steven walker Archives - Business RadioX ®

Gwinnett Business Radio

Steve Walker with Civis Capital and Michael Sytsma and Monique Wells with Building Intimate Marriages

00:00 /

Dr. Michael Sytsma, Monique Wells, Steve Walker, Steven Julian

Steve Walker/Civis Capital

Civis Capital, based in Knoxville, is the small business lending division of Civis Bank, a 109-years old community bank headquartered in Rogersville, TN. The bank prides itself on taking its hometown, community bank attitude and approach beyond the TN borders and throughout the southeast. Civis’s business lending territory is the southeastern USA including all of Florida. Civis Capital treats its clients with the attitude reflected in its motto – “Small Business is our Only Business.” The bank began life as Citizens Bank of East Tennessee, and recently changed the name to use the Latin word for “citizen” and reflect a broader geographic reach.

Steve Walker is a native of Atlanta and 25-year Georgia banking veteran, with the vast majority of that time in commercial loans. He spent the bulk of it in the “big bank” world, logging 12 years with Wachovia/Wells Fargo and 9 years with Regions Bank before moving to the community bank world, which he considers a breath of fresh air. Steve is a subject matter expert on SBA lending and the benefits it offers today’s entrepreneurs, especially the 7(a) program.

Dr. Michael Sytsma & Monique Wells/Building Intimate Marriages

Building Intimate Marriages aims to help individuals grow using marriage as the main agent of change. They do so by providing counseling, psycho-education, and resources focusing on relationship, premarital, marriage, and sex therapy. They also provide consulting and training to other professionals who specialize in the same arena.

They provide about 100 hours of counseling per week with the specialty areas of sex therapy (i.e., sexual conflict, sexual desire conflict, sexless marriages, painful sex, erectile dysfunction), affair recovery, premarital, communication problems, highly conflicted marriages, general marital discord. They also see individuals and families for a variety of typical counseling needs. They provide this counseling for a range of fees depending on the training and experience of the counselor. Session fees for interns can be as low as $10 per session.

They also have a sexual enrichment workshop for married couples – the Passionate Intimacy Workshop. This Friday/Saturday workshop has been shown in follow-up research to be highly effective in helping couples, with 75% stating what they learned was still having a positive change in their overall sexual satisfaction in marriage 6 months after the workshop. They provide the workshop about 4 times a year.

Start-Opia

Cynthia Morneweck and Steven Walker with Great Parents Academy, Sarah Lodato and John Saddington with The Iron Yard, and Phillip Hardin with YouScience

00:00 /

Cynthia Morneweck / Great Parents Academy

Cynthia oversees the overall strategic and operational responsibility of the three core areas of the company: Learning, Technology and Business. She provides leadership and coordination to the senior management team and is on the Board of Directors keeping them abreast of strategies progress and challenges.

Prior to GPA, Cynthia worked for PointClear Solutions, a consulting firm in the healthcare vertical. She was the Director of Operations for the UX practice. She also worked for Northrup Grumman as a Lead UX practitioner on a CDC contract. Before that she worked for the CTO of Georgia Institute of Technology as a UX practitioner promoting and helping the IT team produce a more user-centered approach to building applications.

Even though her roles have changed over the years, her love of User Experience stays with her. She applies the core principles of the discipline (HCI) to all aspects of her life. “I can’t turn it off. Even if I wanted to, I couldn’t. I breathe it. It has served me well.”

Cynthia holds a Bachelor’s degree in Chemistry and Psychology from Smith College as well as a Masters of Science in Human Computer Interaction (Computer Science) from the Georgia Institute of Technology.

Along with her GPA responsibilities, Cynthia is a wife and mother (daughter and son).

Steven Walker / Great Parents Academy

Steven is responsible for developing strategic partnerships and relationships to foster community growth with corporate child sponsors, charitable foundations, parent associations and education organizations.

Prior to joining GPA, Steven served as the CEO of a charter high school that focused on career academies and a STEM curriculum. He served on a subcommittee to advance STEM education for the state of GA and he currently serves on the education committees and board of trustees for two independent schools in Atlanta. Steven has over 22 years of experience in operations, finance and business strategy where he ran a multi-national information technology training and consulting company and oversaw the operations and financial controls of two restaurants as a franchisee and two mega-fitness centers in Atlanta and in District Heights, MD.

Before pursuing his entrepreneurial passions, Steven structured and executed investment-banking transactions for Bank of America, formerly NationsBank, in the corporate finance and private placements groups.

Steven holds a Bachelor’s degree in Electrical Engineering from Duke University and an MBA from The University of Chicago Booth School of Business.

Along with his GPA responsibilities, Steven’s other duties are as a husband and father (daughter and son).

Sarah Lodato / The Iron Yard

John Saddington / The Iron Yard

A serial entrepreneur, John is a graduate of Georgia Tech and has two Master degrees from Dallas Seminary. He’s been an engineer and executive in the Fortune 50 as well as leading his own bootstrapped and venture-funded startups. He currently is a Partner and Chief Strategy Officer at The Iron Yard, a technology accelerator, incubator, and code school. He also continues to work on his iOS app Pressgram and his OS X app, Desk PM.

Phillip Hardin / YouScience

An experienced technology CEO, Philip Hardin has spent his career building technology products to solve complex industry issues. Now Mr. Hardin is tackling two of the most pressing issues of today – education and employment –with YouScience and its product Latitude®. Prior to YouScience, Mr. Hardin joined a start-up in Atlanta in 1995 focused on technology innovation in healthcare where he stayed for 17 years until the company was $1.3 Billion in revenues. He served in various executive capacities at Healtheon, WebMD and Emdeon before it was sold to the Blackstone Group. Mr. Hardin received a B.S. in accounting from the University of Georgia and received an M.B.A. from Stanford University.