Pat Thielke - CEO 1Spire and Consumer Solutions

• Pat Thielke - CEO of 1Spire and Consumer Solutions
• What organization has constantly visible leadership? The military.
• That’s where his career started.
• He dove into a mess, and found a creative way to inspire people to do better at what they did. The military would have a scoreboard, and people who did well rose up and the failures became the butt of jokes. It worked ridiculously well.
• You’re not leading so that someone pats you on the back. The best leader would make the people feel that they accomplished the work themselves. When you do things right, people won’t know you did anything at all.
• One of his factory lines made diapers, and a leader decided they needed that line moved to Bogota. Pat advised against it but they did it anyway and the line sat in customs for almost a year. It rusted, and it was a contributing factor for that company running out of business.
• Since 2000, he’s been starting up companies. Bootstrapping : Generating sales to promote the company to move further. Actively avoiding funding, no debt.
• 1spire has introduced a new form of mobile advertisement. Don’t assume because your fundraiser is successful you can just spend that and not look for more funds. You will fail. You also don’t want to abuse your support system.