SPEAKERS
M. Ryan Gorman
President & CEO
COLDWELL BANKER REAL ESTATE
Liz Gehringer
Chief Operating
Officer
Meridith Elliott Powell
Business Growth Expert
Dan Spiegel
Managing Director
Voted one of the Top 15 Business Growth Experts to watch by Currency Fair, Meridith Elliott Powell is an award-winning author, keynote speaker and business strategist. With a background in corporate sales and leadership, her career expands over several industries including banking, healthcare and finance. Meridith worked her way up from an entry-level position to earn her seat at the C-Suite table. She is Certified Speaking Professional, a designation held by less than twelve percent of professional speakers, and a member of the prestigious Forbes Coaching Council.
She has a cutting-edge message, rooted in real-life examples and real-world knowledge. She is the author of four books, including Winning In The Trust & Value Economy (a finalist in the USA Best Book Awards) and her latest “Own It: Redefining Responsibility – Stories of Power, Freedom & Purpose about how to build cultures the inspire ownership at every level to create profits at every turn. Meridith writes, speaks and is passionate about helping her clients understand everything they need to know about how to make this economy start working for them.
High energy and highly interactive, Meridith’s keynote will help leaders and business owners learn the new rules of success today. Including how today’s economy has changed, how that has changed today’s customers and employees, and specifically how that impacts your business.
In her highly engaging keynote-speaking sessions, Meridith shows her audiences how to attract more business, retain top talent, and leap into position to win in this new economy. No walking on coals, no breaking boards, just real-life strategies you can put into place first thing Monday morning.
M. Ryan Gorman is the President and Chief Executive Officer of Coldwell Banker Real Estate LLC, the original Silicon Valley real estate startup founded in 1906 in San Francisco. In this capacity, he is responsible for the day-to-day franchise and brokerage operations supporting approximately 92,000 agents in 3,000 offices in 44 countries around the world.
He additionally serves as the president and CEO of NRT LLC, including the NRT-owned brokerage offices doing business as Coldwell Banker Realty. As one of the nation’s largest real estate brokerages, powered by a network of approximately 47,000 independent real estate agents operating from approximately 700 offices in more than 50 markets across the United States, Coldwell Banker Realty is the largest component of Realogy Holdings (NYSE: RLGY).
Prior to serving as president and CEO of NRT, Gorman served as Chief Strategy and Operating Officer and as its Senior Vice President, Strategic Operations where he brought a heightened focus on service delivery, defined a comprehensive integrated growth strategy and leveraged the resources of NRT and Realogy to drive a superior experience for affiliated agents, employees and consumers.
Earlier in his Realogy career, as Corporate Senior Vice President and Head of Strategic Development, he oversaw strategic development and merger and acquisition activities across Realogy’s entire portfolio in the U.S. and beyond, from title insurance agencies to real estate brokerages to expansion of Realogy’s world-renowned brands and franchisees.
Before joining Realogy in 2004, Gorman held advisory and principal investment roles with PricewaterhouseCoopers, Credit Suisse, and The Blackstone Group. He graduated with honors from the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania.
Elisabeth Gehringer is chief operating officer at Coldwell Banker Real Estate LLC. Gehringer oversees the brand’s field service, operations, learning, talent attraction, international and events teams.
After starting her career in field services with the sales and marketing group at Ford Motor Co., Liz went on to become a lawyer, representing business owners in commercial litigation. Since 2006, Liz has been part of the leadership team at Realogy Holdings Corp., the parent company of Coldwell Banker Real Estate. Her tenure includes five years with the Realogy Franchise Group and her most recent role as Realogy’s chief ethics & compliance officer. In that role, Liz built and oversaw Realogy’s global ethics and compliance program that earned the company recognition as one of the World’s Most Ethical Companies® for seven consecutive years. As COO, Liz has returned to her career roots of service and branding. Her combination of operational, franchise and legal experience, as well as her track record in building a world-class program from scratch, uniquely position her to drive strategic growth for Coldwell Banker Real Estate. Liz is a graduate of Georgetown University and Georgetown University School of Law.
Dan Spiegel is a sales operations professional who specializes in commercial real estate and works with leadership to create an exceptional platform on which sales teams can grow their businesses and adapt to a fast changing market dynamics. After spending most of his professional career supporting the sales efforts of brokerage professionals, Dan understands how to connect with client facing producers and shared services teams to drive results. Dan has managed the implementation of initiatives, recruited top producing teams, opened new markets and led the integration of acquired businesses, encouraging a culture of collaboration, exceptional service and outstanding achievements.
No matter which hat he's wearing, his goal is simple – to build a strong connection with people and work with them to achieve desired business outcomes. A focus on the people of an organization drives Dan to guide teams and entrepreneurs to be successful.
Dan is keenly interested in the intersection of technology and real estate. Always curious to explore new possibilities, Dan embraces how technology and data management are changing the way service providers interact and provide value to clients. He has further embraced understanding how workplace design can be used to shape the outcomes of an organization leveraging real estate as a strategic component of a success for a company. Dan has been a mentor to proptech start-up firms and serves on the leadership board of CRETech, the industry’s leading organization coalescing tech firms and real estate players. He presents on expert panels at conferences such as CCIM, Disrupt CRE and CRETech, is a frequent discussion moderator at events as well as in blogs and on social media.
Dan holds a BA in economics from the University of California at Berkeley and a Master’s in Urban Planning from the University of Illinois at Champaign Urbana. He began his career in commercial real estate as a Research Director for Grubb & Ellis Company in Chicago, grew in to an expanded role as the Executive Vice President of Operations before assuming a similar leadership team role for the U.S. business at Colliers International. He is a licensed real estate broker in Illinois.