2024 Business Women Awards
ACHIEVEMENT HONOREE: Kathi Graham-Leviss
XBInsight Inc. president
ANYONE WHO’S WATCHED “Succession,” the addictive saga about the mega-wealthy Roys, knows how it ends: the family business doesn’t always remain in the family.
As president of XBInsight Inc., Kathi Graham-Leviss has seen that unfold in real life during the two-plus decades since she launched her executive management and coaching firm.
“We’ve had client situations where the son isn’t the right person to lead the company to the next level and we’ve been able to show that with clear and specific information,” she said. “There are many aspects to a succession planning program, but the nice thing is we also have the technology and data to work with them.”
Graham-Leviss grew up in Huntington, Conn., with a twin brother and another brother just 11 months younger. Even at an early age, she was thinking ahead.
However, her dad was a gym instructor and her mom taught first grade, so funding was an issue.
“We had to figure out a way to pay for school,” she said.
Graham-Leviss, a Boston University graduate, spent several years in radio and TV sales, packaging, selling and tapping into nontraditional revenue in creative ways, putting together one particularly memorable program during Super Bowl XXIV that tied in with convenience store chain Store 24, which was operated by The Store 24 Inc.
After 14 years in broadcasting and five years working for a consulting firm, Graham-Leviss launched XBInsight in 2001 after seeing a need for executive workplace hiring and coaching that she knew she could fill.
At the time, her job was to start new markets and write and facilitate the training for sales teams. She soon discovered that companies didn’t have the right people with the right talent.
Graham-Leviss also saw the wisdom of identifying and measuring the skills and abilities of people who were successful in their jobs to compare against future candidates. There are still only a handful of assessments on the market that help determine whether someone will be successful once they’re in the job, she says.
After years of learning a lot about many industries, Graham-Leviss has developed a database of thousands of jobs that predicts how successful someone will be at work from both a fit and performance perspective. Clients have ranged from CVS Health Corp. and Amazon.com Inc. to the NFL.
“We’re vigilant about validating our data and making sure that it’s performing for our clients and doing what it needs to do,” she said.
