Dawn Fotopulos | SpeakerHub

Personal Details

Bio

Dawn Fotopulos is the Professor of Business at The King’s College and author of Accounting for the Numberphobic: A Survival Guide for Small Business Owners (AMACOM).

As an experienced entrepreneur and small-business turnaround expert she has rescued hundreds of small businesses from financial disaster. She has been featured on MSNBC’s Your Business and at the New York Times Small Business Summit.

Current position (1)

Founder

Hidden Profit Academy

Degrees (2)

Management

NYU Stern School of Business

1998 to 1990

Business

Cornell University

1977 to 1980

Presentations

Presentations (10)

HOW TO KILL THE COMPANY IN FOUR WEEKS

There are millions of books that point the way to managing well, but few in business are listening. When Dawn Fotopulos challenges your employees to view how to guarantee failure in business, a "Screwtape Letters" approach to management, it forces their brains off of autopilot, makes audience members laugh and gets them to look squarely at reality in the mirror.

This presentation has received standing ovations in North America and Eastern Europe. Both for profit and nonprofit organizations have seen almost overnight results after they have heard these key, results-generating ideas. This talk can be presented as a customized 60-minute keynote, a 90 minute interactive breakout session or a hands-on, 3-hour workshop.

LEADERSHIP FOR INTROVERTS

Jim Collins of "Good to Great"fame says every company needs Level 5 leaders and that most are made, not born.

This presentation smashes common Western assumptions that leaders are extroverts, ego-driven and "out front."

This reaches managers at all levels of the organization to identify their Level 5 potentials and the unconventional people hidden in their organization, that if developed, could turbo-charge the future of the business.

Audiences will hear stories of underperformers becoming superstars, failing businesses hitting the J-curve; salespeople will overshoot expectations after hearing this talk! Humor, pathos, wit and world-class experience turning around 300 businesses with the content of this presentation.

If you care about future profits, and engaging the hearts and minds of your managers and staff, you cannot miss this!
Book Online

CUSTOMER SERVICES - THE KILLER APP

Based on Harvard Business School case studies and research, this talk gives managers and senior executives OMG revelations about how their Customer Service units are the single most important operating unit in their entire company.

Dawn shows audience members, by the numbers, how retention, repeat purchases and referrals will exponentially grow revenues and bottom line.

Using examples from Dell Computer, Service Master and Progressive Insurance Company, Dawn reveals how to leverage Customer Service representatives to make any company's client base bullet-proof to competition.

FINANCIAL LITERACY FOR NUMBERPHOBES

"My accountant deals with numbers..." "I'd rather spend the weekend with my mother-in-law!"

Few entrepreneurs like the numbers, but they ARE the global positioning satellite for running a business. Dawn takes accounting and makes it fun. Her goal: to double business survival rates. This program has been presented to accolades at the Levin Institute in New York City and Entrepreneur's Organization.

Independent sales people in real estate, travel, insurance and financial services don't understand they are business owners, not just sales people. Customized breakout sessions and workshops have been developed for these hired gun constituencies.

Participants will learn:

How to work half as hard and make twice the money
How to know if a client is profitable or not and how to build a profitable client portfolio
How to never forget how to tell if a product or service is profitable and what to do about it if it isn't.
Women in Business, incubators, Shark Tank-type pitch conferences are perfe

SALES BUDGET BOOGIE

How to build sales budgets that are aggressive, achievable, and relevant.

This talk is about strategy and is pitched to C-P level executives as well as field sales staff. It will take the audience through a bottoms up approach to sales budget development to get corporate and field staff on the same page.

Sales goals will become a shared vision and not just a tops down exercise in futility.

My experience as a line manager of a $130 million dollar business at Citigroup and 25 years as a consultant to major profit and non-profit companies will be used as examples of what is possible in their organizations.

The companies who apply these proprietary principles will achieve more, make more money and retain their best sales staff.

CASH IS NOT KING - IT'S EMPEROR!

This talk was originally given in webinar format for Cox Small Business Network. If blood is to your body as cash is to your business, then managing cash is mission critical.

Few businesses do this well. Dawn's award-winning book, "Accounting for the Numberphobic; A Survival Guide for Small Business Owners," AMACOM Books (Best Business Book of 2015 Small Business Trends) is the guiding text for this talk that has saved hundreds of businesses from bankruptcy.

How to negotiate the purchase order, pricing and payment terms upfront
Your invoice is a marketing tool- use it!
Keeping track of who owes you money
Collecting without a migraine
Business owners and managers have said, "I took your advice and I actually got paid! I couldn't believe it!"

HOW DISNEYLAND TRAINS STREET SWEEPERS

Too often we look at the big picture forgetting that impressions and memories are made on the ground in the small interactions. The Disney Company understands this profoundly. Everyone from the lowest paid to the highest paid is trained, as part of their corporate culture, to engage, listen and respond to visitors.

This includes answering questions, providing directions, making suggestions for the best photo op, the best ice cream and planning ahead to watch to end of day parade.

This talk uses Disney's ethos and applies it to the travel and tourism industry's "boots on the ground" for education, inspiration and application. These are the building blocks for creating an unforgettable visitor experience in ways that don't require large monetary investments.

EXPECTATIONS VS. REALITY

"I've always wanted to...." Visit a part of the world, climb a mountain, go zip lining through the rainforest, see how the best wine in the world is made, visit the Pacific Coast, rugged and unspoiled. When someone has a dream they have expectations in their mind as to what the reality will be like. Most expectations are built on dreams not reality. Most expectations are never met.

But what if we could understand our visitors so well, that the reality is far better than anything they could have ever expected? What if we could find ways to welcome visitors so warmly that they had a tear in their eye when they went home knowing they left a part of themselves behind?

This talk is designed to help all facets of the travel and tourism industry stop telling and selling and start listening to the experience your visitors are aching for but can't articulate. It's a new way of engaging a tourist and helping them feel like an insider soon after they arrive.

ARE YOU A HOST OR AN AMBASSADOR?

Hosts are busy people. There's a lot to do when a visitor arrives either to slumber, tour, explore or dine. What if there's a new way of being when they arrive? What if the real hospitality comes from the "how" you do what you do instead of "what"? This talk will inspire travel and tourism professionals to think of themselves in a completely different way and to treat their visitors like honored guests, not just revenue streams.

Ambassadors are standard bearers; they are keepers of the reputation of a region with history, culture, and promise. Every ambassador in the world reveres history's significance, records the present for posterity and invests in the future to bequeath to the next generation. This inspiring talk will convert participants from hosts to ambassadors with a renewed vision for the importance of their role and new and creative ways to embrace it fully.

THE ULTIMATE GUIDE FOR REPEAT VISITORS

All tourists are moving away from something and toward something else- "bucket lists" "dream vacations" and "a day in the life" are all about aspirations before we leave this planet.

All humans need a way to beam out of their everyday lives to reach for something extraordinary, beautiful, inspiring, refreshing and memorable. The travel and tourism industry is the only industry that has the capability of making dreams accessible to everyone, even people on a budget or those who are not seasoned travelers. Life is not just about "rise and grind". There's beauty, music, vistas, unconquered territory that speaks to our souls.

Instead of "selling" new visitors, let's inspire them, woo them, and hear and capture their stories so we can inspire others with them. And instead of tourists, let's convert them into locals by the time they leave.