Dr. Karim Ellis

Why organisations work with Karim Ellis

• A John Maxwell Team founding partner, which puts him inside the most widely sold leadership development network in the US corporate market and gives buyers a recognised pedigree to point to internally.
• Corporate training experience across Ford, Honda, Toyota, General Electric, Johnson and Johnson, Procter and Gamble, Kroger, USPS and the US Department of Defense, so he is calibrated for large, regulated, blue-collar and white-collar audiences in the same brief.
• A signature framework, GPS My Success, published as a book and built around five named principles for translating individual vision into action, which gives organisers a structured deliverable rather than a generic motivational set.
• A platform style trained directly under Les Brown, certified at Platinum level, which is what a programme committee is buying when they want an energising US-style closing keynote that lifts a room.

Biography highlights

• Founding partner of the John Maxwell Team.
• Author of GPS My Success: The Address You Input In Life Determines Your Destination (2020).
• Two-time TEDx speaker, including TEDx Cincinnati.
• Les Brown Certified Platinum Speaker.
• 2022 Speakercon Motivational Speaker of the Year.
• Corporate clients include Ford, Honda, Toyota, General Electric, Johnson and Johnson, Procter and Gamble, Kroger, USPS, SHRM and the US Department of Defense.

Biography

Large organisations spend significant budgets on leadership and engagement programmes that fail to move the dial on day-to-day behaviour. People are inspired in the room, then the routine resumes. The problem is rarely talent or content. It is the absence of a shared, repeatable language for what good looks like and how individuals contribute to it.

Karim Ellis works in that gap. As a founding partner of the John Maxwell Team, he trained inside the leadership network John C. Maxwell built, then developed his own framework, GPS My Success, around five principles for turning individual vision into a destination the rest of the organisation can recognise. The book of the same name, published in 2020, is the spine of his corporate keynote.

His audiences are mainstream US corporate: Ford, Honda, Toyota, General Electric, Johnson and Johnson, Procter and Gamble, Kroger, USPS and the US Department of Defense, alongside SHRM and the National Urban League. The brief is consistent. Lift the room, give people a structured way to talk about ambition and accountability, and send them back to work with something they can use on Monday.

The platform craft sits on top of formal training with Les Brown, where Ellis holds Platinum certification, and two TEDx appearances. Speakercon named him its 2022 Motivational Speaker of the Year. The work is built for events that need an energising US-style keynote backed by a defined leadership and personal-development model, not a strategy lecture.

Key speaking topics

• Leadership development
• Vision and goal-setting
• Personal effectiveness and peak performance
• Motivation and audience engagement
• Communication and presence
• Sales and customer service mindset

Ideal for

• Internal leadership development conferences and L and D programmes.
• Annual sales kick-offs and field-force events seeking an energising main-stage keynote.
• Diversity, employee engagement and culture events looking for a US motivational headliner with corporate fluency.

Audience outcomes

• A named five-part framework, GPS My Success, that individuals can apply to their own goals after the session.
• A shared language for vision, ambition and accountability that managers can carry back into team conversations.
• A renewed sense of personal agency on performance, grounded in concrete principles rather than slogans.
• A high-energy closing or opening moment that lifts engagement scores for the event.