For our Friday Business Workshop we really wanted to bring together a  variety of experiences in the realm of business and WordPress that would blow your socks off! Truly.

Chris Lema will be doing deep dives with each of the folks below to help them share the key learnings each has had in the development and running of their own businesses – from contracts to marketing, from hiring to mergers, from product development to pricing. The interviews and lessons themselves will only be surpassed by the Q&A following each interview.

• Karim Marucchi – Karim Marucchi is the Founder and Chairman of the VeloMedia Group, the parent of several boutique professional service firms around the world. Over the last twenty years he’s run start ups, taken companies public, managed mergers and acquisitions, and led professional service organizations across the globe. Today he is also the CEO of Crowd Favorite, which continues to grow beyond its current offices in Los Angeles, Denver, Bucharest, Las Vegas, New York, and Rome due to its unique blend of localized project management and high quality digital solutions. As the first premiere WordPress agency for the Fortune 500, National Geographic, DirectTV, Lexus, the Dallas Mavericks and major entertainment studios count among the company’s client roster.
• Syed Balkhi – Syed Balkhi is the founder of WPBeginner and List25 an extremely popular entertainment site with over 1.2 million subscribers and 200 Million video views. Syed’s work has been featured in NYTimes, HuffingtonPost, Yahoo Small Business, Wired, Mashable, and countless other well-reputed online magazines.
• Sam Hotchkiss – Sam was the founder of BruteProtect, a distributed brute force attack protection tool which was acquired by Automattic in August 2014. Sam is now hard at work on integrating BruteProtect into Jetpack, and exploring the future as an Automattician.
• Vladimir Prelovac – Successfully bootstrapped a company in eastern Europe, reaching over $1mn in revenue in the first year. Won EY Emerging Entrepreneur of the Year 2013 award. Ranked among top 100 most influential people on Social Media in the world in 2012.
• Jeff Milone – Co-founder of Invulu – a web software, service, and application company known for the popular brands Organic Themes, KahunaHost, and more. He started Invulu on Maui with David Morgan in 2009. Jeff also contributes time as an advisor to several nonprofit organizations. An avid globetrotter, Jeff enjoys traveling to WordCamps around the world.
• David Morgan – Co-founder, designer and developer of Invulu, Inc., the company responsible for Organic Themes, Kahuna Host and more.
• John Hawkins – John was an early adopter of WordPress. He moved his blog to the brand new platform a few short months after it was released and never looked back. After doing countless updates to his own site and those of a few dozen friends, John co-founded 9seeds.com to focus full time on WordPress development. In his spare time, John is the lead organizer of the Las Vegas WordPress meetup, blogs at vegasgeek.com and recently became addicted to CrossFit.

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