🎙️ Welcome to Dynamic Decisions – where the best decisions start with great conversations.
Hosted by Teasha Cable, CEO of CModel, this show dives into the stories, strategies, and decisions behind some of the most innovative leaders in business today. Each episode, we sit down with visionaries wh
Jessica Olives has spent more than fifteen years inside nonprofit and public sector governance, including the Port of Seattle, King County Housing Authority, and the Reno-Tahoe Airport Authority. Now she runs Mission Match, a nationwide platform where nonprofits search for board members by expertise, location, and cause instead of waiting for someone to answer a posting. What to do when the perfect skills match doesn't care about your mission: dig deeper first Why her first move on a dysfunctional board is the bylaws, not new recruits What nonprofits can borrow from public sector boards on…
Marta Tarantsey spent 12 years in Oregon state service, from civil rights compliance at ODOT to certifying more than 400 small businesses to now serving as Business Oregon's liaison for four Southern Oregon counties. She does not advocate for one business over another, and she explains why that neutrality is how she helps all of them. Why treating Dutch Bros as a unicorn guarantees you never see another one, and what to ask instead A new Oregon tax credit for traded sector jobs: up to $1,000 per job, up to 10 jobs, for the 2026 tax year How reframing a grant application is following the…
Gloria Salinas runs growth strategy for one of the fastest growing cities in America, and she still says no to projects that don't fit the plan. As Chief Growth Officer for the Frisco Economic Development Corporation, she's helped turn a former farm town into a magnet for Fortune 500 headquarters, 16 corporate R&D centers, and a talent pool with double the national average of tech workers. How Frisco decides between infrastructure incentives and jobs based incentives on a case by case basis Why "soft incentives" like chamber membership and workforce task forces outlast the incentive dollar…
Kathleen Rose has spent 30+ years on both sides of the table: advising municipalities on real estate and economic development, and writing the checks as managing partner on South Main Square in downtown Davidson, North Carolina. She knows which plans lead to action and which ones collect dust. And she'll tell you, even when you'd rather not hear it. Why about 25% of every community plan repeats the same data, and how the Prosperity Builder Scorecard fixes it The two requirements in Amazon's HQ2 RFP that sent communities scrambling: quality of life and cultural fit Why talent attraction has…
Cornell Wesley left banking for an 88,000-person town in Arkansas, turned a $2 million fund into $30 million of economic activity in 11 months, and got a call from Washington asking how he did it. You'll love his response. Today he runs Prosper Portland, with a $200 million budget and 11 urban renewal districts. He talks to Teasha Cable about money, power, and who development is really for. Why tax abatements, infrastructure, and community benefits agreements all belong in the capital stack How the Coca-Cola bottling deal in Birmingham came together on a brownfield site Why he doesn't count…
Peter Bishop spent years in commercial real estate before crossing over to run economic development for High Point, North Carolina, and it shows. In this conversation he explains how a vacant hosiery mill becomes market-rate apartments, why three rival cities agreed to stop competing against each other on incentives, and how one blended-wing aircraft startup is about to bring 14,500 jobs to a former textile town. How historic tax credits and a "local landmark" designation can cut a property's tax bill in half to make a stalled redevelopment pencil out Inside the Guilford County Economic…
Todd Tucker has worked in economic development at three different altitudes: state commerce, utility site selection at Progress Energy, and now leading growth for a county whose tax base just jumped 30% in a single year. That range shows in how he thinks about the job. Why most companies can't actually answer "how much power do you need," and what economic developers ask to get a real number How Lee County's tax base grew 30% year over year to $8.8 billion, and the two levers, zoning and water and sewer access, local government actually has to manage it "Coopetition": working with Raleigh,…
David Blaha spent 25 years building relationships at American Express before becoming Chief Revenue Officer at Extend, a virtual card platform banks and fintechs use nationwide. His take: the smartest fintechs don't compete with banks, they arm them. How COVID turned virtual cards from a niche fix for interviewees and non-carded employees into an everyday bill pay tool for small and mid-size businesses Why Extend builds the capability and lets banks sell it, instead of competing with neobanks like Ramp and Brex head on What David had to unlearn from 25 years at Amex, from a full support team…
Damien Denmark became Yukon, Oklahoma's first-ever economic development director in January 2026, He arrived from Olathe, Kansas with one rule: build the relationship before you need the deal. At only 30 years old, he's already moved a $100 million development through approval in 60 days and built his own incentive tool from scratch. Read that 2x. Learn how Denmark moved a $100M TIF district through approval in 60 days by getting bond counsel, developers, and attorneys in one room instead of six separate meetings Why 5,000 people showing up to Food Truck Saturdays in a town of 19,000 taught…
Your City Is Sick...and More Jobs Isn't the Cure... Jeff has spent more than two decades helping downtowns recover, first as a Main Street manager running Ohio's statewide program, then as founder of Revitalize or Die and author of Your City is Sick. He joins Teasha to argue that economic development has solved for the wrong problem for forty years. Jeff's five points of civic pride: identity, aesthetics, community, standards, and engagement, and why "aesthetics" still gets dismissed as lipstick on a pig despite the real estate data behind it. The real diagnosis behind struggling downtowns:…
Mandy White, Chief Economic Development Officer for the Greater Jackson, TN Chamber , has spent nearly three decades helping turn Jackson, Tennessee into a manufacturing hub home to 60 to 70 companies, including several Fortune 100 and Fortune 500 brands. In this episode, she breaks down what actually won the region's largest single investment ever, and how she keeps the workforce pipeline growing to match it. Spoiler alert, it wasn't incentives. How Jackson won a $425M Georgia Pacific plant, the largest investment in its history, by building trust with the site selection consultant before…
Not All Growth Is Good Growth: The Case Against Chasing Every Deal Maurice Harris has sat on both sides of the site selection table: first as a researcher at Greater MSP and Transwestern Real Estate, now as an economic development specialist at JLL working with BNSF on rail expansion across Minnesota, the Dakotas, and Montana. He's also a Golden Valley, Minnesota city council member and the first African American to win a second term on that council, giving him a rare view into how research actually lands in real decisions. Why site selection has shifted from cheap land and low taxes toward…
Kelsi Jackson, executive director of the Jackson County Tourist Development Council in Northwest Florida, built her county's entire visitor strategy around a decades-old customer service story about an extra pickle. She explains how that mindset turned skeptical gas station clerks and restaurant workers into genuine tourism ambassadors, and what it takes to grow a rural visitor economy without a big budget. The origin of "Give Them the Pickle" and why Kelsi built a whole ambassador training program around it How a four to five month training series turned some of the county's loudest online…
Coreat Houser directs the City of Birmingham's Department of Innovation and Economic Opportunity, overseeing economic development, workforce development, real estate, and small business support across all 99 city neighborhoods. In this conversation, he explains why civic education, not just funding, is often the real bottleneck to inclusive growth, and breaks down how his team rebuilt Birmingham's $6.2M BOLD grant program from the ground up. Why Coreata's first 30 days in city government, right before COVID hit, exposed how little most residents and business owners actually understand about…
Joi, known as The Joiful Recruiter, is the lead talent acquisition advisor for sales at Dynatrace, president of the Black Employee Network Business Resource Group, and founder of Joiful Talent Solutions. After a decade in high-volume RPO recruiting and years in enterprise SaaS, she has built a track record that includes a 95% offer acceptance rate, a 20% drop in time to hire, and a 30% lift in retention among the sales teams she staffs. The exact behavioral questions Joi asks to find out why a candidate really left their last job, before she ever screens for skills How she carried her…
Kristen Fish-Peterson has spent over 16 years running Redevelopment Resources, advising cities and developers across the Midwest on tax increment financing, grants, and the deals that bring struggling downtowns back to life. She has worked both sides of the negotiating table, from City Hall to the developer's pro forma, and brings a rare fluency in both languages to this conversation. Why Kristen tells developers to prove their financial gap with a real pro forma before a city offers a dollar in TIF incentive The Watertown, Wisconsin block she convinced a city to demolish for a park, and the…
Derrek Lennox is SVP of Corporate Development and CFO at Dougall Media, a managing partner at his own consulting firm, and an adjunct professor of corporate restructuring at York University's Schulich School of Business. In this episode of the Dynamic Decisions Podcast, he doesn't just talk turnarounds, he hands over the exact frameworks he uses to make decisions under pressure. The three-part framework (financial, process, strategy) Derek uses to diagnose whether a struggling organization can actually be saved. His two-move method for cutting through bad data: ask questions, do the math,…
Michael Clark has spent nearly 25 years shaping how fast-growing towns handle growth, and he's built his approach around four clear priorities. As Director of Community and Economic Development for Collierville, Tennessee, he oversees planning, engineering, GIS, and building codes under one roof, and starts every day with a decision that has nothing to do with any of it. Heres Michaels wisdom nuggets for any leader tasked with developing and growing economies: Priority 1: Protect your own personal health and wellbeing first. Michael's daily non-negotiable is a solo gym session, because a…
Cheryl Parks, the self-professed "shyest girl in the room" has closed over $25 million in B2B corporate sales with clients like Wells Fargo and Discover Financial, trained more than 1,000 professionals, and teaches at Sales Gravy University alongside Jeb Blunt. She joins host Teasha Cable to unpack why the sellers winning today aren't pitching, they're acting as trusted advisors, and what that actually looks like in practice. The real difference between "stuck pitching" and trusted advising, and why it comes down to whose agenda drives the conversation How Cheryl uses a pre-meeting…
Dorothy "Dot" George, Small Business Relationship Coordinator for the City of Birmingham , brings a rare mix of urban planning, tech project management, and twelve years running her own marketing firm to the job of connecting entrepreneurs with resources. She breaks down what cities can and can't do for small businesses, and why regional cooperation beats competition every time. Why the SBA's small business definition (500 employees or fewer) means 99% of U.S. business activity rides on getting this right How Dot applied agile project management from a $1.2 million Alabama DOT software…
Sarina Pilaroscia didn't set out to build a skincare company. She set out to fix something for her father. He had lived with severe psoriasis for decades. While looking through her dad's medicines, she noticed a flammable warning label on a steroid foam. Whatever he was putting on his skin was so dangerous, it needed a warning label. "Why is this the only option?" That curiosity sent her deep into research mode, visiting libraries, building her own back room lab, followed by a two year Health Canada validated cohort study, all to prove that a far less "toxic" answer to psoriasis and eczema…
Abraham Salinas , Economic Development Manager for the City of Pleasanton, California , built his career in the unglamorous work of turning zoning and code into real investment. From reviving an abandoned commercial corridor in Brentwood, CA., to positioning one of the Bay Area's strongest office marketsfor what comes after the AI "boom." In this episode, he explains how a small team competes without a big budget: How Brentwood turned an abandoned commercial corridor into a mixed-use district by pairing zoning changes with strategic city land sales to a medical provider and county services…
Dallas Snow has sat on every side of the commercial real estate table: sixteen years running operations at Jones Commercial Interiors, then advising Fortune 500 companies on their office footprints at PDR, and now recruiting corporate investment for the City of Grapevine, Texas, a city of 53,000 people that pulls in 52 million visitors a year. In this conversation: Why Grapevine is down to its last 100 acres, and how that scarcity became its sharpest sales pitch Why attracting business to a city is a relationship game, not an incentives race How the city tracks whether growth actually helps…
Dr. Lorien Pratt didn't just watch the AI revolution happen, she helped build it. In the early 1990s, as a computer science professor, she invented transfer learning, the technique now running underneath every large language model and computer vision system in use today. Then she walked away from pure machine learning to found an entirely new discipline: decision intelligence. In this episode, Lorien joins host Teasha Cable, her mentee, friend, and co-founder at OpenDI, for a conversation that skips past the AI hype and gets into what actually changes how organizations decide. They dig into…
Dr. Bernadette Howlett has spent her career at the intersection most people don't think about: where data science, machine learning, and human-centered education meet. As Operations Analytics and Experiential Product Director at Western Governors University, she leads a team using predictive modeling and decision intelligence to help students finish the credentials they started faster, with better outcomes, and with less debt. Her mission has a name: Stop the drop with debt Because a student who leaves without a credential but with loan payments is the worst possible outcome and it's…
Lexington, Massachusetts is the birthplace of American Liberty and home to nearly three million square feet of life sciences space a sector now decentralizing and forcing a hard rethink of the town's economic future. Sandhya Iyer, Tourism and Economic Development Director , joins host Teasha Cable to talk about leading economic development where history is both a competitive asset and a complicating factor. In this episode: why converting vacant lab space to workforce housing is a long-term play, not a concession; the difference between historic preservation and historic character; and why…
Jason Jackson has spent more than two decades walking into companies that have built something real and then gotten stuck. As founder and operating partner at Redwood Ridge Strategies, he specializes in diagnosing the operational constraints that prevent growth-stage SaaS companies from scaling past product-market fit. And more often than not, the constraint has a title: Founder. In this episode, Jason joins Teasha Cable to unpack what he calls "founder drag," the invisible pattern where the very behaviors that built a company begin to cap its growth. He shares real examples, including a…
Ryan Baird is third-generation Silicon Valley. His grandfather held patents with Lockheed. His parents retired from HP. And Ryan spent his career managing $50M+ clients at Morgan Stanley, running a hedge fund, raising $35M for his own startup in Southeast Asia, and eventually building Baird Augustine an investment bank working with 38 family offices deploying over $20 billion annually. In this episode of Dynamic Decisions, host Teasha Cable sits down with Ryan for a candid conversation about institutional finance, and why so much of what people assume about investing is flat-out wrong.…
What happens when you combine servant leadership with a hard-charging startup mentality? Serial entrepreneur David Guttman shares his formula for doubling revenue in 90 days by putting people first. In this podcast, youll learn: How to empower your team through bottoms-up financial ownership Surface game-changing insights through 1:1s Build trust through transparent decision-making Align everyone around a data-driven growth mission Whether you're in a scrappy startup or an established enterprise, Guttman's battle-tested servant leadership playbook can help you unlock massive results. Tune in…
Most economic development wins are measured in ribbon cuttings. Jeremy Stratton measures them in decades. In this episode of the Dynamic Decisions Podcast, host Teasha Cable sits down with Jeremy Stratton, Director of Economic Development for the City of Griffin, Georgia. With nearly 30 years spanning municipal government, Chamber of Commerce leadership, and private sector logistics, Jeremy has a perspective most people in his field never get: he's been on all sides of the table. His track record: 16 corporate relocations, 9 expansions, 2,500 jobs, and $310 million in capital investment…
About Dynamic Decisions Podcast
🎙️ Welcome to Dynamic Decisions – where the best decisions start with great conversations.
Hosted by Teasha Cable, CEO of CModel, this show dives into the stories, strategies, and decisions behind some of the most innovative leaders in business today. Each episode, we sit down with visionaries wh
Dynamic Decisions Podcast is a English business podcast from CModel Data, Inc. Melo plays each episode straight from the publisher's own feed — no ads added, no account needed — and remembers where you stopped, in this browser only.
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