Senior Team
Chris Bechtel, Principal, Senior Strategist
“Innovate and share”. Chris has been a business development, marketing and sales professional for more than 20 years, working with start-ups, growth stage organizations and brands to maximize the results of their digital marketing, PR and revenue generation activities through the use of content and technology. He has worked with dozens of leading organizations including, ACS (a Xerox Company), AnyMeeting.com, CarMax, City National Bank, Ebyline.com, Equities.com, iPressroom.com, the Los Angeles Opera, Target Corporation, Trend Micro, and Yahoo! among many others.
A film school grad with a business and entrepreneurial passion, Chris founded his first company more than 20 years ago, beginning with Big Productions, a rap music video production company in San Francisco. A writer and storyteller, Chris also has a background in fashion, automotive, financial services, media, and technology. It is this combination of skills that enable Chris to help clients build long lasting customer relationships that translate into results. He lectures frequently at UCLA, Cal State University Northridge and at numerous conference and events on strategies and tactics for integrating the web and social communications into marketing and PR.
Mike Moss, Principal, Senior Strategist
Mike Moss is a strategic partner to CEOs. He specializes in revenue growth, strategic partnerships, sales team development and deal making. He creates aggressive growth and sustainable revenue streams for his clients.
Mike focuses on companies in the $2M to $20M range who are ready to scale their revenues. He is experienced in the Internet, software, clean tech, social impact, and sustainable development. He favors disruptive and emerging technologies.
Mike has initiated and closed $4M and $5M contracts, turned $40k subscriptions into $600k annual retainers, and has cold called and closed CEOs of Billion dollar companies. He has closed countless six figure deals including several Fortune 100 companies as “first customers”.
Mike is a strategist, deal-maker and closer. He is well trained in the methodology and science of sales. He has a proven track record in targeting and closing strategic and marquee accounts, developing profitable strategic partnerships, building, training and mentoring sales teams, creating reliable pipelines and forecasts, and penetrating new markets and territories.
Mike has worked at technology companies including NetManage, LivePicutre, RealNames and Verisign. His clients include GlobeScan, Creative Strategy Group, The Hub, Social Capital Markets, and COMplus. He has initiated and closed contracts with HP, Cisco, SAP, Google, Disney, Sony, Warner Brothers, Levi Strauss, Bloomingdales, Kraft, Coca-Cola, Delta Airlines, American Express, Omidyar Network, Rockefeller and countless others.
His clients say he “is one of the few leaders who can develop strategy and close business”, “is one of the most inspiring leaders I’ve worked with”, “has the rare ability to take a vision and make it a reality through deal flow”, and “Mike gets right to the point, is easy to work with, is practical, and direct”.
Mike speaks on business development strategy and mentors dozens of entrepreneurs. He is founder and president of Toastmasters for Social Innovation, Board President for CSEE, a non-profit that supports indigenous tribes, is a LEED AP, a Black Belt in Karate, and a certified Martial Art’s instructor.
Matthew Smith, Principal, Senior Strategist
Matthew Smith is a change agent specializing in non-profits and turn-around opportunities. He is a founding member of the Cars 4 Causes® Board of Directors and currently serves as the Secretary of the organization and is actively involved in the day-to-day operations of Cars 4 Causes,® working alongside senior leadership in the areas of strategic planning, management systems and controls, business development, marketing and public relations.
Prior to his work with Make Good Social Matt lived in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil where he was, and continues to be, involved in sustainable, biodynamic coffee production. Matt has a unique and unparalleled skill set that encompasses all aspects of the business process. His experience stems from his 30 years of involvement with business start-ups and re-organizations, responsible for raising capital, designing workflows and procedures, establishing operational protocols, creating and effectuating marketing programs and quickly identifying and capturing market trends and opportunities.
During his career, Matt has consulted for, streamlined, and/or reorganized various companies; developed over 5,000 homes in Las Vegas Nevada; and engaged in securities speculation. He has worked in corporate mergers and acquisitions, specializing in acquisition strategy and financing, and he started his career packaging and marketing low income, senior citizen housing limited partnerships though various Wall Street firms.
Matt holds a Bachelor of Arts degree in Economics from the University of California at Los Angeles. He currently resides in Venice, California, is a single parent and a loving father to his 5 year old son.
Mikhaila Stettler, Principal, Senior Strategist
As a content strategist and producer, Mikhaila specializes in converting target audiences to the lifestyle habits and values of mission-driven brands focused on health, wellness, environment, green living and personal development. She achieves that by wedding compelling storytelling with rich media to create emotional connection between your brand and your target audience so that it reaches, teaches and prompts them to take action.
A mid-life epiphany turned this former doctor and lifestyle medicine educator away from a thriving career in medicine back to the arts. A storyteller, artist-writer-producer, Mikhaila’s desire to create work with massive transformational impact directed the focus of her efforts to the online world and led her to fuse lifestyle education with the arts. She reverse engineered the process that led to her outstanding success guiding thousands of families to make enduring lifestyle changes, and applied it to the online world. She then figured out how to design online content and video to reach the emotional brain, where all behavior decisions are made.
As a Senior Strategist at Make Good Social, Mikhaila brings her considerable creative and intuitive gifts to the joyous challenge of dreaming up ways to make the digital media interface engaging, interactive, imaginative and (above all) transformational.
Practicing what she preaches, Mikhaila is a passionate advocate of all things organic, non-toxic and ecologically sound. Her idea of heaven is two weeks at a luxury eco-resort on a tropical island – frolicking in the water, practicing yoga and making art daily, feasting on local organic food and salsa dancing the night away.