The Sweeney Agency

About Tommy Spaulding – Leadership and Communication Speaker:

Tommy Spaulding is president of The Spaulding Companies LLC, a national leadership development, consulting, and speaking organization. Tommy Spaulding's career is built on valuable, authentic relationships and communication. More than an expert on networking, he inspires his audiences through his personal stories of connecting with individuals on a level that is more than business-card deep. A dyslexic student who in 2005 rose to lead one of the world's largest nonprofit leadership organizations, Up with People, Spaulding teaches audiences how to achieve greater success through forming deeper, more authentic relationships with customers, employees and clients. He has lived on four continents working as a global ambassador in various capacities, traveling to more than 60 countries. His new book, It’s Not Just Who You Know (Transform Your Life and Your Organization by Turning Colleagues and Contacts into Lasting, Genuine Relationships), published by Random House, is a New York Times, Wall Street Journal and USA Today national bestseller.

Before taking the help of Up with People, Spaulding founded Leader’s Challenge in 2000, which grew to become the largest high school civic and leadership program in the State of Colorado. Spaulding is also the co-founder of The Center for Third Sector Excellence, a non-profit executive leadership and management program and the founder of the National Leadership Academy. He also founded an annual leadership conference called Dialogue for Tomorrow that promotes global leadership by bringing international leaders together to share best practices and to empower the next generation of leaders.

Spaulding has been the Business Partner Sales Manager at IBM/Lotus Development and a member of the Japan Exchange and Teaching (JET) program where he worked directly with the volunteers and staff of the 1996 Nagano Winter Olympic Games. He served as a U.S. Congressional Intern and a member of Bob Dole’s 1996 presidential campaign staff.

Spaulding received a BA in Political Science from East Carolina University (1992); an MBA from Bond University in Australia (1998), where he was a Rotary Ambassadorial Scholar; and an MA in Non-Profit Management from Regis University (2005), where he was a Colorado Trust Fellow. In 2007 Spaulding received an Honorary PhD in Humanities from the Art Institute of Colorado.

In 2002, he received the prestigious Denver Business Journal’s Forty under 40 Award.

What Tommy Spauling Talks About:

Tommy Spaulding’s keynote addresses inspire audiences and teach them how to achieve unprecedented professional and personal success by forming deeper, more authentic relationships with customers, employees, clients, and other key stakeholders. His sincerity, warmth, and humor unfailingly move his audiences, leaving them eager to put his ideas into action. With his inspirational yet practical delivery, Tommy shares heartwarming and humorous stories from life and business to illustrate how genuine and lasting relationships can grow your organization, advance your career, and change your world.

Leadership: A relationship between those who inspire and those who act
How do we accomplish extraordinary things as leaders? The quality of our relationships determines whether we simply reach a goal or inspire greatness. The success of any organization is grounded in the formation of sustainable relationships. In this keynote, Spaulding illustrates how to build relationship capital throughout your organization so internal teams maximize their potential and external constituencies and stakeholders share your vision. Spaulding also explores groundbreaking leadership techniques such as building Fifth Floor Teams, and leveraging the Laws of Influence and Elevation.

Customer sales and service: What does it mean to focus on ROR instead of ROI?
It’s impossible to build a successful client base in a silo. In other words, relationships are not optional. Though economists talk only of Return on Investment or ROI, Spaulding argues that profit and relationships are interdependent. Return on Relationships or ROR is the currency we should focus on rather than solely on ROI, because if we are truly focusing on relationships, the bottom line goals come more easily. In this keynote, Spaulding shares his secrets behind the notion of Return on Relationships or ROR, leaving audiences ready to revolutionize their old methods and reach new heights in customer stability and loyalty.

Team building: Improve employee morale, reduce turnover and mobilize your teams
Unengaged employees cost companies and organizations billions of dollars. Research tells us that employees who don’t have relationships on the job will negatively impact the bottom line. If we are to build sustainable organizations in a modern economy, we must differentiate ourselves by building meaningful ties with and among employees. Spaulding demonstrates a helpful first through fifth floor analogy for evaluating your business relationships and has audiences looking at their workplace with a different lens—a lens that sheds new light on how to mobilize their colleagues and inspire shared success.

Achieving organizational excellence: Empower and elevate yourself and others around you by transforming your approach with people
This is not a keynote address that espouses the merits of good networking. In fact, it discourages it. Spaulding provides real examples and strategies for elevating your current personal and business relationships and how to launch new ones in the spirit of giving rather than taking. In this keynote, Spaulding explores the nine essential traits that empower audiences to reach their full potential through a bold approach called netgiving. Netgiving is about intentionally making business personal and as a result, facilitating personal performance and realization of goals.