[00:01:07] Dianne Ogle: I had my first child in Texas and I was working for a corporation running their marketing department. And I had to put my oldest son in with a lady who had a small group of children in her home.

And every day I'd go get him. I would see him in a swing. And I told my husband, I cannot do this. I feel like I couldn’t run this marketing department yet. I want to have more of an impact on my own son. And so, my boss said, great.

She said go start your own business, figure out what that looks like. And I'll be your first client. And I thought, oh my goodness, how am I going to do this?

[00:01:47] Tommy Thomas: Our guest today is Dianne Ogle. Dianne began her career in sales and marketing before making a name for herself as a leader who could grow organizations and identify trouble spots and bottlenecks that tended to enter an organization's growth and effectiveness. As a prominent figure in the Executive Women of Influence Network, Diana has dedicated her career to empowering women in leadership roles across various industry sectors.

Her leadership experience spans leadership development, team dynamics, and organizational strategy, thus making her a sought-after advisor and coach. Her impact is widely recognized, and she continues to inspire and support women in their professional journeys, helping them to navigate the complexities of leadership and achieve sustained success.

[00:02:38] Tommy Thomas: Dianne, welcome to NextGen Nonprofit Leadership.

[00:02:41] Dianne Ogle: Thank you for having me, Tommy. I'm excited to be here with you.

[00:02:45] Tommy Thomas: I've been looking forward to this. You come with good recommendations from one of my previous guests and one of my future guests. I'm looking forward to this. Take me back to your childhood. What was that like? What are some of your fondest memories?

[00:02:59] Dianne Ogle: I grew up in the Midwest. I was born in Colorado but grew up in Indiana with a high work ethic, middle class. Early on, my parents took us to a church that didn't really preach the gospel as far as what the Bible taught.

And one summer when I was 11, my mom took us to a local Baptist church that had VBS. That was the first time both my mom and I heard the gospel. And she became a Christian with the mother’s group that they had. And then I did shortly thereafter and so it was a beautiful place to grow up and go to college.

And we lived on the baseball field because I had a brother who played baseball up until minor leagues. And so, there were three of us. I was the oldest of three. So, it was just a great way to grow up in the Midwest.

[00:03:57] Tommy Thomas: So, what was high school like?

[00:03:57] Dianne Ogle: I had to change high schools in my junior year. I went to one school in Indianapolis from kindergarten until my sophomore year. And then my parents went north of Indianapolis. And at the time it was a really rural area in Fishers, Indiana, which now it's like the largest high school. But back when I transferred, it was farm kids and I was the city girl moving out into the farm kids and I went kicking and screaming.

That was not a good transition for me, but the Lord's hand was in it even then. I had to take the driver's ed course and I had the athletic director who was a tough football coach, and my dad was a barker, so he didn't intimidate me, but he quickly got me involved and got me to be a stat girl because my brothers were athletes.

[00:04:58] Dianne Ogle: And he taught me to do the statistics for football, basketball, and track. And so, it was a great entry into a smaller school that was very established with kids who had been growing up together. And then I got a chance to be in musicals and got to play in Annie Get Your Gun. So, it was just a fun, great group.

[00:05:22] Tommy Thomas: What kind of career aspirations did a young 16-year-old Dianne have?

[00:05:29] Dianne Ogle: I had a lot of parents thinking I should go to California to go into acting. I had a lot of common sense of knowing the value of a dollar. Because I was raised that if you wanted extra money, you had to work.

So, I started working as a babysitter at age 11, got my first job at 15. I bought furniture, I bought my car. And so, I had a really deep, intrinsic work value at a very young age. And I didn't have a lot of role models of women. Unless you wanted to be a teacher or a nurse, there was not a lot of women, at least in my little world view at that time in the Midwest.

[00:06:06] Dianne Ogle: Mom stayed at home with us. Now I knew she had worked at the Air Force Academy back when she was single in finance but other than that, I didn't have a lot of visual people ahead of me that I could see. Now my dad was in business. And so that's started me out in that track of well, maybe that's what I’ll tip my toe into.

[00:06:29] Tommy Thomas: What's something that people are always surprised to find out about you?

[00:06:35] Dianne Ogle: They are probably surprised that I come from all brothers, that I was raised on a baseball field, that I love sports, and I can talk with the best of them about many sports.

And now I have three boys, and I've got a grandson. And so, Boys-R-Us is what we call ourselves. And I now have two granddaughters. Yay, I've been redeemed. But it's interesting because now the Lord has had me working with mostly all women. So, it's interesting. I was raised with mostly all men and then God's used it to now have me work with women. So it's been a sweet time.

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[00:07:10] Tommy Thomas: You graduated from college, and you got out in the workforce. Take me back to the first time you ever had a staff. And what do you remember about that element of basic leadership?

[00:07:23] Dianne Ogle: I started my career in Indianapolis at a computer software company. And then about a year and a half in, I was working in Pittsburgh running a sales territory and their president's club, only women. So, I learned really young about being the only woman in a whole salesforce and I didn't see any women ahead of me. And then I was tapped in Pittsburgh to come to central Florida and open an office for a temporary help company, which is in your industry. I didn't have any experience in it, but I thought I would just go down there. And that really was my first hand at leadership because before that, as you can imagine, I'm in charge of a sales territory and my clients and peers, but I wasn't having anybody that I was personally in charge of leading until I moved to Florida, had to launch this office.

[00:08:19] Dianne Ogle: This was back in the early eighties and I had it doing over a million dollars in annual revenue within three years and they eventually had me take over Tampa and then do trap troubleshooting up here in Atlanta where I'm at. But yeah, that was the first time I got inherited by a staff, but then I had to build staff.

I had to train them both inside sales and outside sales and didn't get a lot of training. It was just let’s go do it.

I really did it based on my own values on what I saw worked. I have a high work ethic and integrity is huge for me. And so being able to just navigate that was really important for me.

[00:09:05] Tommy Thomas: If I could have shadowed you earlier at that time, as you were building that team, what would the typical weekday or month look like?

Dianne Ogle: I started out with team meetings, daily team meetings, especially for my internal staff, of course that was back before computers.

And so, everything was on these huge Rolodex clocks and these files that were flipping around and we had clients, we had built it to Martin Marietta and law firms and Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. We were considered a little bit higher level administrative, so we didn't do lower and then we did some permanent placement.

We would start off our day on just trying to get our grounding. Who was going to do what and what was coming up. Because every morning you had either calls coming in from clients or you had employees that either could or could not make their commitment, which was always a challenge.

And then my sales staff, who are you going to visit? What appointments do you have? What do you need? How can I come alongside you? Do you want me to go with you? And so just that constant motivation and help to make sure that they were adhering to what we needed the office to do.

[00:10:24] Tommy Thomas: If I could have been in one of your staff meetings and you took a break and left the room and I asked them, what's the toughest thing about working for Dianne? What do you think they would have said?

[00:10:35] Dianne Ogle: Probably just adhering to their commitment to their numbers and even if the climate is tough, and it is hard with rejections, especially my sales team.

But having to get back on the phone or having to try to get back in front of people, which is, like I said, we didn't have computers. So, all of it was either you had to just do cold calling. Knock on those old doors, which I got kicked out of some buildings early in my career, but you just had to have that tenacity and not every day is that easy.

And so that's probably what they would say is that, boy, she's going to keep making us get up and go back out and try to call that person again and try to see them. Because we found that the more we could see people in pers...