Brent Gleeson Profile
Gleeson, a Navy SEAL combat veteran and serial entrepreneur, has leveraged the principles of leadership, discipline, accountability and resiliency learned in training and applied down range for building high-performance teams in the business world. He has raised millions of dollars for his organizations, built winning teams, made costly mistakes, dealt with the inevitable obstacles and sold companies for significant returns.
He is an acclaimed speaker on topics ranging from leadership and culture to change management and building high-performance teams. Companies of all sizes from across the globe hire him for speaking and consulting with a desire to leverage his expertise in building teams that evangelize change and achieve winning results.
After tours in Iraq, Africa and other theaters of war Gleeson transitioned to the world of entrepreneurship applying battletested leadership principles to building teams designed to overcome the odds and achieve results. Using the guiding principles he learned in the SEAL Teams, Gleeson has built award-winning multi-million dollar organizations that have earned the prestige of being repeatedly named in the Inc. 500|5000 list of fastest growing private companies.
He has spoken to thousands of business leaders, professional athletes and first responders all over the world and consulted with hundreds of organizations large and small seeking new ways to develop their leaders, improve the culture and get better results. He has inspired thousands to push themselves beyond their comfort zone and achieve seemingly impossible goals.
With degrees in finance and economics from Southern Methodist University, English and History from Oxford University in England and an MBA from University of San Diego, Gleeson's extensive experience is both academic and real-world in nature. Gleeson has won awards for business leadership and was named one of the "Top 10 CEOs" in Entrepreneur Magazine's October 2013 issue for his exemplary approach to building high-performance teams in business.
His clients include reputable brands such as Bank of America Merrill Lynch, PayPal, Nestle, Toronto Raptors, Morgan Stanley, Raytheon, Boeing, A&E Networks, Teva Pharmaceuticals, Care Fusion, The North Face, Lilly, Blue Cross Blue Shield, UBS and the U.S. Navy.
For the last four years, Gleeson has had weekly columns on both Forbes.com and Inc.com, two of the most highly trafficked business content sites in the world. His columns – that garner thousands of views and social shares each week – focus on the topics of business leadership, culture, change management and building teams that achieve great results.
Since his inception as an entrepreneur, Gleeson has been featured on many business podcasts and local and national news and TV channels such as CNBC, Fox, CBS, NBC, ABC, TMZ and the Discovery Channel. He has also starred in several reality shows such as Discovery Channel's ‘One Man Army' and Mark Burnett's NBC primetime hit ‘Stars Earn Stripes.' For ‘Stars Earn Stripes.' Gleeson and several other special operations professionals – including the late Chris Kyle (former teammate and "American Sniper") – were selected out of two thousand candidates to be paired with celebrities to compete and raise money for charities like Wounded Warrior Project and Hire Our Heroes. Gleeson currently has two TV shows in the works with Matt Bissonnette (former teammate, SEAL Team 6 member, and author of the best-seller ‘No Easy Day') and CAA, where the focus will be a special operations approach to improving businesses.
Gleeson is on the Executive Board of the Navy SEAL Family Foundation and his family is an ambassador family for March of Dimes. He is married with three wonderful children.