Stay ConnectedMeet Gabe Lullo.
Gabe Lullo is the CEO of Alleyoop, a sales development agency working with industry giants such as ZoomInfo, Salesloft, and Adobe.
He has trained over 8,000 salespeople across diverse businesses and, during his tenure in Alleyoop, he has personally hired and managed more than 1,500 SDRs.
With over two decades of experience in sales, marketing, and executive recruitment, his strategies have significantly driven Alleyoop’s growth.
"If you want to be good at something, you have to do way more than you think is even reasonable." - Erik Libby, Founder and CEO of The To-Do Dudes
In May 2020, Erik spent the day he graduated high school spreading 200 bags of mulch for his grandmother.
By the end of the afternoon, five people had walked up and asked if he'd do the same for them.
He hadn't planned on a business, but five people in one day was enough to show him one.
He then built The To-Do Dudes, a home labor company staffed by high school and college students, while attending Stetson University.
It now has hundreds of five-star Google reviews and is looking at expanding beyond Flagler County, Florida.
Customers love hiring local kids, and the mission, "building the next generation of leaders," sells itself.
Now he's raising the bar.
This year he moved the minimum hiring age from 16 to 18, and his interviews test for small things, like whether someone joins the Zoom waiting room on time, because that's how they'll show up for a customer.
His framework is a box with clear rules that everyone agrees to, which keeps things fair for the whole team.
In 2022, two weeks before graduation, his friends were lining up corporate jobs while he chose to move home and bet on his own company.
A few days later, in a Dollywood gift shop, he saw a sticker that read "Walk by faith, not by sight." He took it as his answer.
"We want guarantees from a world that does not give one."
"The quicker I can get something out, even if it's not perfect, at least I know whether they want it or not." - Neema Mahdavian
Neema grew up in a family of doctors, where the only options were doctor or lawyer.
He picked neither. He started as a bank teller at 17, so young the bank had to make an exception to hire him.
By his mid-twenties he was a wealth manager at a private bank making over $200K and getting ready for law school.
Then he walked away from all of it to work out of his partner's garage. The real estate analysis tool they built there became his first exit.
Since then he's built and sold three marketing agencies, launched Poseidon Ventures, and bought a bank.
Now he's pulling all of his companies together to launch what he calls an AI business bank.
It hasn't been a straight line.
He went through three failures in a row, a divorce, and a stretch close to bankruptcy.
What got him out was discipline: he cut his expenses, controlled his urges, and dropped the "gotta have" mentality.
"I survived divorce, I've survived failed businesses, I've survived being on the verge of bankruptcy. Looking back now, I've survived everything."
"AI can help us do more, but it can't tell you what matters. And that's the part where the human being is still really critical." - Laura Patterson
At nine years old, Laura went door to door in her neighborhood selling chocolate.
She figured out fast that a pitch wasn't working. Some neighbors wanted chocolate. Some just wanted to support a kid raising money for school. Some wanted a gift for their family.
Most of them weren't buying the product at all.
That was her first lesson: people don't buy products, they buy value.
She spent almost 15 years at Motorola and learned the second lesson there.
You can't just measure activity. You have to measure what matters to the people at the top, and that means how you're creating customer and business value.
She founded VisionEdge Marketing in 1999. Her mission is to get rid of what she calls "random acts": activity with no strategic intent behind it.
A CEO she knows was honored to be asked to sponsor his Chamber of Commerce's big annual event, and couldn't understand why his team wasn't excited.
She asked him one question: how will this help you hit any of the outcomes you need this year? He didn't have an answer.
Her test for any new idea is simple.
Will it help you win the customers you want, keep the ones you have, or add value for them?
If not, reconsider. Random acts don't just cost money.
They use up leadership capacity, employee energy, and customer trust.
"Customer centricity is not a marketing thing. It is a leadership discipline."
"If there's something I can do and should do, then I have a responsibility to do it. That is what I signed up for when I became a nurse." - Melinda Yormick
Melinda became an OR nurse after watching her grandfather go through a heart surgery, a second surgery to remove a retained sponge, and a stroke that left him bedridden for a decade.
She spent 14 years in the OR across seven health systems, then moved into leadership as a surgical service manager.
Then a patient died after an elective procedure. The surgery went fine. When the airway tube came out, the patient's airway collapsed, and the team couldn't find the emergency airway cart.
The code team couldn't find the patient either. In a two-million-square-foot building, nobody knew where anything was.
That night she went home and searched for something that could prevent it from happening again.
Nothing on the market met healthcare's needs. She didn't quit the next morning.
She spent months talking to frontline nurses and C-suite leaders, and once the case held up, she jumped.
She built Clara, a spatial intelligence platform that shows hospital teams where people and equipment are in real time.
Her hardest moment came long before any of this.
At 19, she lost her dad suddenly and laid on her kitchen floor in Orchard Park, New York, thinking this wasn't supposed to happen.
Getting up from that floor is the hardest thing she's ever done.
"If it's not hard, it's easy. And if it's easy, it's boring."
"Nobody gets a pass from pain. We would never choose the things that happened to us, but we can choose what it produces in us." - Brenda Viola, Founder of Vici Communications
Brenda lost her dad at 10. Not long after, a teacher named Mrs. Dodge told her, "Brenda, you're a great writer."
When she didn't believe in anything else, she believed that.
She became the first in her family to go to college, even though her mom's first reaction was, "But Brenda, you could be a cocktail waitress."
She beat out 10,000 people to become one of QVC's first hosts, and was laid off a few months later.
She kept going, through news, marketing, and eventually a role as Chief Happiness Officer.
In 2021 the losses stacked up. Her mom was ill, her partner died suddenly, and then her dog of 17 years died.
She'd always said "someday" she'd speak full-time.
So she sold her house with everything in it, moved to San Diego, and bet on herself.
Then a car crossed the median and hit her head on. The scan afterward found a lump on her thyroid. What scared her most wasn't the biopsy. It was having to go alone.
She called the one person she knew, a woman she'd met at the farmers market because they were both wearing Eagles gear.
Before Brenda could finish asking, she said, "What time? I'll be there."
Brenda was 60 when she learned that lesson: letting people in is not a weakness.
Her company is coming up on four years old. Vici means "I conquered."
"The beauty of life is letting people in and not robbing them of the privilege to show up for you."
"People don't change because you give them housing. People change because they're given community, accountability, purpose, work, and people around them who actually believe in them." - Moe EganPreston and Moe Egan came to The Other Side Village from opposite ends of the problem.Moe grew up in East Oakland, surrounded by addiction and crime, and became a lifelong addict and criminal himself. He went through six or seven recovery programs and graduated from every one. Each time he relapsed. Then came his seventh arrest, and the officer who cuffed him was his old football coach. The coach told him about Delancey Street, and facing San Quentin, he wrote a letter begging for help.Preston has spent 30 years in nonprofit work and never lived any of that. He's upfront about it. His problem is with the systems around the work, which measure beds filled and boxes checked instead of whether people reach long-term independence.Together they lead The Other Side Village, a permanent community built on peer accountability, where residents run social enterprises like a donut shop. Preston brings the strategy and Moe brings the lived experience, and neither is enough alone.Recently Moe took a group of people who spent decades on the street to New York. For some it was their first flight. On the way home they asked him how to get a passport."People don't fundamentally change when they feel temporary... When people know they have a permanent place in the community, they start thinking about next year instead of next week." - Preston L. Cochrane
"None of us engage perfectly with technology when we're overwhelmed or stressed. You shouldn't build a system that requires perfect engagement in order to be useful."
- Ellie Gordon
Ellie spent 17 years building technology that improves people's lives. What pulled her into addiction and recovery was personal.
She has lost loved ones, helped friends through severe struggles, and worked through her own challenges.
Her hometown of Pittsburgh was hit hard by the opioid crisis, and she says that when you watch that happen to your community, you can't not help.
She kept coming back to a gap. Someone can have a great counselor, but they might spend an hour with a provider and the rest of the week alone with stress, cravings, and triggers.
A craving doesn't wait for the next appointment.
So her team built a platform that uses wearables to read heart rate, sleep, and movement. It can predict cravings up to four hours ahead.
When it spots rising risk, it sends a coping tool, a reminder of what motivates the person, or a way to reach their support network.
The team also designed it to work passively, because people in crisis don't open apps. In a VA usability study, every participant found it helpful alongside their treatment.
About half of her users are 60 or older, which she didn't expect.
Her view is that the system is great at responding to crises and weak at anticipating them. She's not trying to replace human care. She wants to make it more continuous, timely, and informed.
"Courage isn't certainty. Building and leading this company is the hardest thing I've done, because there are people depending on you and you have to make decisions in imperfect circumstances."
"It didn't matter what I had accomplished before, what I had achieved, what awards I had. None of that mattered. It only mattered what I brought that day." - Mary Crafts
Mary started Culinary Crafts in 1984 by pulling a little red wagon around the neighborhood with her two boys, selling cookies and bread door to door.
She built it into Utah's largest off-premise catering company, named best in the state 28 times.
She catered for Oprah, Elton John, and two US presidents, and earned a gold medal for catering at the 2002 Olympics.
At 50, she found a photo of herself at 284 pounds and wept in a parking lot because she didn't recognize the person in it.
She had spent decades chasing success to prove she was worthy of love.
So she got a spiral notebook, wrote "fear" on one side and "action" on the other, and tracked the fear behind every habit.
She lost 140 pounds, no surgery, no pills, just by healing what was underneath.
Then she retired at 65 and climbed Kilimanjaro.
Every fear she thought she'd beaten showed up on that mountain.
At one point she told the mountain she was a big deal back home. Its answer was "I don't care."
Now she works with 33 nonprofits and asks women one question: "What would you do if you weren't afraid?"
"Whatever you see in me already exists in you. Or you wouldn't see it in me."
"Don't make an assumption, ask the question. Ask your senior people two things: what's slowing you down, and what would make you consider leaving. That pattern is your real priority list." - Alex Seiler
Alex's HR career started with a job creating employee ID numbers by hand at Citigroup.
Nobody dreams of being the employee ID guy, but he paid attention to what he was good at and let that pull him forward.
He still respects the people who do the unglamorous work the whole company depends on.
From there he worked across Citi, WeWork, and Control Risks, and he's blunt about what that taught him: every size of company has its own flavor of chaos.
Bring startup speed to a battleship and you blow past every stakeholder.
Bring the battleship process to a five-person startup and you bore everyone into quitting.
The skill that transfers is judgment about pace, and diagnosing the environment before you prescribe anything.
His rule for earning a seat at the table: lead with the business question, not the HR program.
He doesn't pitch leadership development to a CEO as a way to lift engagement scores.
He opens with the two VPs the company lost last year and what it cost to backfill them.
As CPO, he brought recruiting in-house, saved $500K, and put $360K of it into better benefits.
His hot take: companies buy engagement software to fix a management problem.
The survey says people are unhappy with their manager, and the action plan is to run the survey again next quarter.
The data was never missing. The willingness to have an uncomfortable conversation was.
"CEOs don't fund feelings. They fund downside protection and upside acceleration."
"I wasn't making myself an NFL player. I was making myself behave like an NFL player before anybody believed that I could do it." - Cris D'Annunzio
Cris spent three years buried on Princeton's depth chart, bitter and barely playing, to the point of calling Joe Paterno to ask about transferring to Penn State.
He stayed only because he'd never quit anything in his life.
Once the hope of football working out left the room, his ego left with it, and he started writing everything down, tracking every input, with no expectation it would lead anywhere.
It led to an honorable mention All-Ivy League season and a shot in the NFL.
Then Wall Street, managing over $500 million in client assets.
Then thirty years as a working actor (American Gangster, Seinfeld, Animal Kingdom) in an industry that rejects you more than nine times out of ten.
Then high-ticket sales, where he still closes every week.
His conclusion after all four arena's: talent was never the gap.
The gap is whether you keep the process intact when nobody's watching and everything in you wants to negotiate it away.
It's the premise behind Metal and Method: you don't know what you actually do every day, you know what you think you do, and your mind lies to you most in moments of duress.
"At some point you will actually break. You can't do it yourself. This is why validation is so important."
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