From Chaos to Catalyst: Angie Flynn-McIver and Gillian Bellinger on The Asheville Business Summit

What happens when theater directors and improv masters turn their attention to business leadership? Something magical, it turns out. Meet Gillian Bellinger and Angie Flynn-McIver, two creative professionals whose unlikely partnership is revolutionizing how we think about leadership in uncertain times.

Despite having remarkably parallel careers—Gillian with twenty years as an improviser and corporate facilitator, Angie as a theater director who co-founded NC Stage Company before transitioning to leadership coaching—they only met three months before this conversation. Connected by mutual friends who recognized their complementary talents, they quickly formed Verge Leadership Lab, bringing arts-based approaches to business challenges.

Their upcoming keynote "From Chaos to Catalyst" at the Asheville Business Summit promises something different from typical business presentations. Rather than talking at attendees, they're creating an interactive experience focused on practical tools for navigating disruption. The session will feature Alex Matisse, CEO of the internationally acclaimed East Fork Pottery, who will demonstrate how creative principles have tangibly benefited his organization.

What makes their approach so powerful? As Gillian explains, improvisers constantly process incoming information and pivot immediately based on changing conditions—precisely the skill modern executives need. Angie notes that theater professionals inherently understand uncertainty, as the arts operate in a perpetual state of adaptation. This "baked-in" comfort with ambiguity enables creative professionals to approach business challenges with innovative mindsets that conventional business training often lacks.

Their insights into resilience, rejection, and continuous learning apply universally to entrepreneurs in any field. Whether you're managing a pottery company, running a theater, or building a tech startup, the skills that enable artists to thrive—adaptability, creative problem-solving, and authentic communication—are increasingly essential in our volatile business environment.

Don't miss this opportunity to gain actionable strategies from two masters of creative leadership. Register for the Asheville Business Summit at wncsummit.com and transform how you navigate uncertainty in your business and life.

Guest Bios

Gillian Bellinger

As a corporate trainer and owner of Misfit Improv, Gillian crafts experiential programs that help business leaders and creatives alike flex their “adaptability muscle.” Her facilitation résumé spans 20 years across a variety of industries. Clients include: PwC, Lockheed Martin, Kaiser Permanente, Nissan, and Fidelity. Audiences value her knack for turning discomfort into discovery: yes-and becomes strategic insight. Gillian looks to empower people to choose change on purpose. bellingercoaching.weebly.com

Angie Flynn-McIver

Angie Flynn-McIver founded Ignite CSP on a radical premise: intentional communication is a fundamental pillar of leadership. Dubbed a “detective of human behavior,” Angie blends performance savvy from her theatre ro

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Bill

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Episode Transcript

Bill Gilliland (00:02):
Hi there, welcome to this week's episode
of Epic Entrepreneurs.
Man, have I got a treat for youtoday?
But I want to remind you thatyou need to get your tickets to
the Asheville Business Summit.
It's easy All you need to do isgo out to wncsummitcom all the
information there.
Now, the reason I've got atreat for you today is because
I've got the keynote speakers,and it's an interesting story of

(00:25):
how they came together.
They actually have their ownbusinesses, but they've come
together as Verge Leadership Lab.
I've got Jillian Bellinger andAngie Flynn McKeever, so I don't
know who wants to start, buttell us a little bit about how
all this happened and yourbackgrounds and how you got
there.
Maybe we'll start with Jillian,yeah, Great.

Gillian Bellinger (00:46):
Thanks so much, bill.
We're glad to be here.
So Angie and I together areVerge Leadership Labs and we do
facilitation, consulting andcoaches.
We're both coaches andfacilitators individually, and
it's interesting because wedidn't know each other until
maybe four months ago.
Angie, three months ago.

Angie Flynn McIver (01:07):
I mean yeah yeah, we were.

Gillian Bellinger (01:09):
We were kind of match made through other
people because we have deeplysimilar backgrounds and I have a
background in improvisation.
I've been an improviser andimprov teacher for the last 20
years and I am also a corporatefacilitator and a certified
coach.
So I wear two hats and inAsheville I run Misfit Improv,

(01:33):
which is an improv school andperformance ensemble, and our
shows happen to actually be atNC Stage and Angie and I can
talk about what that connectionis momentarily.
So we had mutual friends thatconnected us and said you know
you should talk to each otherabout the overlap in your
careers.
And we were both gay, right, wewere both willing to sort of

(01:58):
entertain what that looks likeand I'll hand it over to Angie
to kind of pick up the story andshare a bit about her
experience.

Angie Flynn McIver (02:08):
As Jillian said, we have really similar
backgrounds.
Mine is not in improv, but intheater.
I am a director and producer,and my husband, charlie, and I
moved to Asheville in 2001 tostart NC Stage Company, which
now is the lucky host of MisfitImprov.
And then, when I had been doingNC Stage about 10 years, I

(02:28):
started to peel off intocorporate coaching and
facilitation and I have acompany called Ignite CSP that
specializes in communicationskills coaching and leadership
coaching and sort of everythingthat falls under that umbrella,
and one of the things that we doa lot is speaking and coach

(02:49):
other people to speak in public,so that what seemed like a
great clearly the person whobrought us together saw a lot of
overlap between my backgroundand Jillian's and, as I was
joking before we startedrecording, it's like we're one
of those boy bands in the 90swho was created by a producer

(03:12):
and I'm not sure which one I am,but I'll let you pick your
flavor, jillian.

Gillian Bellinger (03:19):
I choose Sporty Spice, and I would also
like to offer.
That obviously means that wealthand fame are sure to follow.
Yes, so once we we connected,we realized that we we both are
deeply passionate about how thecreative arts can really serve
business.
So a lot of the skills that weuse as facilitators with my sort

(03:45):
of sweet spot is mid-level toupper-level corporate executives
about how to be a leader, and alot of that lives in dealing
with the unknown, the ability topivot, the ability to be
adaptable, managing change andhelping other people do the same
thing, and that all of that itlives in the arts.

(04:07):
Right, we are constantly askedin improv to pivot immediately
based on a data set that we aregetting and responding to, and
then in theater it shows up alittle bit differently for Angie
, if you wanna sort of talkabout how you see it, Angie.

Angie Flynn McIver (04:25):
Well, I was thinking, if you want to sort of
talk about how you see it,angie, well, I was thinking, as
you were saying that, that it'sreally about the way that
creative arts are businesses,whether that is an actor who is
their own freelance smallbusiness, who is figuring out
how to do everything that youneed to do as that type of small
business, which is one personwho's auditioning and booking

(04:47):
and traveling and dealing withtaxes and being incorporated and
all those things to somethinglike North Carolina Stage
Company, which is indeed a smallbusiness, which has all of the
issues and the questions of anysmall business, and then added
to to pick up on a word that yousaid earlier adding to this
idea of uncertainty whichplagues the arts almost more

(05:10):
than any other business.
So it is really baked into ourprocess and the way that we
respond to even daily challengesto go okay, let's take a step
back, let's look at thiscreatively, let's see where we
need to innovate, let's seewhere we need to pivot, and I

(05:30):
think that that's one of thethings that we were interested
in exploring in this keynote.

Gillian Bellinger (05:35):
And I think we're also really good at We've
been scrappy for a long time.
That's exactly right.
What were you going to say,Bill?

Bill Gilliland (05:45):
that's exactly right.
What were you gonna say, bill?
Well, no, I love all this.
I almost don't need to be hereand uh, which is, which is
awesome, but it does spark somequestions for me about business,
and then we'll get to the, tothe summit and the keynote and
how that came out.
But I I just want to.
I I think it's interesting.
I believe beth was maybe the onethat put you two together, so
beth is beth limbaugh's, theother co-founder of the

(06:07):
Asheville Business Summit, andshe's very good at connecting
folks and seeing some thingsthen in other people that maybe
they didn't even see themselves,or at least introducing them to
people that might work.
And I love that the fact thatin the arts you guys are so
collaborative in in generalanyway, because everything's a

(06:29):
production and you understandthat you can't do this stuff by
yourself.
But I do have a businessquestion for each of you, and
that is what surprised you?
You come out of the arts, youcome out of theater, what
surprised you or what do youwish you had known when you went
into business?

Angie Flynn McIver (06:51):
Everything.
I think I was really fortunatein that I knew I wanted to be a
producer from a pretty young age, so I was able to set up my
career in a way that I was ableto gather some of those skills
in a safe environment.
So I was the education directorof the National Shakespeare

(07:11):
Company in New York for aboutfive years in my 20s, and so
what that meant was I got tocreate a whole project, I got to
create a program and we touredShakespeare and workshops all
over New York, New Jersey andConnecticut.
But I got to do it under theumbrella of this larger
organization.
So I figured out hiring andfiring, I figured out budgeting,

(07:35):
I figured out sales all underthis other aegis before I was
out on my own.
But Charlie, my husband and Ioften joke that we started NC
Stage.
We wanted to do it sort ofbefore.
We knew better and that's stilltrue, I think for us the

(07:59):
understanding of what it wasreally going to take to make a
financially viable business.
We had a glimmer, but we didn'treally know what we were
getting into.

Bill Gilliland (08:14):
Yeah, I think a lot of people start businesses
and are successful and have noidea what they're doing in the
beginning.
And so they had, and so a lotof them will tell you that they
might not have done it if theyactually knew, which is which is
super interesting.
That's great.
How about you, jillian?

Gillian Bellinger (08:30):
Yeah, uh.
So I would say, um, a couple ofthings.
So, um, my, my initial businesswas what Angie talked about,
about being an actor.
So I've been an improviser andan actor for a long time and
acting is sort of an interestingcareer because one there is no

(08:52):
direct path to that.
You're sort of floating in theunknown and you just have to
figure it out.
And then the second piece is itreally sits in a space of a lot
of rejection.
It's like a constant jobinterview where you just don't
hear anything and that is adifficult experience to interact

(09:14):
with.
I'm much more used to it now andyou know I still audition and I
let those auditions go a loteasier and don't think about
them after they're done and moveon, generally speaking, and it
also requires an immense amountof resilience and I might even
say, like at the beginning, abit of bravado.

(09:36):
The other side of that bravadocoin is that I think in the
beginning I overshot my skills.
So I would say that you know, Isort of had this perspective
and I see this with our students, where I was like, well, I've
done one improv program, so nowI should be a professional

(09:58):
improviser, and on the secondcity stage, and that may or may
not be true for some people.
It wasn't true for me, and Ithink what I needed was, while I
needed that resilience, I alsoneeded a lot of humility, and
that humility, I think, comes inthe form of continuing to
educate oneself so constantly,constantly seeking out

(10:21):
information and education andclasses about how to continue to
be more.
I don't even know if the wordis better, but more specific and
effective might be the way that, and so that would be one thing
.

(10:43):
I think it also is that there isa visioning of a future that is
even bigger than I wouldinitially think.
So an example is that I, as ayoung improviser, I really
fixated on Second City and beingon a Second City stage, and

(11:06):
that is a great career and manypeople do it.
It also isn't the end of a line, right Like.
There are a lot of ways that acareer as an actor can look, an
example, being running an improvtheater and being an artistic
director.
So it is.
Sometimes it will look like howwe want, and sometimes it will

(11:29):
reveal itself as we go along andhaving a vision of the world
being bigger and and the endgoal looking bigger than maybe
what's right in front of me.
I think is really a usefulskill that I came to late Not
too late, but I just came to itlate.

Bill Gilliland (11:51):
Yeah, there's really a lot there.
Yeah, that's pretty amazing.
What occurred to me was that Icome out of sales and in sales
you get a lot of no's and youhave to get a.
In fact, the rule is you figureout how many no's you need to

(12:14):
get to get a yes yeah, so youmight get.
It might take you 10 no's toget a yes.
So every no's of hey, thanksfor the no kind of thing, and if
you look at it that way, thenit becomes a game to how do you,
how do you move it?
So I don't think it's anydifferent from what you learned
in in auditioning and right, allof that.
So how did you get into thecorporate game, both of you?

Gillian Bellinger (12:37):
I could start .
So, um, I got into it throughcorporate improv.
So a lot of improvorganizations do corporate
improv and I started with anorganization called Stevie Ray's
Comedy Cabaret in Minneapolisthey still exist, they're a
local company and then I movedto Comedy Sports Minneapolis.

(12:58):
Both of those organizations docorporate improv.
Both of those organizations docorporate improv and so I
started to do some of those withthem.
When I moved to Chicago, I didsome for Comedy Sports Chicago
and then I moved to LA andthat's where I kind of lived the
longest in my adult life and Ihad connections then essentially

(13:20):
, then essentially, and severalimprovisers started to hook me
up to other organizations thatreally love improvisers because
they are very adept at beingable to translate data.
So one of the companies I workfor now is a large leadership
and development company out ofthe UK and they do topic based

(13:42):
training.
So good, how to give goodfeedback, how to management
versus leadership Timemanagement would be another
example the psychology ofleadership.
So there's about 70 coursesthat we deliver and we get a
deck and then we have to makesense of it.
We have to translate thatinformation to an audience of

(14:06):
executives and make it useful,which is something that
improvisers do all the time.
We get a suggestion from theaudience, we filter that and we
turn it into something.
So it's similar skills.
I will say that one of thethings that I've gotten really
good at is speaking corporate,and I also lead a staff now.

(14:28):
So, as a leader, I understandwhat it's like to have
challenging conversations.
I understand what it's like tohave to manage my own time.
I understand what it's like tohave to delegate and navigate
the being in a leadership roleand what that feels like.
So so that was the trajectory,you know, 20 plus years.

Bill Gilliland (14:54):
Yeah, yeah.
So you started working forsomebody else, essentially, and
ended up yeah, yeah, ended upbeing great.

Gillian Bellinger (14:59):
And I still do, I still yeah, yeah, yeah.

Bill Gilliland (15:03):
A hundred percent.
Yeah, they, but they.
You know that helps to havesome other people booking some
things for you from time to time, for sure Awesome yeah, how
about?
You immersed in North CarolinaStage.

Angie Flynn McIver (15:10):
Company, a leadership development company,
reached out to me and said, hey,we need, as part of this larger
program leadership developmentprogram that we are running, we

(15:31):
need a presentation skillscomponent.
Could you design that?
And I was like, yep, I could, Ican figure that out.
With my education backgroundand directing background, I was
pretty sure I could figure thatout.
So I designed that for them andfor several years just ran that
workshop for them with someother coaches that I trained to

(15:52):
deliver that work and thenstarted realizing, oh, there's a
huge amount of adjacent workthat I could do in this area.
Ultimately, I felt like myskills as a director were what
were really coming into theforefront here.

(16:12):
It's being able to see theselittle moments that indicate, oh
, this person is nervous aboutsomething, but they're not
telling me what it is, butthey're just trying to push
through this speech or thisconversation.
So, but, if we can get back tothis little moment, this little
hiccup, and unpack that, ah, nowwe can really get somewhere in

(16:38):
creating authentic communication.
And then, once I realized that,I went back to school, I got a
coaching certificate and amaster's in organizational
development and leadership andthen felt like, okay, I've
really got the credentials to dowhat I want to do in this field
, and I've been doing itfull-time ever since.

Bill Gilliland (16:59):
Yeah, that's awesome.
Those are.
That's two great stories.
Well, let's talk a little bitabout the keynote and why people
should show up and come and getthis Cause.
I'm going to tell you y'all,you get it right now.
These are people have been allover the world and they've
they're choosing to be inAsheville and we didn't have to

(17:19):
go get them.
They're already here and uh,which is which is exciting.

Angie Flynn McIver (17:24):
And so tell us what y I would say the thing
I'm most excited about with thiskeynote is it really brings
together a bunch of thesethreads that Jillian and I have
been talking about about what dothe creative arts do really
well, what can we bring from ourknowledge and history and
experience in the creative artsand the creative industries to a

(17:49):
business audience that may ormay not have a toe in that place
, and then making it prettytangible and actionable.
We've come up with takeawaysand an experience that is going
to be pretty different, I think,from any other keynote that you
might attend in 2025.

(18:10):
It's really coming together inan exciting way, with a lot of
different components and a lotof different takeaways.

Gillian Bellinger (18:19):
I would agree .
I would say that we aredefinitely not going to talk at
people.
We are interested in talkingwith people about how to help
them solve problems and we arebringing with us a toolkit that
folks are going to walk awaywith and be able to implement.
We also are excited because, asa case study, we are bringing

(18:42):
in Alex Matisse, who is the CEOof East Fork Pottery, which is,
if people aren't aware of, eastFork is a massive pottery
company that is pretty famous inthe pottery world and has been
featured in, you know, the NewYork Times for being an amazing
company, and Alex is going tocome and share how East Fork

(19:06):
utilizes the skills that we talkabout and we'll be able to see
how that affects the bottom lineand why that matters and how it
has been actionable for theirorganization from a real boots
on the ground way.

Bill Gilliland (19:25):
Yeah, I can't wait.
I think that's so exciting totake concepts and then make them
real.
And, like you said, I love thefact that one of our principles
of this is that people have towalk away with things that they
can put in practice the next day.
We're not talking about thingsthat are pie in the sky, or you

(19:45):
got a book and it's going to setit on the shelf.
This is actionable items thatare going to make a difference
in your life and your businessthe next day.
So, yeah, I love that.
So, is there a?
Is there a working title?
Is there a full?

Gillian Bellinger (19:59):
title.

Bill Gilliland (20:00):
Yeah, what's the ?
What are we talking about here?
Yeah.

Gillian Bellinger (20:03):
So our our title is from chaos to catalyst.
Yeah, so we're just talkingabout what do you do when your
world explodes from a businessperspective?
So you know, examples of thatmight be a pandemic.
Another example of that forfolks who are in't affected by
that Disruption change what dowe do when we find ourselves in

(20:37):
circumstances that are new andrequire a new set of skills?

Bill Gilliland (20:43):
Yeah, I love that, I love that.
So what else would you like forfolks to know?

Angie Flynn McIver (20:50):
A whole day is just shaping up to be very
exciting.
Jillian and I were talking theother day about how we're going
to spend the morning before thekeynote and what we're looking
forward to.
It's a great time to becelebrating Asheville, to be
celebrating Asheville business.
Whether you're located here inWestern North Carolina or if

(21:11):
you're coming from a littlefurther away Charlotte or
Greenville or someplace likethat it's just going to be an
incredible event.

Gillian Bellinger (21:18):
And I think it's exciting that people will
have an opportunity to reallygain some of that knowledge that
I was even talking about before, where, as long as we keep
learning, then we are able toevolve our skills and
capabilities to meet the needsof the new moment we find
ourselves in.

(21:38):
And, as I'm sure everyone knows, everything keeps changing.
I mean, it changes what staysthe same and if we're able to
evolve with that and come from aplace of that growth mindset,
it only empowers us to makestronger, more successful
businesses.

Bill Gilliland (21:57):
So you heard it here You're going to leave with
tools to deal with everything inyour life.
Yes, it's going to be amazing,it's going to be fun.
It is going to be so fun and soinformative.
Going to be amazing, it's goingto be fun.
It is going to be so fun and soinformative, and we are
dedicated to making sure thatyou walk away with actionable

(22:19):
things that you can have.
And I can't tell you howexcited to see and to
participate in this event and,frankly, I know that they don't
even know 100% of how this thingis going to go.
So it's going to be exciting,it's going to be fun.
That's what improv is all about.
Right, that's right.
So it should be fun.

(22:39):
Well, thanks for being here,Really appreciate what you're
doing in our community and forAsheville and Western North
Carolina and the rest of theworld, and I really can't wait
to see y'all.

Gillian Bellinger (22:53):
Thank you, Bill.
We're excited.
Thanks so much.

Bill Gilliland (22:55):
Hey, and until next time, all the best.