Lay of The Land Jeffrey Stern

Andre Cisco — Manager for MGK and XX Brands, Brand Strategist and Investor, co-owner of the 27 Club — the coffee lounge and kitchen here in Cleveland — and Managing Partner at Dead Logic, a marketing strategy and brand management firm.
Andre is a serial entrepreneur with more than 10 years of entertainment, international logistics, and merchandising experience — Invested in wealth building through ownership and community, he is dedicated to creating businesses that disrupt, educate, and enhance opportunities while creating access and equity across industries.
This was such a fun conversation getting to exploring Dre’s upbringing and ties to Cleveland, the intersection of art and business, the history and evolution of his relationship with MGK, starting a label, bringing Drake to Ohio for the first, giving back to the community here in Cleveland, balance, luck, motivations, reinvention, fatherhood and enjoying the journey along the way.
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SPONSORS: John Carroll University Boler College of Business || Impact Architects & Ninety
John Carroll University Boler College of Business: https://business.jcu.edu/ As we’ve heard time and time again from entrepreneurs on Lay of The Land — many of whom are proud alumni of John Carroll University —  success in this ever-changing world of business requires a dynamic and innovative mindset, deep understanding of emerging technology and systems, strong ethics, leadership prowess, acute business acumen… all qualities nurtured through the Boler College of Business!
With 4 different MBA programs of study — spanning Professional, Online, Hybrid, and 1-Year-Flexible — The Boler College of Business provides flexible timelines and various class structures for each MBA Track — including online, in-person, hybrid and asynchronous — to offer the most effective options for you, in addition to the ability to participate in an elective International Study Tour, providing unparalleled opportunities to expand your global business knowledge by networking with local companies overseas and experiencing a new culture.
The career impact of a Boler MBA is formative and will help prepare you for this future of business and get more out of your career. To learn more about John Carroll University’s Boler MBA programs, please go to business.jcu.edu
The Boler College of Business is fully accredited by AACSB International, the highest accreditation a College of Business can have.
Impact Architects & NinetyLay of The Land is brought to you by Ninety. As a Lay of The Land listener, you can leverage a free trial with Ninety, the platform that helps teams build great companies and the only officially licensed software for EOS® — used by over 7,000 companies and 100,000 users!
This episode is brought to you by Impact Architects. As we share the stories of entrepreneurs building incredible organizations throughout NEO, Impact Architects helps those leaders — many of whom we’ve heard from as guests on Lay of The Land — realize their visions and build great organizations. I believe in Impact Architects and the people behind it so much, that I have actually joined them personally in their mission to help leaders gain focus, align together, and thrive by doing what they love! As a listener, you can sit down for a free consultation with Impact Architects by visiting ia.layoftheland.fm!
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LINKS:
https://www.instagram.com/andreciscoxx/https://www.linkedin.com/in/andrecisco/
https://www.instagram.com/deadlogiccreate/
https://www.deadlogic.co/https://www.instagram.com/27clubcoffee/

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Past guests include Justin Bibb (Mayor of Cleveland), Pat Conway (Great Lakes Brewing), Steve Potash (OverDrive), Umberto P. Fedeli (The Fedeli Group), Lila Mills (Signal Cleveland), Stewart Kohl (The Riverside Company), Mitch Kroll (Findaway — Acquired by Spotify), and many more.
Connect with Jeffrey Stern on Link

Rick Stockburger, CEO of BRITE Energy Innovators.
Located in the City of Warren, just outside Youngstown in the Mahoning Valley, BRITE was founded in 2010 as a non-profit focused on the acceleration of energy technology in Northeast Ohio. Since then, and under Rick’s leadership, BRITE has helped over 600 companies, creating approximately 2100 jobs, and channeling >$250 million dollars into BRITE’s network of companies.
Providing signature start-up programs, a networked ecosystem, and strategic presence to unleash the energy revolution across Ohio, Appalachia, and the Midwest writ large, BRITE serves a variety of clients providing solutions to today’s challenges and defining tomorrow’s opportunities in energy storage, grid resilience, and mobility and transportation.
Rick comes to BRITE as a Northeast Ohio native, a decorated combat veteran serving the US over nearly 7 years in the early 2000s and in operations across the world, as well as a kindred believer to myself, in the power of storytelling, having spearheaded an award-winning “Red, White, and Blueprints: A Rust Belt Documentary” telling the stories of some of the most innovative initiatives, individuals and ideas in the Rust Belt from Detroit to Buffalo to Cleveland and beyond!
This was an awesome conversation — we cover Rick’s journey to BRITE, involving a serendipitous run-in with Dave Grohl (a fellow Warren, Ohio native), Voltage Valley, the dependency and interconnectedness of everything energy, some of the most compelling companies within BRITE’s network, including some who’s stories we’ve shared here on Lay of The Land like LAND energy (back on Episode 48), Octet Scientific (back on Episode 118) with their founders, Scott Colosimo and Onas Bolton respectively, changing perceptions about Nuclear, Rick’s learnings along the way, and ultimately the opportunity and ability for this region ability to lead in energy production, electrification of things, and energy storage going.
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SPONSORS: John Carroll University Boler College of Business || Impact Architects & Ninety
John Carroll University Boler College of Business: https://business.jcu.edu/ As we’ve heard time and time again from entrepreneurs on Lay of The Land — many of whom are proud alumni of John Carroll University —  success in this ever-changing world of business requires a dynamic and innovative mindset, deep understanding of emerging technology and systems, strong ethics, leadership prowess, acute business acumen… all qualities nurtured through the Boler College of Business!
With 4 different MBA programs of study — spanning Professional, Online, Hybrid, and 1-Year-Flexible — The Boler College of Business provides flexible timelines and various class structures for each MBA Track — including online, in-person, hybrid and asynchronous — to offer the most effective options for you, in addition to the ability to participate in an elective International Study Tour, providing unparalleled opportunities to expand your global business knowledge by networking with local companies overseas and experiencing a new culture.
The career impact of a Boler MBA is formative and will help prepare you for this future of business and get more out of your career. To learn more about John Carroll University’s Boler MBA programs, please go to business.jcu.edu
The Boler College of Business is fully accredited by AACSB International, the highest accreditation a College of Business can have.
Impact Architects & NinetyLay of The Land is brought to you by Ninety. As a Lay of The Land listener, you can leverage a free trial with Ninety, the platform that helps teams build great companies and the only officially licensed software for EOS® — used by over 7,000 companies and 100,000 users!
This episode is brought to you by Impact Architects. As we share the stories of entrepreneurs building incredible organizations throughout NEO, Impact Architects helps those leaders — many of whom

Kyle Maggard, Founder & CEO of Over Easy.
Kyle started OverEasy in the fall of 2018, reflecting on his time as a former college athlete at Westpoint and as an Army Captain where living a healthy and active life wasn’t just his passion, but his job. As a busy father, husband, and entrepreneur, he came to recognize that staying fit and eating healthy were harder than they sounded in his busy lifestyle, and without a convenient and nutritious option to start his day, set out to create one for himself.
Over East started with a year of Kyle iterating and testing different recipes while still at Harvard Business School, until he found the right combination for the company's first product — a delicious, high protein, high fiber oat-based breakfast bar, believing that a good breakfast sets the tone for the rest of the day.
Since moving back to Cleveland, Kyle raised $5 million in funding for the business and has grown Over Easy’s distribution across national retailers like Wegmans, Giant Foods, and others including Whole Foods, who was Kyle’s first partner.
While aiming to cater to all consumers, Over Easy found an early niche among both college and professional athletes as collegiate athletic programs were among the brand’s first customers in January 2020 and the bars are now supplied to over 20 NFL locker rooms and a few dozen MLB, NBA, WNBA, and NHL locker rooms.
Kyle exudes passion for the business and for Cleveland — While Over Easy started with a breakfast bar, it is more than apparent after talking with Kyle, even only for a few minutes, that his ambitions to fix a broken food system, starting with breakfast, are far greater and his desire to help build up the Cleveland entrepreneurial community is inspiring. It was a ton of fun to learn from Kyle how he thinks about branding, leadership, quality, excellence, motivations, enjoying the process, his vision for the future, challenges faced along the way, and lots more!
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SPONSORS: John Carroll University Boler College of Business || Impact Architects & Ninety
John Carroll University Boler College of Business: https://business.jcu.edu/ As we’ve heard time and time again from entrepreneurs on Lay of The Land — many of whom are proud alumni of John Carroll University —  success in this ever-changing world of business requires a dynamic and innovative mindset, deep understanding of emerging technology and systems, strong ethics, leadership prowess, acute business acumen… all qualities nurtured through the Boler College of Business!
With 4 different MBA programs of study — spanning Professional, Online, Hybrid, and 1-Year-Flexible — The Boler College of Business provides flexible timelines and various class structures for each MBA Track — including online, in-person, hybrid and asynchronous — to offer the most effective options for you, in addition to the ability to participate in an elective International Study Tour, providing unparalleled opportunities to expand your global business knowledge by networking with local companies overseas and experiencing a new culture.
The career impact of a Boler MBA is formative and will help prepare you for this future of business and get more out of your career. To learn more about John Carroll University’s Boler MBA programs, please go to business.jcu.edu
The Boler College of Business is fully accredited by AACSB International, the highest accreditation a College of Business can have.
Impact Architects & NinetyLay of The Land is brought to you by Ninety. As a Lay of The Land listener, you can leverage a free trial with Ninety, the platform that helps teams build great companies and the only officially licensed software for EOS® — used by over 7,000 companies and 100,000 users!
This episode is brought to you by Impact Architects. As we share the stories of entrepreneurs building incredible organizations throughout NEO, Impact Architects helps those leaders — many of whom we’ve heard from as guests on La

Azadeh Hardiman — Business Leader of Level20, the new business incubator of Progressive Insurance, one of the largest insurance carriers in the US (which was founded and still headquartered here in Cleveland)!
As the new business incubator, Level20 is focused on addressing the unmet needs of current Progressive customers and the general population, by understanding the real problems people face every day, deserving of real solutions. Azadeh and her team drive growth beyond insurance to develop new ideas, products, and services that help these people.
Azadeh joined Progressive in 2015 as a Director where she led the user experience strategy and design for several large-scale digital customer initiates; introduced product design tools and internal processes to Progressive; and grew the team to include digital product strategy, design, copywriting, and analytics.
Before joining Progressive, Azadeh was a founding member of mPortal, a start-up technology company that focused on a single idea: people will want to use data on phones (note: seven years before the iPhone was introduced).  As part of the founding team, she wore many hats including operations, product management, business development, and marketing as she helped grow mPortal into a profitable company in less than three years and worked on product strategy for companies such as Verizon, Disney, ESPN, Time Warner, Comcast, Reliance, and Telus.
In addition to her work at Progressive and Level20, Azadeh, who’s based in Shaker Heights with her husband and three children, has served in leadership roles on several nonprofit boards and is currently on the Board of The Diversity Center of Northeast Ohio and President of the UVA Alumni Club for Northeast Ohio.
In our conversation today, we peel back the curtain on what "intrapreneurship" looks like, comparing and contrasting what it’s like to build a traditional startup vs. innovating from within a large corporate organization, the kinds of initiatives Level20 has taken on thus far and the work still to be done — from home maintenance to flexible term life insurance, to financial wellness offerings, their presence here in Cleveland, her reflections on leadership and growth, and a whole lot more.
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SPONSORS: John Carroll University Boler College of Business || Impact Architects & Ninety
John Carroll University Boler College of Business: https://business.jcu.edu/ As we’ve heard time and time again from entrepreneurs on Lay of The Land — many of whom are proud alumni of John Carroll University —  success in this ever-changing world of business requires a dynamic and innovative mindset, deep understanding of emerging technology and systems, strong ethics, leadership prowess, acute business acumen… all qualities nurtured through the Boler College of Business!
With 4 different MBA programs of study — spanning Professional, Online, Hybrid, and 1-Year-Flexible — The Boler College of Business provides flexible timelines and various class structures for each MBA Track — including online, in-person, hybrid and asynchronous — to offer the most effective options for you, in addition to the ability to participate in an elective International Study Tour, providing unparalleled opportunities to expand your global business knowledge by networking with local companies overseas and experiencing a new culture.
The career impact of a Boler MBA is formative and will help prepare you for this future of business and get more out of your career. To learn more about John Carroll University’s Boler MBA programs, please go to business.jcu.edu
The Boler College of Business is fully accredited by AACSB International, the highest accreditation a College of Business can have.
Impact Architects & NinetyLay of The Land is brought to you by Ninety. As a Lay of The Land listener, you can leverage a free trial with Ninety, the platform that helps teams build great companies and the only officially licensed software for EOS® — us

Nick Dadas — Co-Founder of University Tees, SISU Lifestyle, Acton Academy Lakeside, ISI, and MasterPlan Coach.
In 2003, still a sophomore at Miami University, Nick co-founded University Tees after trying to organize a t-shirt order for his business fraternity and becoming frustrated with his experience; so he and his co-founder, Joe, decided there had to be a better way and like all good entrepreneurs, they started their own company. Since then, University Tees has gone on to grow into the premier custom apparel brand for the college market with over 700 campus managers at over 300 colleges nationwide, over 150 full-time employees, and with expanded capabilities for the corporate market where they’ve built a reputation for excellence, servicing large-scale distributors and retail programs at volume across the country from their brand new full-service production facility in Cleveland.
In addition:
Nick founded SISU Lifestyle, a leading Sauna manufacturing company and brand focused on affording the best sauna experience possible.He founded the Acton Academy Lakeside, a one-room schoolhouse for the 21st century and for his own 3 children and other families who share this desire for an innovative approach to education.He founded The ISI Life (standing for Iron Sharpens Iron), where he hosts a podcast of his own and has built a community for men in pursuit of developing habits for success, establishing life-giving relationships, and building momentum towards a life of excellenceHe founded MasterPlan Coach, a comprehensive executive coaching program for entrepreneurs seeking to achieve authentic success across their personal and professional life.All in, Nick is a true entrepreneur, applying his problem-solving mindset to all aspects of life and thematically tying his work together to a foundational principle of Developing People and Changing Lives — a topic which we’ll unpack in our conversation today. This was such an engaging conversation — Nick is intentional and full of wisdom and candor; it was a real joy getting to hear his story and reflections.
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SPONSORS: John Carroll University Boler College of Business || Impact Architects & Ninety
John Carroll University Boler College of Business: https://business.jcu.edu/ As we’ve heard time and time again from entrepreneurs on Lay of The Land — many of whom are proud alumni of John Carroll University —  success in this ever-changing world of business requires a dynamic and innovative mindset, deep understanding of emerging technology and systems, strong ethics, leadership prowess, acute business acumen… all qualities nurtured through the Boler College of Business!
With 4 different MBA programs of study — spanning Professional, Online, Hybrid, and 1-Year-Flexible — The Boler College of Business provides flexible timelines and various class structures for each MBA Track — including online, in-person, hybrid and asynchronous — to offer the most effective options for you, in addition to the ability to participate in an elective International Study Tour, providing unparalleled opportunities to expand your global business knowledge by networking with local companies overseas and experiencing a new culture.
The career impact of a Boler MBA is formative and will help prepare you for this future of business and get more out of your career. To learn more about John Carroll University’s Boler MBA programs, please go to business.jcu.edu
The Boler College of Business is fully accredited by AACSB International, the highest accreditation a College of Business can have.
Impact Architects & NinetyLay of The Land is brought to you by Ninety. As a Lay of The Land listener, you can leverage a free trial with Ninety, the platform that helps teams build great companies and the only officially licensed software for EOS® — used by over 7,000 companies and 100,000 users!
This episode is brought to you by Impact Architects. As we share the stories of entrepreneurs buildi

Reilly Berk, CEO of Berk Enterprises.
Founded back in 1946 by her grandparents, Suzanne and Harold Berk, Berk Enterprises boasts a diverse history that began with the creation of the "QuicKill" insecticide and the subsequent founding of Berk Exterminating Company in Warren, Ohio. Evolving, the company expanded its ventures into numismatics, leading to the Warren Coin Shop, and later transformed into Berk Paper and Supply, carrying janitorial products such as tissues, napkins, and paper towels. In 1976, Berk Paper and Supply evolved into Berk Enterprises, when the company underwent transformative changes, introducing innovations like the novelty drinkware line for the concession industry and the Environ product line which consists of earth-friendly alternatives.
Today Berk Enterprises, Inc. maintains an impressive catalog of over 4,000 food service disposables such as plastic cutlery, straws, cups, to-go containers, and much more as they service over 3,000 different customers, including some of the largest restaurant chains, as well as schools, entertainment venues. theaters, stadiums, and fairs, in addition to supplying the nation's largest food service distributors with multiple distribution centers across the country.
Guided by familial dedication, Reilly, who was recently recognized by Forbes as a 30 under 30 in Cleveland, now serves as the CEO of Berk Enterprises, overseeing over 115 employees and with a drive and vision to continue to shape the industry with Berk Enterprises’ legacy, values, and expanding product offerings.
This was a really fun conversation as we unpack what it was like becoming CEO in her early 20s, the history and evolution of the family business, Reilly's perspective on management and leadership, and what is in store for Berk going forward.
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SPONSORS: John Carroll University Boler College of Business || Impact Architects & Ninety
John Carroll University Boler College of Business: https://business.jcu.edu/ As we’ve heard time and time again from entrepreneurs on Lay of The Land — many of whom are proud alumni of John Carroll University —  success in this ever-changing world of business requires a dynamic and innovative mindset, deep understanding of emerging technology and systems, strong ethics, leadership prowess, acute business acumen… all qualities nurtured through the Boler College of Business!
With 4 different MBA programs of study — spanning Professional, Online, Hybrid, and 1-Year-Flexible — The Boler College of Business provides flexible timelines and various class structures for each MBA Track — including online, in-person, hybrid and asynchronous — to offer the most effective options for you, in addition to the ability to participate in an elective International Study Tour, providing unparalleled opportunities to expand your global business knowledge by networking with local companies overseas and experiencing a new culture.
The career impact of a Boler MBA is formative and will help prepare you for this future of business and get more out of your career. To learn more about John Carroll University’s Boler MBA programs, please go to business.jcu.edu
The Boler College of Business is fully accredited by AACSB International, the highest accreditation a College of Business can have.
Impact Architects & NinetyLay of The Land is brought to you by Ninety. As a Lay of The Land listener, you can leverage a free trial with Ninety, the platform that helps teams build great companies and the only officially licensed software for EOS® — used by over 7,000 companies and 100,000 users!
This episode is brought to you by Impact Architects. As we share the stories of entrepreneurs building incredible organizations throughout NEO, Impact Architects helps those leaders — many of whom we’ve heard from as guests on Lay of The Land — realize their visions and build great organizations. I believe in Impact Architects and the people behind it so much, that I have actually joine