Keynote Speakers

Opening Keynote Speaker
Amanda Brinkman

 

Amanda is a producer, filmmaker, branding expert and sought-after public speaker, sharing her “Do Well By Doing Good” philosophy on stages around the country. She demonstrates how both companies and individuals can make a meaningful and positive difference in people’s lives, while fostering their own success in the process. She believes that companies must not only identify their brand purpose but put that purpose into action.

Through her work, Amanda has defined what it looks like for brands to truly act “as publishers” creating movements through their content strategy. In her most recent demonstration of this, Amanda was the Chief Brand Officer of Deluxe where the brand challenge was to reach small businesses. The solution? She created, produced and hosted their Emmy-nominated series “Small Business Revolution,” which streamed on Hulu and was named among Inc. Magazine’s top shows for entrepreneurs. Through this inspirational reality show, Amanda was able to prove the model of authentic content stretching a brand’s spend by achieving 12x the reach through this series over traditional paid media. The program accumulated over 13 billion impressions, 6,000+ earned media articles and 20 million content views (and counting). Not to mention -- this work changed lives, families, small businesses and communities across the country.

Read more about Amanda and watch her sizzle: https://youtu.be/xm5iv-qsvSA
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Closing Keynote Speaker
Chris Gardner
CEO of Happyness

Chris Gardner is an entrepreneur, international best-selling author and an award-winning film producer. Gardner’s autobiography, The Pursuit of Happyness became a New York Times #1 best seller and has been translated into over 40 languages, including six dialects of Chinese and recently into Arabic. Gardner’s book, The Pursuit of Happyness was the inspiration for the critically acclaimed film in which Will Smith received the Golden Globe, Screen Actors Guild and Academy Award nominations for his performance. His second book, Start Where You Are, also a best seller, was published in 2009. Gardner’s new book Permission to Dream was selected as “Book Of The Month” by the Wall Street Journal upon its publication.

After close to 40 years on Wall Street, Gardner had to answer a very important question, "What are you going to do with the rest of your life? Do you retire or REWIRE?" Gardner chose to "REWIRE." The difference is, "when you retire you stop doing what you used to do. When you REWIRE you do what you want to do!"

Gardner is currently, in his words, "making a huge alternative investment" in human capital. This investment has had him speak at over 500 schools on three different continents. He is conducting his Permission 2 Dream Tour. He believes that "what can be, needs to be as much a part of the conversation as what can NOT be." Gardner believes that "Dreams don't have borders." 

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