Light that spark fire nation, JLD here and welcome to entrepreneurs on fire brought to you by the HubSpot podcast network with great shows like ABM conversations.

Today we'll be talking about empowering people, creating value and driving change to draw these value bombs.

I brought John Swigart into EO Fire Studios.

John was named a 2020 mid-Atlantic entrepreneur of the year, has been responsible for overseeing all aspects of pie since its establishment in May of 2017.

He brings over 20 years of experience and tech enabled insurance and financial services businesses.

Today we'll be chatting about a differentiator in insurance.

We'll talk about how to innovate in a dinosaur industry and we'll also talk about how to maintain high octane growth without getting eaten alive by it.

So much more when we get back from thinking our sponsors.

The My First Million Podcast features famous guests, discusses how companies made their first million in brainstorms, new business ideas based on the hottest trends and opportunities in the marketplace.

One recent app was all about how venture capitalists make money, listen to My First Million, wherever you get your podcasts.

John, say what's up to Fire Nation and share something that you believe about becoming successful that most people disagree with.

Hello Fire Nation, thanks so much for having me on. I'm really excited to be here today.

I guess something that I believe in that maybe not everybody would think of is I think the first and second primary drivers of any person's success are grace and blessings and the third would be what you end up doing with those things.

We are a product of the blessings that we've been given and that's the first and most important thing.

And this goes right in line Fire Nation with our conversation today about empowering people creating value in driving change and John, you have a pretty unique journey going from CMO to the CEO.

Share that journey with us and break down how you actually navigated both of these very different but important roles.

My journey in the executive positions actually started as a CFO and I went from CFO to CMO and then to founder CMO.

And I think the most important element on there and frankly one of the drivers of why I was able to make these transitions is I try to keep a growth mindset focused on learning, acquiring knowledge and experience and then applying that experience in ways that I value in a unique context.

Obviously those are all from the outside very different roles, you know, very analytical, very financial on the CFO side wanting to be much closer touch with customers on the chief marketing officer side and then being responsible for the full culture, people development team development customer development as a founder CEO.

But they're really all actually integrated. I think how you bring in an analytical mindset into being a CMO and a CEO is very important and how you stay in touch with customers, even as a CFO and certainly as a CEO is really important as well.

So it's it all comes down to focusing on growth, focusing on learning and then constantly finding ways to apply that learning and knowledge and experience into value added ways and where the value add is really driving customer value add.

So I talked about this a little bit in the introduction when I was going over what you've done thus far and I want to move on to pie.

...