customers include the Fortune 500 and high-growth middle market companies that found Finch while searching for the most profitable paid search advertising solutions they could find. Finch is now a global company but has only one KPI, a company that attracts the best people, has virtually no employee turnover,

We recently had the pleasure of interviewing Ragula Bhaskar (“Bhaskar”) the visionary co-founder and CEO of FatPipe Networks. Over twenty-five years ago when networks as we know them were just beginning, Bhaskar and his wife, Sanch Datta (co-founder, President and CTO of FatPipe) had the determined vision to start a company that is now widely regarded by Gartner and other industry experts as the market leader for software-defined wide area networking (SD-WAN). Simply put, Bhaskar and Sanch built FatPipe from the ground up to become the most reliable and secure software platform for many of the largest networks in the world. We live in a time when tech CEO’s are treated like rock stars and have huge egos and expensive penthouse offices. Bhaskar and Sanch represent so much more. They saw an opportunity no one else saw in the late 90’s, then worked for many years to build a mission critical enterprise platform that is now acknowledged as the very best. We need more determined visionaries like Bhaskar and Sanch!

You may not expect a pest control company to have a full-sized NCAA basketball court and a golf simulator inside their headquarters—but then, you may not expect a lot of things about Aptive Environmental’s unique culture and amazing vibe. Modeled after the slick beauty of leading tech companies, Aptive has been a disruptor in the pest control industry by offering the best technology and solutions to a stable and professional sales team and introducing an element of fun. At the helm of this juggernaut company’s beginning is David Royce, Founder and Chairman, and Vess Pearson, CEO. David describes himself as a “serial entrepreneur,” and is always looking to make the world a better place with each business he starts or influences. He has been featured in several articles by Forbes magazine and other national publications and continues to dazzle the world with his intense curiosity and tenacious creativity. Vess brings his passion, drive, and energy for building successful sales teams and creating a fun culture.