About Us
Erin Hatzikostas
Meet our founder
Erin Hatzikostas is a former Corporate CEO turned Professional Pot-Stirrer.
Erin is the best-selling author of You Do You(ish), a TEDx and keynote speaker, coach-sultant, and the co-host of an offbeat career and leadership podcast, b Cause with Erin & Nicole.
Erin’s talks have reached hundreds of thousands of people and her thought leadership has been featured on ABC, CBS and published in Business Insider, Fast Company, Well+Good, among several others.
Erin spent her career “first half” working in the corporate world, where at the age of 42, she became the CEO of a large healthcare financial institution. In just three years, she took a struggling company and turned it around, tripling earnings and sending employee engagement skyrocketing. Her secret? Radical authenticity.
Erin holds a BBA in Statistics from Western Michigan University and an MBA in Finance and Marketing from the University of Connecticut. She is married to her husband, Manny, who she met while stumbling through (and failing) an early career in the Actuarial field. Erin and Manny have two highly authentic children – Ella (13) and Mick (11). In Erin’s free time you can find her coaching basketball, running, skiing, drinking wine in her fat pants, or dancing wherever you’re not supposed to dance.
We help people and companies use authenticity as their secret weapon to success.
To change the working world to a radically more authentic place.
Meet the Front of the House
In 1994, Erin’s roommate came home from her college class and told Erin something that would change her life forever. Excited to help Erin finally figure out where she should point her future, Amy said, “Erin! I’ve found the career for you. It’s high pay, low stress, and you just have to be good at math. And you’re the only person I know that’s good at math. It’s called…an Actuary.”
Now Erin being the go-getter (and naïve as hell) she was, she headed straight to the library the next day. Somewhere up on the 4th floor she found a “book” about Actuaries. Well, it didn’t really say much about what an Actuary was; it was just this beige booklet that listed all the companies that hired Actuaries along with their address and phone number (yes people, no website or emails back in the olden days!)
So with the excitement a 5 year-old might have on their first trip to the dentist, Erin set off to get an internship as a high-paid, low-stressed Actuary. After swindling her way into Aetna’s esteemed Actuarial program, Erin left her Midwestern, Michigan roots for the big city of Hartford, Connecticut.
In just a few years working and taking seven of the requisite Actuarial exams, she became the proud owner of seven Actuarial exam failures. After graduating second in her high school class and always being a bit of a smarty pants, she found herself on the bottom floor of the Actuarial profession.
Meet Nicole
If Nicole Licata Grant were a celebrity mash-up, she would be the progeny of Dolly Parton, Betty White, and Cher: a little trashy, a little classy, oddly entertaining, and curiously enigmatic…while harboring a deep passion for do-gooding, glitter, and big hair.
Other than growing up in urban New Haven, Conn. in the 1990s, attending Yale while poor, divorce, being arrested overseas, working in warzones, and having once been fired from a “dream job” (that term is a lie, by the way) she has not survived any major life traumas from which anyone might find inspiration.
Nicole has however spent much of her 25-plus-year career in the service of others. Nicole has recently made a joyful transition to public service while “Making Public Utilities Sexy Again (MP-USA!)” in a regulatory capacity (despite not being a lawyer or having a badge). Most recently, she was former Executive Director (aka cruise-ship director for good) of a leading national corporate foundation in the energy sector. She has also served as an Economist with the federal government and as a humanitarian aid worker and international development professional with several organizations including Save the Children and Innovations for Poverty Action (IPA). In short, Nicole has had the privilege of spending a good amount of time in places with bad beaches and/or conflict and loved every minute of it
Meet Rachel
Walking across the gravel parking lot, feet swollen, back aching and knowing there was more work to do once she got home, was a typical day for Rachel after a long day of teaching. Though she loved her students, she couldn’t help but wonder, “Is this it? Is this what the next 30 years is going to look like?” She said this, all with a pang of guilt, because what she had – a steady job, 401k and the ability to impact children’s lives – wasn’t exactly what she envisioned, but felt she should be grateful for. She loved being a teacher, but the toll it took mentally and physically became harder and harder to endure as each year passed.
The fear of leaving a stable job outweighed all apprehensions, when she found out that she and her husband were going to become parents to a sweet baby boy. At that moment, Rachel knew, to be the mom she wanted to be, teaching was no longer in the cards.
