Cordell Bennigson is an Echelon Front leadership instructor, advisor, and trained executive coach. He is a former U.S. Marine Corps officer, pilot, and forward air controller who has led, transformed, and sold multiple private equity owned companies since leaving active duty.
In the Marine Corps, Cordell flew the AV-8B Harrier and achieved the rank of Major. During Operation Iraqi Freedom he was an Air Officer and Forward-Air Controller with the First Marine Division and Task Force Tripoli during the fight to Baghdad and into Tikrit.
Since leaving the Marine Corps, Cordell has led business teams in the United States and around the world in a wide variety of industries, roles, and companies. His leadership style, which embraces and implements Extreme Ownership, has enabled him to excel and deliver results as he progressed from General Manager to Vice President, and ultimately to multiple roles as CEO.
As a CEO, he led companies through the challenges of growth, recession, global market shifts, business integration, cultural transformation, M&A transactions, and the wide range of challenges and opportunities encountered by teams in today’s market.
Cordell brings a blend of Marine Corps, combat, and extensive private-industry leadership to the Echelon Front instructor team. As a coach, he has worked with leaders at the top of Fortune 50 publicly traded companies, small company founders and entrepreneurs, private equity backed lower and middle-market executives, and board members and leaders of both for-profit and nonprofit organizations. The business situations he has supported clients in have included cultural transformations, turnarounds, hyper-growth, M&A integrations, and general leadership/team performance improvement.
Cordell earned his Bachelor of Arts degree from the University of California at Berkeley, holds a Master’s in Business Administration from Harvard Business School, and completed the Developing a Leading-Edge Operations Strategy Executive Program at the M.I.T. Sloan School of Business.