Digital Chatter Episode #015: Amy WaningerEric Sharpe: Hello and welcome everyone to another edition of Digital Chatter. This week I have my, uh, my guest is Amy Waninger, who is someone who I've never met before, but she is the CEO of Lead at Any Level. Amy, go ahead and say hi to everyone.Amy Waninger: Hello! Thanks for having me, Eric.Eric Sharpe: Yeah, you're welcome. So, Amy we got introduced actually through through someone who you've never met as well, but I started looking through what you do and who you are and I thought you were a perfect example of an entrepreneur and a CEO. I'd like for you to tell everyone a little bit about what you do.Amy Waninger: Sure. So I work with organizations that want to build diverse leadership bench strength for a sustainable competitive advantage. And My, um, my. I have programs, I've written three books, I do live training events and um, yeah. A little bit of consulting and just kind of all around diverse leadership bench strength.Eric Sharpe: Well that's a, first of all, that's a phenomenal 32nd pitch right there. I think you've clocked that in just under a 25 seconds.Amy Waninger: So I probably should have stopped at the ten second mark. I'm working on it.Eric Sharpe: It's great. It's great. So I mean, that's a lot of stuff. And, and uh, you know, for, you know, for, for someone young like yourself. I mean, that's, that's incredible.Amy Waninger: Bless you for that.Eric Sharpe: You've, you've accomplished a lot, you know. Tell me a little bit more about how you got into your business, you know, what, what led you from starting out as the younger version of yourself as to, you know, and lead us along the path as to how you got to where you are now.Amy Waninger: Sure. So I'll try to make the long story not so long, but about three years ago, two or three years ago, I went to my first ever conference. And you know, I'm older and I can't believe I got this far in my career without ever going to a conference. But when I went it just opened my eyes to this whole world outside of, you know, my city and my, um, my company into this broader industry. And I thought, wow, this is amazing. And as I'm watching people on stage, I thought I want to do that, I want to give something back to the industry. And I, you know, I always wanted to be in theater but I couldn't sing and if he couldn't sing you couldn't be in theater because they don't want you. Right. And I got that would be such a great way for me to be in front of people and kind of scratch that itch of wanting to be on stage and not having to sing, which is excellent. I really wanted to do something. I wanted to create something original. I didn't want to regurgitate to people books that I had read. And so I submitted for that conference. I submitted a proposal that was accepted and then I had to come up with an hour's worth of content based on three bullet points, which was terrifying. Right? Because I had never done this before.Eric Sharpe: Yeah, I mean, so this is your first, really your first chance to do a, I mean, almost like keynote style talk.Amy Waninger: Yeah. And so I panicked a little bit and I was like, oh, I got to do this or I got to figure it out. So somebody believes in this message. And I knew I wanted to speak specifically about diversity and inclusion because it's so important in the insurance industry where I was working, um, because there's just such a talent shortage and we have such a reputation in insurance of being, you know, old white men sitting around a table hurrumphing. And I know that not to be true, but it's hard to get people to recognize the need. So because the audience was so diverse in terms of roles and responsibilities, tenure and authority, I had to create the topic that was relevant to everybody in that audience. So it might be a, you know, a claims adjuster who was just out of school or it might be someone who was, um, you know, the,