Welcome to the Carrie Newhoff Leadership Podcast. A podcast all about leadership

change and personal growth. The goal? To help you lead like never before in your church or in your business.

And now your host, Carrie Newhoff.

Well, hey everybody and welcome to episode 273 of the podcast.

My name is Carrie Newhoff.

And I hope our time together today helps you lead

like never before.

One of the things I love about being able to do,

what I do is I get to meet some fascinating people with incredible

stories and I know we have a ton of young leaders listening whether that's in the

church world the marketplace and a lot of the times it's very easy early on you know to have like no idea where your life is going and no idea what's possible that's why I think you're going to love today's interview I'm sitting down with Ron Kitchens. He has a

fascinating story. He grew up as he'll share with next to nothing and he has gone

on to found one of the greatest employers in the entire Midwest,

Southwest Michigan First and Economic Consulting firm, which just creates literally

tens of thousands of jobs.

He's the founder of the Leadership Conference

catalyst university, co-founder of Next.

Ron and his team have been extensively featured

in places like the Wall Street Journal Fast Company, CBS, NBC, Fox, USA Today, Forbes Fortune, The Economist,

and National Public Radio. He's an author and his company has been recognized as one of the top five best places to work in America

as well as a national brightest and best company back in 2016. Ron's a fascinating guy and is a bit of a leadership

guru himself but he would have never known that when he was growing up and I

...