Bill Cates is a high-energy speaker who motivates by sharing proven ideas and strategies that work.  Bill has helped over 20,000 small business owners and salespeople build thriving referral-based businesses – where the phone is ringing with referred customers/clients. And Bill has helped large companies increase sales and cut hundreds of thousands of dollars in marketing expenses at the same time! 

Bill Cates is the author of three popular books on referrals:  Get More Referrals Now!, Don’t Keep Me a Secret!, and Beyond Referrals: How to Use the Perpetual Revenue System to Turn Referrals into High-Value Clients.  Bill is the president of Referral Coach International and the founder of The Referral Coach Academy.

Bill Cates’ client-acquisition system has been featured in such publications as Success Magazine, Entrepreneur Magazine, Selling Power, the Huffington Post and The Wall Street Journal.   

Bill’s seminars are high energy, and high content.  Bill is the kind of speaker who prefers to talk with his audience instead of talking to them.  Therefore, you can expect a highly interactive session.  You can also expect to receive powerful and practical strategies that will have an immediate impact on your business.

Award-winning journalist Michele Norris is one of the most recognized voices in radio. She was host of NPR's longest-running national program, "All Things Considered," until 2012. Norris and "All Things Considered" received many of journalism's highest honors, including a Peabody Award, a duPont Award and an Overseas Press Club Award, and she was named the 2009 Journalist of the Year by the National Association of Black Journalists, solidifying her as an in-demand speaker on current events and American culture.

In 2013, Norris was named host and special correspondent for NPR. While on sabbatical, Norris spent a time traveling the country and developing two successful initiatives: The Race Card Project and NPR's Backseat Book Club. Her new role will allow her to continue this work while producing in-depth segments for all NPR programs.

Before joining NPR, she served as a correspondent for ABC News, where she reported extensively on education, inner city issues, the national drug problem, and poverty. While at ABC, she earned an Emmy Award and Peabody Award for her contribution to the network's coverage of 9/11.

In her 2010 book, The Grace of Silence: A Memoir, Norris focuses on how America talks about race in the wake of the Obama presidential election, and explores her own family's racial legacy. Tom Brokaw says the memoir makes her personal story a universal one: "Michele Norris takes us on a riveting personal journey from north to south and back again through the tangled landscape of race in America -- and teaches anew about the pain and possibilities of our past and future." It was named one of the year's best books by The Christian Science Monitor.

Eric C. Peterson, MSOD is a Senior Consultant with Cook Ross Inc. He is a recognized facilitator and educator in the Diversity & Inclusion space with over 15 years of experience in Unconscious Bias, Diversity & Inclusion (D&I), Learning Strategies, and Organization Development. Eric is certified in the use of both the Predictive Index and the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, and is a graduate of the Facilitation Learning Partners Program of Healing the Heart of Diversity. He has been published in Profiles in Diversity Journal and Echelon Magazine, and has been sourced as a D&I expert by CNN, National Public Radio, USA Today, The Bloomberg Group, the Washington Post, the Boston Globe, and the Los Angeles Times.

Eric C. Peterson, MSOD is a Senior Consultant with Cook Ross Inc. He is a recognized facilitator and educator in the Diversity & Inclusion space with over 15 years of experience in Unconscious Bias, Diversity & Inclusion (D&I), Learning Strategies, and Organization Development. Eric is certified in the use of both the Predictive Index and the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, and is a graduate of the Facilitation Learning Partners Program of Healing the Heart of Diversity. He has been published in Profiles in Diversity Journal and Echelon Magazine, and has been sourced as a D&I expert by CNN, National Public Radio, USA Today, The Bloomberg Group, the Washington Post, the Boston Globe, and the Los Angeles Times.

Nereida (Neddy) Perez, Vice President and Chief Diversity Officer at Ingersoll Rand. She is an internationally known Human Resources and Diversity practitioner with more than 20 years of experience working with Fortune 500 corporations in developing and implementing business strategies designed to remove organizational and cultural barriers designed to spur talent and business growth.

Neddy has been a speaker at a number of national conferences and events in HR, Diversity, Supplier Diversity and STEM. She has served as an advisor on diversity initiatives at an array of Fortune 500 companies and government agencies. Ms. Perez has been on the board of several national nonprofit organizations focusing Manufacturing, Energy, Leadership Development and Workforce Management. In 2014, she was named as the Top Hispanic Executive in the U.S.  by the National Hispanic Business Group and more recently was named one of the top 10 Latina in the U.S. by Latina Style Magazine. A strong advocate for MWBE’s and supplier diversity she has created and implemented supplier diversity programs at KPMG, National Grid and established the initial structure at Ingersoll Rand.