About Me

Mel Blackwell – Senior Executive, Speaker, Culture Architect

Mel Blackwell has been fixing broken businesses for over 35 years. He started in a smoke-filled trailer park collection office right out of high school and worked his way up to leading teams at billion-dollar companies. He's run startups, turned around failing businesses, and spent more than 20 years in VP-level C-suite roles.

He's learned what works and what doesn't, usually by screwing things up first, then figuring out how to fix them. He's walked into businesses that looked like shot-up saloons and helped turn them into places where good people actually want to work.

Mel doesn't sell complicated frameworks or flavor-of-the-month programs. He shoots straight about what it takes to build a culture that can actually handle the Wild West of business. No fluff. No corporate jargon. Just what works.

When he speaks or coaches, people tell him he makes complicated things simple. That's because he's lived it. He knows what it's like to be in the middle of the fire with no perfect answer and a team looking to you for direction.

Mel holds a BS in Marketing from Auburn University and an MA in Management from The University of Alabama, but most of what he knows came from doing the work, not from a textbook.