Dr. Kettner is Senior Vice President and directs LeadFirst's Assessments & Analytics team. His work focuses on facilitating the strategic decision-making of top management, performance measurement, capital investment planning and analysis, customer and culture profiling, market research, and other areas to support the decision-making of management.

George has coordinatied statistical client engagements with First USA Bank, American Express, and The Hartford Insurance Group to develop customer acquisition and retention models and causal path models which link customer perceptions and behavior to financial performance. This work applies the most advanced statistical tools available to best understand the interplay between a multiplicity of variables and relationships.

His recent work also includes the development of a capital budgeting guide, survey of best practices in capital investment methodologies, and capital investment analysis for particular large investment proposals. George has directed the development of decision support software for linking capital investment proposals to strategic goals and prioritizing such proposals. The software is based on the Economic Risk-Adjusted Present Value Economic Risk-Adjusted Present Value technique and provides users with a decision framework to incorporate management value judgments as well as hard quantitative data into decision-making. He has personally facilitated the prioritizing of capital investment proposals in meetings of senior management of organizations whose investment budgets can be measured in billions of dollars.

Dr. Kettner earned an M.A. equivalent (Economics), C. Phil. (Economics), and Ph.D. (Economics: Theory, Econometrics, Public Finance, Labor Economics) from the University of California, Los Angeles. He has held the positions of Chief Economist and Technical Director, Syllogistics, Inc.; Senior Operations Researcher, Information Spectrum, Inc.; and Principal Scientist, General Research Corp. He has 25 years of experience in economics, econometric modeling, management consulting, and customer research.
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Carlos began his career with Inter-Race in Minneapolis, Minnesota, a nationally recognized institute for the development of Diversity Leadership in the workplace. Carlos took that vision and education back to Bogotá, Colombia as president of Estra Ltda., a company that provided agricultural services. In this position Carlos learned his first corporate lessons in presenting to boards, directing people, and negotiating with vendors and lenders. Carlos learned first-hand – and succeeded – by increasing overall sales 19.6% annually during his three years at the helm.

In 1993 Carlos, his wife, and two children moved to Florida, establishing a marketing and consulting advisory to companies in Latin America wishing to expand to the US and other markets. Later, Carlos expanded his business to include translation and interpretation services to clients for documentation translation, and training materials, and the delivery of finished products in Spanish.

Carlos’ experience in establishing distribution outlets for companies in Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay, Chile, Colombia, Venezuela, Mexico and Puerto Rico; and successful training and education programs on International commerce, regulations, cultural differences and diversity – have gained accolades with LeadFirst clients since 2002.

Carlos is fluent in English, Spanish and conversational Portuguese, has strong teaching and communication skills, a great knowledge of legal aspects of international sales, marketing and HR. As a graduate of Augsburg College, Minneapolis, Minnesota with a Bachelor of Arts Degree, Carlos lives in the Miami, Florida area and is currently working on his masters degree in Industrial and Organizational Psychology at Walden University.
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Maria a native of Spain has lived and worked in Spain, Columbia, and the United States. She is fluent in English, Italian, Spanish, and conversational in Portuguese.

Before joining LeadFirst, Maria gained experience working internationally in a diversity of industries, including – retail, medical, manufacturing, and lodging. As an in-house customer relations specialist for Hilton, Maria successfully developed relationships, developed business with, and traveled to, customers in Canada, Mexico, El Salvador, Venezuela, Columbia, Ecuador, Argentina, Chile, Europe, and across the US.

Maria joined the LeadFirst team in 2006 and brings her multicultural and international experience to bear in client relations throughout South America as LeadFirst’s Manager of Latin American relations. She’s also a highly requested leadership coach and expert facilitator with proven results from over 1,000 session participants. Maria lives in South Carolina with her husband and son, and enjoys traveling and spending time with her family.
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