Elizabeth Ross
CEO
Ross brings more than two decades of experience in key leadership roles in the marketing industry, most recently serving as Chief Marketing Officer at Bright Health Group where she was a critical part of the executive team that shepherded the company through a lucrative $924 million IPO in June of 2021. Prior to that, she was the CEO of Periscope, an agency in Minneapolis she helped sell to Quad Graphics in 2019 for $132.5 million. Ross has also held leadership roles at DDB, Digitas, and IPG Mediabrands.
Liz’s mission is to do things that people love. At the end of the day, companies hire agencies to drive growth. Period. And the best way to drive growth is to help craft messaging and brands that people feel genuinely connected to. And the key here is understanding that this isn’t about creating vanilla messages that appeal to everyone. In fact, the opposite of love is not hate, but indifference.
The industry is complex and ever changing and the opportunity to be a part of it is nothing short of inspiring. She is humbled to be a part of what is happening next.
Scott Jones
CFO
Scott Jones is the CFO for Shift Paradigm leading the financial operations, legal and mergers & acquisitions activities for the company.
Prior to Shift Paradigm, Scott has held senior finance positions at NewPoint Media Group (Advertising), LeaseQ (FinTech), Noesis (FinTech) and Sage Group plc, a publicly traded business management software and services company. Scott spent nearly 16 years at Sage and held CFO and Senior Vice President positions which included 6 years of leading North America’s mergers and acquisitions activities.
Scott completed his undergraduate degree at Southern Methodist University and holds a Bachelor of Business Administration in Accounting with a minor in Economics. He is a Certified Public Accountant
Justin Gray
CCO
Justin Gray is a serial entrepreneur who has made a career of launching successful companies and scaling them, with successful exits of over 250MM. After joining the Shift Paradigm family as a result of the LeadMD acquisition in early 2021, Justin slotted into a role near and dear to his heart, helming the go-to-market team where he manages Sales, Marketing and Business Development.
Justin is also a strong voice for pragmatic entrepreneurship, modern marketing, and building intentional organizational culture. As a recognized speaker, Justin has been published over 500 times in industry publications and maintains a regular column in Inc., while also contributing to Entrepreneur, Tech Crunch and others.
Justin and his wife Jennifer met over marketing, have a son named like a superhero, Grayson, and a daughter who’s destined to be a Rockstar. When not driving bookings revenues, you can find him roaming the fields at his hemp farm in Missouri or combing the desert looking for a poorly executed shot at the golf course.
Sarice Plate
CHRO
Unfailingly intrepid and informed Human Resource executive, Sarice is recognized for driving the Human side of HR. Aggragating a broad base of global knowledge and expertise – intimately and successfully – to produce an engaged and dedicated employee-centric workplace. The search for talent, architecting teams, and optimizing the humanity of the workplace with transformative programs and strategies is embedded in my psychology.
Dedicated to humanizing and strategizing in equal parts, I have spear-headed multiple award-winning and innovative global HR initiatives to secure a competitive advantage and ensure enterprise success:
Transformed employee development with an award-winning global learning strategy that empowers learners and fosters a culture of continuous learning, achieving an unprecedented adoption rate of 86% in first 6 months.
Designed and launched an ‘always-on’ global listening strategy to monitor engagement, build trust, and create a new way for employees to share their voice, resulting in 79-91% favorability scores.
Led a Global Human Capital Management digital transformation to improve the employee experience, system functionality and employee performance, realizing a $2M cost of ownership savings within 3 years.
Competencies that create results:
- Strategic Planning I Implementation I Alignment I Business and HR Transformation
- Talent Acquisition I Branding I Talent Management I Performance Management
- Employee Engagement I Culture I Diversity, Inclusion & Belonging I Employee Experience
- HR Process Design I Operations I Shared Services & Delivery
- Learning and Development I Leadership Development I Coaching
For Sarice, long-term engagement is a personal reward; collaboration is how it’s done. Building engaged teams, developing best-practices programming, creating fresh methods, applying technology—it’s all about getting it done with thought and finesse, seamlessly.
Chris Arrendale
COO
Chris Arrendale has over 18 years of experience in email marketing technology and software. His expertise includes insights into the email industry’s largest ISPs and is backed by extensive knowledge in industry-leading webmail providers, spam filter providers, reputation management strategies, and deliverability consulting best practices. He has traveled extensively as a marketing speaker, author, and software consultant.
Prior to Shift Paradigm, he led and founded multiple deliverability ventures including Inbox Pros that was later acquired by Trendline in 2018. He has worked with clients all over the world solving deliverability and compliance issues. Chris recently authored a book on email deliverability, privacy, and compliance titled “Deliverability Inferno”.
Chris graduated with an Associate’s degree from Oxford College of Emory University, followed by a B.A. from Emory University and earned a M.S. from Southern Polytechnic State University.
JT Bricker
CSO
As a strategic marketing leader, J.T. leads teams in helping clients design and execute actionable marketing and sales strategies and impactful execution that drive revenue growth and profitability. He works closely with organizations to develop a strategically grounded approach to marketing and sales with a blend of strategy, analytics, technology and creative to achieve growth objectives. J.T. works with the LeadMD team in advising clients on best practices in revenue growth strategies, strategic sales and marketing alignment, account-based strategies, demand generation, marketing technology, marketing operations, analytics and sales management.
Prior to joining LeadMD, J.T. held a variety of marketing leadership and strategic consulting roles including management consultant, marketing operations, pricing and offer management, demand generation and analytics in multiple enterprise organizations.
Michele Souder
SVP, Program Management
With over 20 years of email marketing experience, Michele started the client services practice at Trendline 10 years ago, and now leads our Program Management area at Shift Paradigm, including strategy, analytics, creative, platform, QA and solutions consulting. Her previous experience includes email marketing positions at General Mills, North American Membership Group, BoomBox Inc. and Bigfoot Interactive.
Michele leads a team of professionals focused on delivering a superior level of service, driving efficient and effective programs, and exceeding client objectives and goals.
Michele holds a B.S. in Economics with concentrations in marketing and strategic management from the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania and an MBA in marketing and strategic management from the University of Chicago Booth School of Business.
Colleen Preisner
SVP, Campaign Performance
As a Senior Marketing Executive, Colleen brings her passion and creativity to everything she does. Spending over two decades working in senior marketing roles in the financial services industry, Colleen has become a fanatic for insight based marketing strategy that delivers results. This, coupled with her agency experience, has also afforded her the opportunity to work in nearly every marketing discipline. Throughout her career, she has proven her ability to build and lead strong, high functioning teams, to challenge the status quo and approach any challenge with passion and dedication. Colleen now leads the Capability Groups teams across North America.
When she is not running madly about mucking things up at work, she can be found gazing at the sunset from the dock, watching hockey or sending embarrassing snapchats to her two adult children. She and her husband live in Milton, Ontario.
Alice Walker
SVP, Practice Strategy
Alice Walker is an endlessly positive Marketer with a passion for content, campaigning, and education.
Throughout her career, she has worn many hats: Technical Writer, Content Lead, Project Manager, and Marketing Consultant. What they have all taught her is: bring solutions to the problems, be comfortable being uncomfortable, and she is happiest when empowering others while driving revenue and results. As both a people and process expert, there’s nothing she loves more than taking a challenge and creating scalable systems, frameworks, and creative solutions to solve them.
A Bay Area native, in her spare time Alice can be found spending time with her family in Davis, CA, cheering on the San Francisco Giants, or working on her latest crochet project (often all at once).