Liz Bohannon | Founder & CEO of Socially Conscious Fashion Brand Sseko Designs and Best Selling Author of Beginner's Pluck

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Liz Bohannon

Founder & CEO of Socially Conscious Fashion Brand Sseko Designs and Best Selling Author of Beginner's Pluck

Liz Bohannon
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 encourages her team to focus on through any challenge.

Liz Bohannon is the Founder and CEO of socially conscious fashion brand Sseko Designs, which she founded in 2009 as a way to provide educational and economic opportunities for women in East Africa, while creating a brand of beautifully designed and sustainably conscious products from jewelry, to clothes, shoes and handbags.

In 2020, just as the pandemic turned every business upside down, Liz and her team surpassed their business goals by over 100% because she guided them through the principles in her Bestselling Book, Beginner’s Pluck: Build Your Life of Purpose & Impact Now, where she helped her team reclaim their curiosity and apply a beginner’s mindset to creating a new revenue stream that exploded sales.  

Organizations around the world are using Plucky Principles like Dream Small, Become a Problem Finder, and Own Your Average to smash sales goals, drive innovation, and build teams focused on passion, purpose, and impact.

Liz shares the lessons learned from her 10-year journey growing Sseko from three women under a mango tree, into a successful international 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, and in her keynote presentations she shares uncommon ideas toward success like, Own Your Average and Stop Trying to Find Your Passion…Create so you can do big things. Liz continues to channel her inner beginner as she manages 100s of employees across multiple continents, 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 Bohannon
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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.

Liz Bohannon
Featured Book

Beginner's Pluck: Build Your Life of Purpose and Impact Nowby Liz Bohannon

Beginner's Pluck: Build Your Life of Purpose and Impact Now

by Liz Bohannon

There's no lack of people out there telling you to find your passion and dream big. But why does it seem like when we try, we so often end up more lost and overwhelmed than when we started?

Liz Forkin Bohannon wants you to rethink everything you've been told about finding your passion and following your dreams. Why? Hate to break it to you, but you're likely never going to "find your passion." Because your passion and purpose are something you build--actively--day by day. In her signature tell-it-like-it-is fashion, Liz shares 14 actionable principles that will teach you how to do just that. With total transparency, Liz shares hilarious and heartbreaking stories of her journey of screwups and successes that illustrate the mindsets and principles that will give you a jolt of energy, inspiration, and direction toward your True North. By embracing your Inner Beginner, dreaming small, choosing curiosity over criticism, and so much more, Liz's story and the principles of Beginner's Pluck will have you on your way to building a life of purpose, passion, and lasting impact.

Ready to rise to the occasion? It's time to make this life everything you want it to be.

******

"Brave, practical, and true, Liz shares her magical journey for anyone brave enough (and generous enough) to want to go on the journey of a lifetime."--Seth Godin

"I met Liz more than a decade ago in Gulu, Uganda. Beginner's Pluck is a thoughtful book about what Liz has been strategically doing in the world, not merely optimistically hoping for. Her authentic voice is one I trust because I've seen what she's done. As you flip these pages, you won't want to be more like Liz. Instead, you'll want to figure out what your next steps are to release your passions, hopes, and love into a world which is in desperate need of someone just like you to engage it."--Bob Goff, hon. consul for the Republic of Uganda and author New York Times bestsellers Love Does and Everybody Always

"I am SO VERY GLAD this book exists. We have long needed Liz's expert voice speaking into the minds of dreamers and doers, the ones who have the ideas and want to execute, and the ones who are exhaustedly executing. We want purpose in our day, and Liz does it with her life and teaches it here."--Annie F. Downs, bestselling author of 100 Days to Brave and Remember God

Liz Bohannon
Featured Reviews

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Organizations face rapidly changing work environments, sales teams stuck in analysis paralysis, and the urgent need to rethink business models, products, and services to meet...
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