The 10 Most Disruptive Business Leaders to Watch in 2022_Profile Archives

Mike Van Pelt: Helping Men Gain Control of Their Lives

Meet Mike Van Pelt, the founder of True Man Life Coaching and the host & Creator of the True Man Podcast. Mike’s passion and experience in coaching, guiding, and mentoring men have come from his earlier involvement in leading Christian men’s groups, along with his own journey to redirect his life journey and achieve success. Mike brings over two decades of deep organizational expertise and thought leadership in account management, consulting, and leadership development. He has a B.A. degree in Business Leadership and a Master’s degree in Public Administration (MPA) from the University of Arizona.

Known as the “Comeback Coach,” Mike founded True Man Life Coaching as a specialized coaching service to help others reach their maximum potential and achieve excellence. Mike’s primary purpose in starting True Man Life Coaching was to assist men who have misinterpreted the directions of their lives. He believes men want success and satisfaction in each and every area of their lives and are looking for a roadmap of discovery back to their true minds and hearts. His goal is to become an instrument of guidance and healing to lift the heavy heart loads that many men carry with them every day.

Helping Men Gain Control of Their Lives

Initially, Mike started his business as a business consultant, helping small businesses plan for success. However, during the Covid pandemic, he pivoted into men’s life coaching, because it offered a much more personal way to walk alongside men and help them find their way in business and life.

Mike works mainly with men who are at the midpoint in their lives. He believes that this is a crucial time in a man’s life because many have regrets or wounds from their past, and they are ready to move in a new direction. Often, they are looking to recover from these past wounds and are beginning to consider their legacy and how they want to make a positive impact. The greatest satisfaction Mike has is seeing the light come on in a client when he begins to understand his full potential.

“If you need help, raise your hand and ask for help. If you have good people around you, they will show up to help you. If they don’t, change the people around you.”

Under Mike’s leadership, True Man Life Coaching offers 1-on-1 coaching, small group coaching, and mastermind groups. It also provides coaching services to businesses and organizations looking to coach their employees from a Christian perspective.

Standing Apart

Mike’s ability to listen to what’s on a man’s heart and mind and help them process the outcome they want during the coaching process sets him apart from other coaches. While this might sound simple, in a world flooded with coaches, Mike seeks out the answers men already have inside them. He helps his clients reflect on and refocus their past experiences and find the answers they need to create a new roadmap.

The Biggest Accomplishment

Initially, Mike had to zero in on how to best connect with potential clients on the True Man Podcast. This podcast helps Mike reach his audience weekly and talk about topics that are important to men on their life journey.

The True Man Podcast has provided an excellent opportunity for Mike’s potential clients and strategic partners to hear, know, like, and trust him before making a business decision to work together. Mike has also expanded this to a YouTube channel to further bolster his outreach.

Currently, Mike is working on his first book and planning for the first True Man Men’s Summit in 2023. Along with his book and the summit, Mike is available to speak at any Christian or business event. In addition, Mike is a regular guest on other podcasts, speaks at business and professional conferences, and strategically partners with other leaders who share a similar passion and focus.

In addition to being a coach, Mike is happily married to Jill, his wife and best friend of 26 years. They are also proud parents of two talented teenagers. When not coaching, Mike enjoys spending time at one of many family activities or getting in a quick round of golf with friends.

Arun Prasad: Enabling Businesses to Operate Effeciently

Meet Arun Prasad, the CEO of Money Convey, a technology platform providing blockchain solutions for institutional and individual clients to meet their financial demands and provide new opportunities to maximize their potential. Money Convey is the Oracle Corporation for Web 3. It offers businesses access to its scalable, privacy-enabled layer 1 blockchain network. The blockchain network’s value proposition lies in its architecture, which enables customization, scalability, and flexibility to deploy low-cost privacy-focussed blockchain applications.

Money Convey’s blockchain infrastructure is designed to help institutions utilize their data most efficiently. It also helps to communicate quickly, solve interoperability problems, and manage digital identity.

The Farsighted Leader

As the organization’s CEO, Arun brings his technical expertise to the table, enabling businesses to operate efficiently and validate data for their process movement. Arun completed his Master’s degree from New York University in Industrial Engineering. During his time at NYU, he served as the president of the Tandon Consulting Club, which incubates students for consulting roles. As the club’s President, Arun organized several corporate events and seminars, which kept him closer to students.

Before pursuing his Master’s degree, Arun managed Priyaa Groups, his family’s apparel business in India, which grew 10x and expanded to multiple new locations under his leadership. Now, as a New Yorker, Arun has his eyes set on helping institutional and individual clients with blockchain technology and founded Money Convey in 2022 to do that.

“My grandmother had Diabetes, and I have seen her go through various treatments all my years growing up. The issue is that the body learns to adapt to the medicines, and in conditions like Diabetes, the number of organs failing increases over time,”- Arun said. “Therefore, physicians need to work on new techniques and technology that could not solve a growing problem. That led me to a quest to find a better technique that could accommodate growing technology to solve new problems. Blockchain was the solution for the quest.”

When the Pandemic Presented an Opportunity

Arun came to the U.S. during the pandemic in September 2020. While the pandemic was terrible for most, it gave him a level playing field. “The Pandemic gave the opportunity for people to explore more technology and learn more about blockchain. The awareness towards the technology we offer has grown exponentially throughout the pandemic.”– He said.

Online networking helped Arun as an entrepreneur as it allowed him to talk to experts through virtual meetups, which would not be possible in person. The pandemic also resulted in massive investments in the healthcare system, giving rise to startups that need Money Convey’s technology. Presently the organization is working with several startups focused on providing a better solution for their users and helping them achieve groundbreaking solutions through its blockchain technology.

“I consider my team as my greatest achievement; building a team based completely out of New York and talent coming from prestigious universities is something that I feel is an achievement.”– Arun stated.

The X Factor

Money Convey’s business works on network effects. With one client, it can engage with other clients of theirs. Moreover, as the company focuses on data management, its network effect will be stronger due to the overall increase in data usage since the pandemic.

Though a startup, Money Convey maintains the standards of an established company in anything it does. The organization spends a lot of its resources on R&D, supporting and customizing tailor-made solutions for its clients. It has built an architecture that serves the needs of enterprises. Lastly, it has a strong management team with prior experience building and managing companies.

Eyeing the Future

Being the founder of Money Convey, Arun is still working on developing the technology that helps businesses grow and thrive without long waiting times and errors while ensuring better security, accessibility, interoperability, and traceability. Under Arun’s leadership, Money Convey aspires to design a blockchain network that is deliberately cultivated so that these networks can forge connections across platforms, spread information, and spark collaborative actions. As a result, the organization can address sprawling issues in ways that none can accomplish.

Ivette Torres Carías: Creating Exceptional Brand Loyalty

Meet Ivette Torres Carías, the Regional Business Development Manager at Webhelp Onelink, a premier partner in outsourced omnichannel customer experience services. Webhelp’s primary purpose is to revolutionize the BPO industry through innovation, entrepreneurial spirit, and happiness culture, generating value for its associates, clients, and the community.

Founded in Paris, Webhelp is now located throughout Latin America, supporting some of the biggest brands spread across the U.S, Latin America, and Europe. Webhelp’s values of happiness, leadership, engagement, innovation, excellence, and solidarity are the basis of which its employees approach their work and life.

Alongside its Game-Changing Culture, Webhelp brings a complete portfolio of services, focusing on BPO, automation, thriving for conversations, and development of self-service to reduce digital effort and drive customer autonomy, positioning self-service, chatbots, and voice bots. It also connects channels and systems for seamless, digital customer journeys anywhere, anytime. The firm utilizes omnichannel, messaging, video chat, and platform integration. Webhelp focuses on bot interactions and customer experience efficiency to help with quicker and more personalized experiences, introducing machine translation, voice transformation, RPAs, and email automation. Most importantly, Webhelp’s team learns from its customers’ voices to improve quality and provide actionable insights using best-in-class monitoring, voice recording, transcription, speech, and analytics.

A Dedicated Leader

As a Business Engineer with a master’s degree in Business Management, Ivette loves to learn, which has been a crucial part of her personal and professional life. Presently she is pursuing a degree in Theology and learning Portuguese as her third language. During the third year of her associate’s degree, she liked the dynamic daily life of a project manager and decided to dedicate her life to project management.

“I have built my career in the business development field designing solutions and supporting the commercial process inside Webhelp, this year is my fifth anniversary, and I am happy with the path that I had the privilege to walk; I started as a project manager in 2017 and based on the different opportunities and the support of my leaders and mentors I am now part of the leadership in our PMO.”– Says Ivette.

Aside from her professional career, Ivette loves serving in several volunteering programs. Initially, she started volunteering in High School as a math teacher. Later she got an opportunity to work for a program in her local community where she could work with specially-abled people. Before that, Ivette hadn’t had the necessary opportunity to interact with the community, which opened a new world for her. She discovered several different techniques to teach and learn.

“In life, there are good days and challenges; I invite you to create opportunities for the people around you and find something that fills your purpose in life. I always say that you can find a purpose by identifying one problem that annoys you the most and work each day until it is less of a problem and more of a solution.”

Ivette now teaches them not only how to read and write but also math and other subjects, which can help them get a high-school diploma. Currently, she is also a part of a church program to reduce illiteracy among people with special abilities.

A Team Effort

As a passionate team player, Ivette knows that her greatest accomplishment is a team effort. She says, “I have a team of 8 members that I am beyond proud of; seeing them grow, learn, and lead has been the most rewarding experience in my career so far.”

Webhelp recruits talents at an entry-level level, and Ivette knows how they face their fears and build their voices. Her role is to support them and remind them what they can do. She doesn’t take it as her accomplishment as when she was provided with the challenge of leading a team at a very young age; she also had doubts, fears, and second thoughts about it, but now she has realized that a bit of encouragement has the most significant impact of all and it also helps put people on charge.

When the Pandemic Bought New opportunities

Ivette believes the pandemic bought a lot of opportunities for the BPO industry. The pandemic halted face-to-face interaction to a large extent, which escalated the need for remote assistance worldwide.

“A lot of companies needed a solution to Customer Service, and others had to learn how to sell remotely, and on fortune, we had that portfolio of solutions.”– Ivette states.

During the pandemic, Webhelp changed one of its major clients’ path in digital transformation and moved their interaction to 50% digital. This eventually helped the company achieve brilliant results and reduce overall billing by 15%.

Webhelp is well known for its tailor-made services. Irrespective of the industry, product, or location, Webhelp has a solution to improve its customer’s journey. Now with years of experience, the organization is ready to accommodate its services to a different reality.

The Primary Differentiator

Ivette believes that Webhelp’s primary differentiator is its people. She says, “The culture, mindset, and vision we have as a company impact the services we provide.”

Ivette still remembers her first day when she met someone at C-level who said, “we take care of you to be at 200% of your personal life so you can be 100% inside our company.” At that point, she understood that the company’s culture is entirely focused on its employees as a person, and the contributions they make to the company are secondary.

Eyeing the Future

Webhelp is focusing on transitioning from traditional channels to digital and self-service platforms, including the human touch, as it wants to have a holistic approach. With offices in 8 countries, providing services to different regions, Webhelp will continue to develop other solutions and expand its service portfolios, such as Content Moderation, Data Annotation, and B2B Sales, among others, to provide an end-to-end solution to its clients with a customer-centric focus.