Peter Kozodoy is the author of Honest to Greatness, an Inc. 5000 serial entrepreneur, TEDx speaker and business coach who works with organizations and their leaders to help them overcome self-limiting bullsh*t and use brutal honesty to achieve massive success.

But it didn’t start that way.

At 17, he was an Olympic-hopeful figure skater who was sure he would achieve his childhood dream of attending Harvard University.

By 18, he had missed both the Olympics and Harvard, and found his life spiraling out of control until he accidentally discovered the power of strategic brutal honesty with his community, with others around him, and with himself.

Then, from the depths of the Great Financial Crisis, Peter and his business partner built an Inc. 5000 marketing agency that would go on to work with startups to the Fortune 500, and local car dealers to Warren Buffett. Peter’s tough lessons learned — in business, leadership, and entrepreneurship — have appeared in Inc., Forbes, The Huffington Post and more, and his work at GEM has earned Telly, Pixie, Communicator, Aurora, Davey and W3 awards.

He has shared his story at TEDx, CEO Clubs of America, Digital Book World and many other conferences and corporations, spreading his mission to help leaders use strategic brutal honesty to achieve massive success in business and in life. Today, Peter runs a private equity portfolio of companies he has co-founded and incubated, all of which operate with his leadership principles.

He has been a member of both Entrepreneurs' Organization and the Young Entrepreneur Council, and has served on the boards of the Greater New Haven Chamber of Commerce and Junior Achievement in CT. He holds a BA in Economics from Brandeis University and an MBA from Columbia Business School, and also holds a black belt in Taekwondo which earned him a trophy that’s taller than he is (which, admittedly, isn’t very tall).