Your Instructor
Rick Hansen is a published author, teacher, executive leader, entrepreneur, executive coach, and passionate surfer. Originally from Southern California, he combines his near twenty years experience to create a unique recipe for transforming leadership and the teams they lead. With a diverse industry background in local, domestic, and global markets, he brings over 20 years of understanding and a knack for driving business growth, growing partner networks, raising key metrics, building dynamic teams and creating a culture where motivation and innovation become the competitive edge. Whether it’s the companies he’s transformed or owned, he’s developed a way that creates highly engaged teams across organizational life.
Of his work, one CEO of a 30+ year old, multimillion, dollar global organization said, “He’s built, motivated, and lead this team to be the most dynamic unit in the company’s 30 year history in morale and spirit and overall growth and potential.”
After a brief stint as an English Literature teacher, he transitioned to business were he became fascinated with how leaders engage their teams. He struggled with how to transfer - or even if he can he transfer - the more soft skills of teaching over to the very hard world of business, profits, and P&L. However, over time he realized the difference between the classroom and business was slight. Today he uses the spirit of a startup, the practices and disciplines of general management, and the principles of surfing to build, motivate, and lead highly functioning teams.
He’s worked for mom and pop shops, to digital startups, to global, digital top tier consulting firms for Fortune 500 clients. He’s led multifunctional, cross discipline teams in domestic markets from 15 to 50 to global teams of over 1,000. He’s co- founded, owned and operated an indy snowboard company with global impact, authored and published a book “Leadership and the Art of Surfing,” and served as an adjunct graduate professor in Organizational Development and Theory.
Rick’s background is not just in business but in a multitude of diverse fields. He’s also a soccer and surf coach, accomplished speaker, a writer, avid surfer, snowboarder, competitive triathlete, marathoner, and cyclist.