YACG Orlando Lunch & Learn - Negotiating to Get What You Want

Cari H. Coats is a business advisor, leadership strategist, executive coach and speaker, leveraging her extensive executive and C-suite experience. Coats is co-founder & managing partner of Accendo Leadership Advisory Group. Accendo is a leadership strategy firm offering advisory services for the full spectrum of leadership development, including executive and transitional leadership coaching, high performance executive team development, professional development for high potential women leaders, and next generation succession coaching for family business leaders. Coats is a certified executive coach in the Marshall Goldsmith Stakeholder Centered methodology and works primarily with executive-level leaders and teams, and a member of the Forbes Coaches Council. Coats is also president of C2 Advisors, providing advisory services that leverage her wideranging professional network and expertise in strategy, marketing, entrepreneurship, family enterprise, social innovation and the capital markets. Coats is a key advisor to CEOs and executives of numerous innovative and high-growth companies.

Most recently, Coats was executive-in-residence at the nationally ranked Crummer Graduate School of Business at Rollins College in Winter Park, FL, focused on leadership and innovation, and is currently an adjunct member of the leadership faculty. Coats has worked broadly with financial securities and consumer products companies, sports organizations, entrepreneurial and social ventures, family-held enterprises, as well as alternative investment, venture capital, private equity and venture philanthropy funds. She is a former director on the boards of venVelo and StarterStudio, two early stage venture investment funds focused on Florida and the southeastern U.S. Her community, civic and social innovation leadership are longstanding and far-reaching.

Prior positions Coats has held include chief operating officer, chief strategy officer and chief marketing officer within CNL Financial Group, a leading private investment management firm providing global real estate and alternative investments with a cumulative $28 billion in assets under management, corporate officer for CFG and its subsidiary CNL Investment Company, corporate officer and founding executive of CNL Real Estate Advisors, a CFG subsidiary which reached $200M in equity raised and $650M in assets under management in its first year. While at CNL Financial Group, Coats led an exhaustive growth strategy process in partnership with McKinsey and Company. Following her departure from CNL, Coats served a key advisory role in the start-up and rapid growth of Franklin Square Capital Partners, a leading alternative investment company which pioneered the Business Development Company as a non-traded security in the retail investment space. Coats also led a year-long growth/exit strategy for one of the largest privately held, family-owned beverage distributors in the U.S. that strategically positioned the company for a significant exit with a double-digit multiple.

Read Cari's full bio here.