Channon Kennedy Of The Morgan Square: How My Career Journey Has Shaped How I Lead Today

Every founder and CEO has a path that shaped them. Early jobs, mentors, failures, pivots, wins, and the moments that forced them to grow up as a leader. A career journey is rarely a straight path, and the lessons gained along the way often become the blueprint for how a leader hires, builds culture, handles pressure, and makes decisions when the stakes are high. We want to explore the real experiences that formed today’s leaders, and the concrete ways those experiences show up in how they lead now.

As a part of this series, we had the pleasure to interview Channon Kennedy.

Channon, Founder & CEO of Kiwi Vision, was recognized in the 2024 Top 100 Women of Influence by the Silicon Valley Business Journal. With over 28 years of experience in the commercial financial industry, she expertly leads all aspects of the company’s operations. Her extensive executive management expertise has been instrumental in driving Kiwi Vision’s continued success.

Thank you so much for joining us in this interview series! Before we begin, can you please introduce yourself? Our readers would love to “get to know you” a bit better. Can you tell us a bit about your ‘Origin Story’ and how you got started?

I’m Channon Kennedy, Founder and CEO of The Morgan Square, a Kiwi Vision product, and a first-of-its-kind measuring and marking tool now carried at Home Depot.com, Hartville Hardware, Woodcraft, and other major retailers. By day, I’ve spent more than 28 years in commercial banking, working closely with startup founders through every stage of growth.

My origin story is one I genuinely never saw coming. I’m a first-generation college graduate who built a banking career from the ground up, and for nearly three decades, I sat across the table from entrepreneurs helping them scale their businesses. I knew their dreams, their fears, their financials inside and out. Becoming a founder myself? That wasn’t on the bingo card. The Morgan Square came out of a deeply personal conversation with a close friend whose young son, Morgan, had passed away after a long battle with leukemia. He told me he wished he’d had a tool that helped him work faster so he could have spent more time with his son. That conversation planted a seed, and I couldn’t shake it. I taught myself the patent process, the prototyping, the manufacturing, all of it. I call myself an accidental entrepreneur, but the truth is I’ve always been someone who finishes what she starts.

None of us are able to achieve success without some help along the way. Is there a particular person who you are grateful towards who helped get you to where you are? Can you share a story?

There are so many people I could name, but I want to talk about Julie Filice. I call her my Auntie Julie now. When I was first considering launching the business, I had my business plan drafted up and I was nervous about it. I knew Julie from work, and she had recently helped her nephew open a gym, so one day I reached out and asked if she’d take a look and give me feedback. That’s all I was looking for: feedback.

She read the plan and called me back and said, “I’ll invest. I’ll write you a check for $50,000. You can write your own promissory note. No personal guarantee. I believe in what you can do.” I was completely floored. I hadn’t gone to her for money. I’d gone for an opinion. And here was someone who barely knew me outside of work, telling me she believed in me in a way I wasn’t even sure I believed in myself yet. That investment is what allowed me to file my patent, establish my LLC, and actually get this company off the ground.

What strikes me most is that we weren’t close before that moment. We are now. We talk on the phone. She really has become family to me. I will never forget what she did, and I never want to. Her trust is the reason Morgan Square exists.

Ok, fantastic. Let’s now shift to the main focus of our interview. Can you take us back to the beginning? What did your early career look like before you became a founder or CEO? What were the “forming jobs” that mattered most? Please tell us the stories.

I cannot make this up: my very first job in banking was processing construction loan disbursements. I spent my days reviewing detailed Excel sheets line by line, making sure clients got the right funds for the right materials. I’d go out on site visits with the relationship managers and feel important walking around those job sites in my work clothes. Now look at me. Full circle. I’m not just looking at construction projects on paper, I’ve created a tool people use to build them.

Banking was foundational for me. I’m a first-generation college graduate, and nobody taught me about finance growing up. I taught myself. I didn’t grow up with stability, and frankly, I didn’t want to repeat the life I came from. So I locked in. I learned everything I could about how money works, how businesses are built, and how founders make decisions under pressure. Years later, when I sat across the table from early-stage entrepreneurs as a banker, I understood not just their numbers but their stress. That perspective is what I carry with me now as a founder myself, and it’s what shapes how I lead.

What’s one challenge or failure from your career that still influences how you lead today? Please explain in detail.

This isn’t a failure I committed, but it’s a moment that shaped me. Earlier in my career, there was someone who was so disrespectful to me, so unbelievably rude, that they hung up on my voicemail mid-cuss. That was the moment. I still remember sitting there thinking: I don’t ever want to make another human being feel the way I feel right now.

As a Black woman in corporate spaces, I had experienced more than my share of being talked down to, overlooked, or outright dismissed. And every one of those experiences taught me something I now lead by: there is a baseline level of respect every human being deserves, full stop. I treat the janitor in the building the same way I treat a millionaire investor, because they are both human. Every person I work with, manage, or meet gets that from me.

That experience didn’t just influence how I lead, it defined it. Respect is the floor in every interaction I have, and I won’t go below it.

What non-negotiable values guide how you lead, and where did those values come from? Please share stories or examples if you can.

Respect, by a mile. It’s non-negotiable, and it comes directly from the experiences I just described. Respect builds relationships, and relationships are how anything meaningful actually gets done. We can disagree, we can have different visions, we can argue our positions. That’s healthy. But there has to be respect underneath the conversation, otherwise nothing productive comes out of it.

Here’s how seriously I take it: I have walked away from business opportunities because the way the relationship felt wasn’t right. Money is great, but there are things money can’t buy, and respect is one of them. If I’m being talked down to in a sales meeting, or if a partner treats my team poorly, I’m out. There will be other deals. There won’t be another version of me with my integrity intact if I ignore that.

What do you do to continue evolving as a leader today? What do you do to turn inspiration into actual new habits?

I deliberately put myself in places where I’m unfamiliar. In a couple of weeks, I’m headed to Goldman Sachs for a program, which is a totally new environment for me, and that’s exactly the point. Being around people whose journeys are different from mine forces me to think differently.

I’ve also been showing up in my community a lot more. People are coming to me now asking real questions: how do I file a patent, how do I find a manufacturer, how do I price my product? And honestly, the landscape has changed since I started. There’s AI now. There are new platforms, new funding models, new tools. So if I’m going to be useful to the founders coming up behind me, I have to keep learning. I cannot show up empty-handed. That accountability to my community is what turns inspiration into habit. It’s not about me reading a book and feeling motivated for a week. It’s about people asking me real questions and me having a responsibility to answer them well.

Based on your experience, please share your “Five Ways My Career Journey Has Shaped How I Lead Today”.

1. Show up as your best self, every single time

Whatever the task is, whatever the goal is, I’m showing up to give it my all. I learned in banking that rework is expensive and embarrassing. Get it right the first time. That doesn’t mean perfect, it means intentional. I bring that same standard to The Morgan Square, whether I’m packing an order, walking into a buyer meeting, or rolling into a trade show booth.

2. Stay authentic

Don’t change who you are to fit the room. The minute you have to fundamentally change yourself to do your job, that’s not your job. There’s a difference between adjusting your delivery and losing your identity, and one of them costs you time you can never get back. I’ve kept my voice, my energy, and my locs in every space I’ve ever walked into, including rooms where no one looked like me. That authenticity is what’s earned me the mentors and relationships I have today.

3. Share the load

Your team is an orchestra. I spent a lot of years in management, and I learned early that the controlling, do-it-all-myself leader is the one whose team eventually burns out. I borrowed this from a CEO I respected: every person on your team has their own instrument, and your job as a leader is to know which one each person plays best, and then conduct. When everyone is playing their part, you make beautiful music. When one person falls, the whole team falls. So you better know your people.

4. It’s chess, not checkers

I’m always reading the room. I don’t always need to make the next obvious move. Sometimes the smartest thing I can do is sit still and watch what the other players are doing, because they will reveal their hand if you let them. I’m the same person in every environment, but I’m a chameleon in how I engage. There’s a real difference between adapting and changing, and great leaders adapt without losing themselves.

5. Love what you do

This sounds simple, but it’s the throughline of everything. I’ve been at the same bank for 27 years, and I still love the work. I’m running The Morgan Square on top of that, and I love that too. When you genuinely love what you do, the long hours stop feeling like sacrifice. I’m busy, but I’m not overworked, because every box I pack and every founder I help is something I actually want to be doing.

Many companies define values, but fewer truly live them. How do you personally hold yourself accountable to your organization’s values in day-to-day decisions, especially when it would be easier not to? Can you share an example?

For me, it comes down to consciousness and self-review. I check myself before every team meeting, especially on the days when I’m not at my best. If I’ve had a rough morning, I don’t get to show up short with my team. I still owe them the same respect I’d want from them. I actually ask my team how they’re showing up that day, because sometimes a meeting isn’t the right moment for a hard conversation, and a good leader has to read that.

After hard moments, I sit with myself and run a quiet self-evaluation. How did that go? What did I learn? What could I have done better? Because here’s the truth: if you’re an ass to your team, your team is going to be an ass back to your customers, your partners, each other. Culture is downstream of leadership behavior. So I have to be the example, and I have to hold myself to it even when no one is watching.

You are a person of great influence. If you could start a movement that would bring the most amount of good to the most amount of people, what would that be? You never know what your idea can trigger. :-)

The movement I want to start is one that proves there is no prescribed path to success. As a woman of color in the tool industry, I am in rooms where almost no one looks like me. And every time a young woman walks up to my trade show booth and says, “I didn’t know we could do this,” it confirms why this work matters beyond the product. Representation isn’t just about visibility, it’s about expanding what people believe is possible for themselves.

The other half of that movement is this: your network is your net worth. You cannot build anything meaningful alone. You need people around you who can see your blind spots, vouch for you in rooms you’re not in, and pull you up when you’re stuck. There’s a saying I love: “Go fast alone, go far together.” That is the mission underneath The Morgan Square, and it’s what I want every founder, especially every woman and person of color, to internalize. Your idea has value. Your vision belongs in this industry. And you don’t have to walk the path alone to walk it well.

How can our readers further follow your work online?

People can follow my journey on Instagram @TheMorganSquare where I share posts about new products as well as my journey!

This was very inspiring. Thank you so much for joining us!

About The Interviewer: A dynamic and seasoned executive, Jim Hamel assumed leadership of Swanson Health Products, a global vitamin and supplement company in November 2021. As CEO, he has led the company to achieve double digit revenue growth internationally in his first fiscal year and has overseen expansion into 170+ international markets totaling over US $80M in revenue. Under Jim’s leadership, Swanson Health Products has continued its commitment to industry-leading service, quality and excellence with award-winning customer care and ongoing UL, NSF and Halal certification for achieving Good Manufacturing Practices and standards. Earlier in his executive career, Jim was the CFO with multi-national consumer products companies such as Diageo and Newell Rubbermaid and with other industry leading companies in ecommerce, agriculture, mining and explosives. Throughout his career he has been building his expertise in finance, international business, commercial operations, and risk management. Jim earned his Bachelor of Science in Accounting from North Dakota State University in 1989 and is a Certified Public Accountant (CPA). He also holds Six Sigma certifications and brings strong global finance acumen — with proficiency in Spanish — and board- and investor-level relationship building to every role he fulfills. Jim thrives on transformational leadership — with deep financial expertise, a global outlook, and a passion for wellness — to steer Swanson Health through its next phase of growth and innovation.