Keynote Speakers
OPENING SPEAKER: 
Billy Boughey
Journey to Success
An engaging conversation about the important "signs" we encounter on the path to success. Billy will explore eight key signs—like Yield, Detour, and Stop—and how they relate to leadership and personal growth. By understanding and applying these signals, we can navigate challenges, make better decisions, and stay on course. This is one of his most requested talks.
ABOUT BILLY:
Billy is a nationally recognized keynote speaker, Founder of Elevate Experiences, and a former professional baseball player. He has led events for top organizations like Delta, Disney, FIFA, and Coca-Cola, and works with teams to enhance culture and leadership. As the author of Culture Reconstructed and Start from Scratch, Billy empowers leaders to build impactful businesses. His engaging keynote presentations inspire teams to elevate performance, strengthen leadership, and drive lasting success within organizations.
Tharon Johnson
Tharon Johnson is the founder and CEO of Paramount Consulting Group, a full service, bipartisan government affairs and communications firm based in Atlanta, serving clients in the corporate and political sectors. Paramount Consulting Group specializes in government affairs, lobbying, campaign strategy and communications. Leveraging deep relationships from across the aisle, the firm supports clients through a variety of complex needs, providing strategic guidance and solutions that drive results
A nationally recognized political strategist and trusted community leader, Tharon appears each week on Fox 5 Atlanta’s longest-running public affairs program, “The Georgia Gang” and on 90.1 WABE-FM’s popular “Political Breakfast” podcast, ranked among the top 40 political podcasts nationally. He is also the author of the award-winning column “Red, Blue, and You,” which can be found monthly in Georgia Trend magazine.
Tharon advises elected officials at the highest levels of government. Most recently he served as a senior advisor to the Biden-Harris campaign in the battleground state of Georgia. He has served at senior levels of federal, state, and local campaigns, including for President Barack Obama, Congressman John Lewis, Atlanta Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms, Congressman John Barrow and DeKalb County CEO Michael Thurmond.
Brian Robinson
Brian Robinson owns Robinson Republic, a communications consulting firm that specializes in public affairs messaging throughout the state of Georgia. His clients include corporations, issue advocacy groups, chambers of commerce, public officials and political campaigns. Robinson Republic assists clients with message development, issue advocacy, media training, media relations and crisis management. He is a weekly political commentator in metro Atlanta media’s leading outlets and national cable news channels. He’s cohost of WABE’s Political Breakfast and a panelist on Fox 5’s Georgia Gang. He writes a column on politics in each edition of Georgia Trend magazine and is often quoted in leading national publications as an expert on Georgia politics.
Prior to opening his own business, Robinson worked as deputy chief of staff for communications for Gov. Nathan Deal. Before that he served seven years on Capitol Hill in the Georgia delegation.
CLOSING SPEAKER:
Don Yaeger
What Makes the Great Ones Great!
As a sports writer and author of more than two dozen books, Don has had a front row seat with some of the greatest winners in athletics, including Walter Payton, Jimmy Connors, Michael Jordan, John Wooden, Pat Riley and Dale Brown. They are all legends in their own right, but does anyone believe the athletes mentioned above are really the GREATEST athletes of their time, physically? Remember, Jordan wasn’t even the first pick in the draft. Payton had to go to a small black college because bigger schools didn’t want to risk a scholarship on him. Each became a champion through strength and skills that had nothing to do with physical prowess.
Using rich personal accounts gathered from more than twenty-five years of interviews with many of today’s sports legends and business leaders, Don has distilled Sixteen Consistent Characteristics of Greatness. Don shares some of these characteristics with audiences, in an easy, engaging style, which helps participants realize that they, too, can achieve a higher level of personal success.
ABOUT DON:
As an award-winning keynote speaker, an eleven-time New York Times Best-selling author, host of the top-rated Corporate Competitor Podcast, Executive Leadership Coach, and longtime Associate Editor for Sports Illustrated, Don Yaeger has fashioned a career as one of America’s most provocative thought leaders.
He is primarily sought to discuss lessons on achieving Greatness, learned from first-hand work alongside some of the greatest sports and business legends in the world. Additionally, Don has been retained by companies and organizations to coach their leaders on building a culture of Greatness, using the framework built through his exhaustive study of Great Teams in sports and business, discerning the lessons we can learn from them. Throughout his writing career, Don has developed a reputation as a world-class storyteller, in fact, renowned thought leaders such as John Maxwell and Simon Sinek have called Don the best storyteller they have ever worked with! Because of these achievements, Don has been invited as a guest to every major talk show – from Oprah to Fox Business News, from CNN to Good Morning America.
In 2020 Don launched the Corporate Competitor Podcast, which Podcast Magazine quickly recognized as one of the Top 50 Podcasts in America. By 2022 Spotify had listed Corporate Competitor Podcast in the top five percent of the most followed and shared podcasts in the world. Among the guests interviewed by Don for episodes of the podcast have been former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and the CEOs of Disney, Delta Airlines, Bank of America, Hendrick Motorsports, KPMG, FanDuel, Chick-fil-A, Insight Enterprises, TopGolf, Mayo Clinic, BET Media and Ritz Carlton.
Born and raised in Hawaii, Don has traveled extensively through his career. A graduate of Ball State University where he was selected as one of the university’s “50 Graduates of Distinction” over its first century and subsequently was inducted into their Hall of Fame in 2022, Don now resides in Tallahassee, Florida. He and his wife, Jeanette, have a son and a daughter.