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Liz Bohannon

Founder & CEO of Socially Conscious Fashion Brand, Sseko Designs
Bestselling author of Beginner's Pluck
Passionate about building community and helping others build lives and businesses of purpose, passion, and impact

Full Bio

In Person-Fee 🛈

$20,000 - $30,000

Virtual Fee:

$10,000 - $15,000

Travels From

Oregon

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Liz Bohannon | Speaker Reel

Mindset & Luck - Liz Bohannon // Author & Co-Founder/CEO, Sseko Designs

Liz Bohannon - Building Your Life of Purpose and Impact // OCEAN Conference 2019

Liz Bohannon – Beginner's Pluck | Leadership Collab 2019

Liz Bohannon Speaker Biography

Organizations continue to face rapidly changing work environments, sales teams who are stuck in analysis paralysis, and the urgent need to rethink business models, products, and services to meet the changing needs of their customers. But what Plucky Leaders know is that inside these challenges you can find the greatest opportunity to pivot, progress, and innovate, and that’s exactly what Founder and CEO of Sseko Designs did and how she and her team created a massively successful turnaround story in the height of the pandemic.

Like many businesses experienced, March 2020 showed record low sales and revenue for Sseko Designs. But by May, not only was Sseko back up to baseline, they had surpassed their revenue goals by over 100%. How was this possible?!?! By taking her team through the principles in her Bestselling Book, Beginner’s Pluck: Build Your Life of Purpose & Impact Now, Liz helped her team reclaim their Pluck by choosing to get curious and tap their inner beginner. Organizations around the world are using Plucky Principles like Dream Small and Own Your Average to smash sales goals, drive innovation, and build teams focused on passion, purpose, and impact.

Liz Bohannon is the Founder and CEO of socially conscious fashion brand Sseko Designs, which she founded in 2008 as a way to provide educational and economic opportunities for women in East Africa.

Liz shares the lessons learned from her 10-year journey growing Sseko from three women under a mango tree, into a successful international fashion brand that provides employment, educational and entrepreneurial opportunities to thousands of women across the globe.

Her story is filled with lessons for success that are grounded in the principle of having a beginner’s mind, which Liz sums up in her new book, Beginner’s Pluck: Build Your Life of Purpose and Impact Now. In it, as in her presentations, she shares uncommon ideas toward success like, Own Your Average, Stop Trying to Find Your Passion…Create It, and Dream Small so you can do big things. Liz continues to channel her inner beginner as she manages 100s of employees across multiple continents, and her mindset sets her apart as a courageous, creative and effective leader.

The Sseko story has been featured in dozens of publications including, Vogue Magazine, Redbook Magazine, O Magazine, Inc., Fortune and others. Sseko has appeared on national broadcasts including ABC’s Shark Tank and Good Morning America.

Among other notable honors, Liz was named a Top Three Transformation Leader by John Maxwell, Forbes listed her as a top 20 public speaker in the U.S. and Bloomberg Businessweek named Sseko as a top social enterprise to watch.

Liz now splits her time between Uganda and Portland, Oregon, where she and her husband Ben run Sseko Designs and raise their two young sons.

Beginner’s Pluck: Crushing Goals with A Beginner’s Mindset

Investing in the future takes a good deal of conviction and purposefulness which many people are seeking as we emerge from the past few challenging years, but where to begin? Besides being the Founder and CEO of socially conscious fashion brand Sseko Designs, Liz Bohanan is a difference maker in this world. By sharing her unique story of applying a Beginner’s Mind to everything she does, Liz shows how this mindset will help you escape the normal constraints that hold you back and give you new pathways to pivot, innovate and ultimately transform toward any goal. The power of her personal story building a multi-million dollar, socially conscious brand with purpose and impact will inspire you and motivate you to take action!

By exploring some of the key principles from her Bestselling Book, Beginner’s Pluck: Build Your Life of Purpose & Impact Now, Liz will challenge you to dream small so you can start doing instead of dreaming, and show how curiosity over criticism fuels innovation. She sets the stage for your personal journey down the ultimate path of success by weaving passion & purpose into every goal. The three words she lives by are purpose, passion and impact and you can learn to make these a part of your everyday thinking as well.

Key Takeaways

Become a Problem Finder - Turn your world inside out. By challenging your Inner Beginner, you'll become less overwhelmed with finding the solution and you find new power by first starting with identifying the most interesting problems facing your customers and your community.
Dream Small / Achieve BIG – Counterintuitively, when we give ourselves and our people permission to dream small and ACT on those dreams, we create the momentum we need to do BIG things in the world.
Reconnect With Your Purpose - Purpose is the “why” that should always be considered first and foremost. When unexpected curveballs are thrown your way, the strongest unifier and innovation-inducer is going back to the basics and embracing a renewed sense of purpose. You don't find your purpose, you build it. And Liz will teach you how.

Beginner’s Pluck: Collaboration Beats Competition Every Time

Since its founding, Sseko Designs, led by transformation speaker and entrepreneur Liz Bohannon, has generated tens of millions of dollars in impact revenue, created dignified, fair-wage jobs for thousands of artisans globally, and enabled hundreds of female scholars in developing economies to continue on to university and become leaders in the their communities and our world. None of this would have been possible if Liz had not had the vision to see that sometimes working together to solve a problem results in much more immediate success than going it alone. Liz can offer a clarity of conviction and inspire the audience to find a new purposefulness in the way in which they do their work.

Liz shares with the audience how she is living out her values of choosing collaboration over competition as Sseko Designs merged with their biggest competitor, Noonday Collection to form the world’s largest impact-driven, fair-trade social selling brand. Liz details that after leading thousands of key stakeholders through an intensive M&A change management process, she is even more committed to leading with the principles of stakeholder buy-in, emotional intelligence, vulnerability and co-creation.

Key Takeaways

Become a Collaborator - Turn your world inside out. By challenging your view and thinking about potential ways to work with others, you'll become less overwhelmed with tackling your problems and find new power by first starting to identify the most interesting ways to potentially collaborate with your community, your competitors and maybe even your customers!
Find a New Way to Dream – When we give ourselves permission to creatively dream and then ACT on that out-of-the box thinking, we create the momentum we need to do BIG things in the world.
Connect With Your Purpose - Purpose is the “why” that should always be considered first and foremost. When unexpected curveballs are thrown your way, the strongest unifier and innovation-inducer is going back to the basics, embracing a renewed sense of purpose and possibly even teaming with a competitor. You don't find your purpose, you build it. And Liz will teach you how.

It's Longely At The Top (But it's really about the company we keep!)
Leadership can be an isolating experience. The daily pressure to perform, wrestle with gut-wrenching decisions, and drive hard conversations all weigh on a leader’s soul. Overcoming what can often become a self-fulfilling prophecy of the lonely leader is not only crucial to your survival but also to those you lead.