April Meeting: Kendra Prospero – Helping Founders and Leaders Transform Their Thoughts About Work

Finola Annibella


Kendra Prospero is a human resources expert who delivers highly engaging keynote presentations that help founders and leaders transform their thoughts and feelings about work. She knows employers benefit when their team members feel included, are happier, and are more productive. Her philosophy is that we give up the best hours of our days and years of our lives for work, and we should love our jobs.

Before founding Turning the Corner, an award-winning Human Resources consulting firm and “Best Place to Work”, Kendra worked for many years as a Software Engineer for IBM but felt she struggled in a career that left her dying on the vine. Turning the Corner is a result of her following her passion for helping others as the CEO and Founder of one of the few firms in the nation that supports growing small businesses with all their “people” needs.

Kendra loves helping people get results, leading her team to greater places, and challenging us all to change the world one job at a time.

September Meeting: Nhi Aronheim – Resilience

Finola Annibella

Nhi Aronheim stands at only four feet, nine inches tall, but her story is immense.

Several anthologies including Kentucky Women: Two Centuries of Indomitable Spirit and Vision, Colorado Public Radio (CPR), and Harvey Brownstone Interviews have profiled her harrowing journey as a child refugee who escaped war-torn Vietnam in search of the American Dream.

Nhi’s diverse background is captivating.  As a refugee, she was adopted by a Christian family in the South, where she learned to deal with prejudice and discrimination. She later met and married a Jewish man and converted to Judaism in 2004. Nhi has two beautiful children who she has raised to embrace Vietnamese and Jewish cultures. After transitioning to sales and marketing in the mortgage industry—where Nhi worked for over sixteen years—she retired as a marketing specialist at the age of forty-one to begin her next life adventure. Since then, she has been a mediator, author, and speaker.

March Meeting: Ryan Miller with Team Vertice

Finola Annibella

Team Vertice is a senior-led B2B marketing consultancy built by experienced operators who’ve led strategy, built pipeline, and driven revenue inside the walls of startups, scale-ups, and Fortune 50 enterprises.

Collectively, we’ve helped hundreds of B2B brands generate nearly $1BN in trackable revenue—through smart positioning, aligned go-to-market strategies, and marketing systems built for scale. We’ve led in high-growth environments, guided companies through transformation, and partnered with leadership teams to turn marketing from a cost center into a strategic growth function.

We bring the mindset of in-house executives with the flexibility of a consultancy. Whether the challenge is brand clarity, sales and marketing alignment, or scaling demand generation—we show up as embedded partners focused on what matters: driving results.

August Meeting: Karen Posey – CEO Whisperer Meets Enterprise Value Architect

Finola Annibella

Session Overview

The 6 Things Only the CEO Can Do
Where Strategy Becomes Enterprise Value

A keynote for CEOs and First Teams who want to move from running the business to designing it—and build companies that scale, attract capital, and compound enterprise value.

Enterprise value doesn’t come from doing more. It comes from the CEO doing the right things. When the CEO operates as architect, not bottleneck, clarity replaces complexity, decisions accelerate, and the business becomes scalable without dependence on one person. This keynote reframes the CEO role from driving execution to designing leverage, from managing activity to architecting value, and from being indispensable to building an enterprise.

Leaders leave with clarity on where the CEO creates disproportionate enterprise value, a sharper understanding of First Team ownership, faster decision-making with less organizational drag, and a new lens on how boards, strategy, and structure compound value. The challenge for most CEOs isn’t effort. It’s focus. Enterprise value grows when strategy is clear, ownership is aligned, and leadership energy is directed toward the highest-leverage work.

The keynote introduces the six areas where only the CEO can create enterprise value:

  1. Vision Clarity by designing a future the market understands and values.
  2. First Team Alignment by turning leadership into a coordinated engine.
  3. Stakeholder Confidence by building trust with boards and capital.
  4. Strategic Alignment by structuring the business to scale.
  5. Personal Effectiveness by protecting energy and decision quality.
  6. Board Collaboration by moving from oversight to value creation.
    1.  

The CEO’s job is not to execute the strategy.
The CEO’s job is to design the system where execution becomes inevitable.

Bio

Karen Posey is an Enterprise Value Architect and CEO & Managing Partner of KP Strategies. She works with CEOs and Boards to turn strategy, leadership alignment, and execution into measurable enterprise value—growth that is scalable, financeable, and durable.

Often described as where CEO Whisperer meets Enterprise Value Architect, Karen helps leaders move from running the business to designing it. She brings clarity to complexity, accelerates decision velocity, and builds operating models that reduce dependency on the CEO while increasing enterprise value.

Her career spans launching four successful companies, leading a regional turnaround, advising Fortune 500 organizations, serving as VP of Strategy for a $12B healthcare payer, and acting as CEO of a MedTech company. Across every role, her strength has been translating vision into results.

Karen is a Vistage Certified Speaker and trusted advisor across Healthcare, MedTech, Digital Technology, and Defense Technology. Grounded in purpose and passionate about wellness, she believes sustainable performance starts with clarity, discipline, and personal effectiveness.

 

March Meeting: Ryan Miller with Team Vertice

finola.annibella@yahoo.com

Team Vertice is a senior-led B2B marketing consultancy built by experienced operators who’ve led strategy, built pipeline, and driven revenue inside the walls of startups, scale-ups, and Fortune 50 enterprises.

Collectively, we’ve helped hundreds of B2B brands generate nearly $1BN in trackable revenue—through smart positioning, aligned go-to-market strategies, and marketing systems built for scale. We’ve led in high-growth environments, guided companies through transformation, and partnered with leadership teams to turn marketing from a cost center into a strategic growth function.

We bring the mindset of in-house executives with the flexibility of a consultancy. Whether the challenge is brand clarity, sales and marketing alignment, or scaling demand generation—we show up as embedded partners focused on what matters: driving results.

February Meeting: DJ Summers – Common Sense Institute

finola.annibella@yahoo.com

Presentation Outline

This discussion will examine the Colorado and the Denver metro area as it stands now. Most of the key metrics that defined the Front Range in the mi-2010s are markedly different now in the mid-2020s: demographics, growth rates and key economic indicators among them. The area’s future will depend on how leaders respond.

DJ Summers is Common Sense Institute’s Director of Communications & Research Operations. He oversees CSI fellows and research staff, coordinates with partners, iterates and analyzes projects and breaks down findings for the public, legislators and commercial leaders.

Prior to CSI, DJ attended the University of Utah and Syracuse University. He worked as a journalist, investigator and political researcher across the U.S. from Washington, D.C. to Alaska. DJ has a drive to understand complex truths and make them clear and accessible to the public and its leaders alike.

DJ lives in Denver and is a classically trained pianist. He devotes his spare time to practicing and studying music. When not at the piano bench, he has a regimen of strength training, combat sports and enjoying good Colorado beer.

Common Sense Institute is a non-partisan research organization dedicated to the protection and promotion of Colorado’s economy. CSI is at the forefront of important discussions concerning the future of free enterprise in Colorado and aims to have an impact on the issues that matter most to Coloradans. CSI’s mission is to examine the fiscal impacts of policies, initiatives, and proposed laws so that Coloradans are educated and informed on issues impacting their lives. CSI employs rigorous research techniques and dynamic modeling to evaluate the potential impact of these measures on the Colorado economy and individual opportunity.