Meet Harris Kalofonos | Managing Director | Founder

We had the good fortune of connecting with Harris Kalofonos and we’ve shared our conversation below.

Hi Harris, we’d love to hear more about how you thought about starting your own business?
Since the dawn of humankind, symbols and marks have been a way to express one’s identity, place, and state of mind. The Olympic Rings along with the flag of Greece were my first references to symbol synonyms with self-identity. At the age of 16, I was first exposed — in a way that I could appreciate — through greek monks the meaning and composition of greek words. Along followed the explanation of symbols one can find all around Greece in architecture, culture, and religion. Fascinated by the depth of thought, a world with its own vocabulary revealed its self at the time, expanding my horizons of understanding. Business-wise, the dots did not connect until years later, when storytelling became a necessity professionally. After working at the past five Olympic Games, my head spun with marks and colors from Greece, China, the UK, Canada, Brazil, Tokyo, and back. The underlining theme was the celebration for a logo mark that can bring people stronger together and deliver impact at scale through sports competition. The Olympic Rings are today the most recognizable brand globally, and I was fortunate to grow up personally and professionally with them over the past two decades. Beyond the Rings.

What should our readers know about your business?

Working on what works and not what one likes is a daily challenge in this space. It all starts with empathy and curiosity to develop and deploy brand systems that create clarity and trust. It is the new norm to partner with clients to find deep understanding around which creatively you can solve problems through targeted visual and verbal identity, clearly communicating who their target audiences are motivated to connect.

Evolving towards a working process starts with a typical framework that needs to be clearly communicated and uniquely adjusted to your style of interpreting all the data that will synthesize a client’s story.

Branding your branding is the only way for a prospective client to appreciate the value you bring to the table. After all, developing brand systems is a very personal affair based at the end of the day on trust and the belief from the client’s side that you are worth the time and investment to bring their brand to life.

Goodvoice Group embarked on this journey of self-discovery and walked through its own process multiple times until we felt we had arrived at a logo and brand system that communicated our brand essence.

After all, developing brand systems is a very personal affair based at the end of the day on trust and the belief from the client’s side that you are worth the time and investment to bring to life their brand.
Going to the market. Creating a globally scalable youth leadership program that trains young people as creative and resilient leaders of tomorrow was one of the first significant challenges GVG undertook.

Questions like how we develop a brand system for a gen x, and z target audience are identifiable by the parents and at the center of the thought process for a long time. It all began by taking a deep dive into what students and their parents need and aspire to.

Developing a brand system that spoke to the students’ hearts and minds set the program apart. In 2020 it was awarded one of the top 100 best learning and education programs by the Global Forum on learning and education.

Let’s say your best friend was visiting the area and you wanted to show them the best time ever. Where would you take them? Give us a little itinerary – say it was a week long trip, where would you eat, drink, visit, hang out, etc.
2021 marks 150 years of the city that hosts most of the US Olympic and Paralympic Movements organizations, training sites, and museums. The story begins sometime after the end of the US Civil war in the dawn of the industrial era as visionary ex-generals, industrialists, fortune-seekers head west to live their dream. Like so many great before them, these visionaries, after amazing legendary fortunes, seek to gain immortality through real estate statements that would stand the test of time. As one looks back, the dots of today’s Olympic City USA are primarily connecting through a series of real estate milestones. Like compound interest, fuel over time, the ideal conditions for the best of the best to have the necessary infrastructure — in Olympic City USA — to leave their mark on the world stage. My recommendation, therefore, would be to think out of the box or, in this case, out of Denver and visit Colorado Springs US Olympic and Paralympic Museum, a true must for anyone visiting Colorado these days!

The Shoutout series is all about recognizing that our success and where we are in life is at least somewhat thanks to the efforts, support, mentorship, love and encouragement of others. So is there someone that you want to dedicate your shoutout to?
Tara Fortier In April of 2006, I was at Yale. This was my first memory of Tara amazing me with a suspension one leg tango dance move during a performance at one of the campus halls. Fast forward 15 years, here work today on using lasers to extract timing signals from atomic clocks and facilitate comparisons between different types of atomic clocks as a means to test our current models of physics is beyond amazing. Tara is also a scientific member of the White House/NSF Q-12 partnership and on the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy’s Inter-Agency Working Group to develop the National Quantum Workforce Plan. Beyond physics, Tara is committed to creating opportunities for women and underrepresented minorities in STEM. She currently serves on the executive board for the NIST Women in STEM group and is the chair of the CLEO conference’s taskforce for Diversity and Inclusion.

Scott Galloway
I first heard about Scott while driving home one day from work on the radio. He was talking about how education is so expensive and serves so little these days. I was captivated as I saw everything he would say and had not thought to form my thoughts into words. As I got home that day, I looked him up; NYU professor, serial entrepreneur, a branding guru, book writer, and the list goes on. I ordered his book on post-corona that day. Once I got it, I went cover to cover in three days. It was that good. I read more of his books, and some months later, I join one of his online courses on branding through a new company he founded called; Section4. I feel I could keep writing forever, but I will let you discover what I discovered as I started to engage in all he is involved in. p.s Section4 just raised $30M in series A. Look him up.

Stacy Cason
Kerry Plemmons, a great business mind and professor at Denver University business school, introduced us some years ago. Stacy has one of those stories that one day will be in a book. Stacy started as a nurse but soon followed her true calling as a successful businesswoman and entrepreneur. After bringing to life successful real estate development deals, she now works on solving pain problems. Her company — called Planetarie — is setting the bar for delivering quality CBDa products at scale.

Makis Asimakopoulos
Back in the day when I worked for the 2004 Olympic Games in Athens, Greece, I only knew that he was the CEO of the Athens 2004 organizing committee. Years later, and after I moved to the US, I would learn more about him. Notably, sometime after the 2004 Olympic Games, he took over the Athens Marathon with a low number of participants, around 800. Makis grew the Marathon to over 50,000 participants, making it one of the world’s most significant running events. Over the years, we have stayed in touch, he is always eager to learn and available to talk and share his wisdom on sports matters.

Bob Gemignani
Donna Nelson, who works for the mayor’s office at Olympic City USA, always connects me with great minds like Bod. Here is what I found out. Bod is a passionate advocate of solving problems in education. Bod focuses on connecting the lost dots caused by disconnection and fragmentation between industry and students being educated and trained in the K-12 system. Using collective impact principles around workforce development, Bod and his team focus on creating meaningful and productive talent pipeline solutions for industry partners and the developing K-12 workforce. By creating quality connection points between rapidly changing occupational demands and the talent within the education system, he is revolutionizing our thought process around K-12 workforce placement strategies. Above all his work helps students connect with their future now.

Suman Kanuganti
When I first heard I would work with Suman’s team on a video messaging project, I knew very little about AI. I thought it was all about robots and algorithms. What I discovered was a surprise. It is all about the people behind the scenes. Suman is the co-founder of an AI company called personal ai. His concept is simple; capture, store, control, and utilize all your memories to augment your potential. During the seed funding round, the idea and company attracted $3M for notable VC in the AI space. Suman comes to us from India. After college, he started a company called Aira to help the visually impaired find direction via smart glasses and a dedicated team. A true visionary of our times, his work on AI can become the keystone for solving some of humanity’s most significant challenges in the years to come.

Website: goodvoicegroup.com

Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kalofonos/

Other: www.ycaimpact.com and https://hkalofonos.medium.com

Image Credits
Goodvoice Group has the rights to all images and artwork