Who is Hernán Leal?
Hernán Leal is a successful businessman, author, mountaineer, extreme athlete, and motivational speaker.
Founder of FASTCO, focusing on refining the process of debt collection, teller sales, and outsourced customer services.
His life story is the inspiration of an animated short film entitled “The Boy and the Mountain”, which has received 105 awards in 50 countries.
What will you learn from Hernán Leal as a speaker?
As a motivational speaker, Hernán Leal channels his passion for mountaineering into an uplifting experience to help the audience build resilience, improve self-trust and find meaning in life.
Through mountaineering, Hernán Leal realized he had much to share with those climbing their own personal mountains, which is why in his talks he motivates his listeners and guides them with what he’s learned from his challenges in the boardroom and on the slopes.
Hernán Leal’s story, career and contribution to society:
Hernán Leal has his bachelor’s in finance and business from Pontifical Catholic University, his MBA from Universidad Adolfo Ibáñez, and a certificate from Harvard Business School’s Owner/President Management program.
A prominent and respected business leader in his native Chile, and throughout Latin America, Hernán recently moved to Miami, Florida, where he plans to expand his public speaking work. Today, he has been invited to speak to an array of executive teams and multinational corporations, such as DHL Express and BHP Billinton, just to name a few. His methodology, expressed in his 2018 book “The Mountains That We Carry Inside”, uses a practical three-step model to help people achieve their dreams.
He began his career as a planning and budgeting specialist at COSTA Food Company, one of the major food and beverage operators in Latin America. From there he took on a finance and management role with the German pharmaceutical company Hoechst, eventually building their presence in Latin America. While there, he continuously analyzed business practices, and after resolving significant flaws in the company’s accounting process, realized he might be able to start his own company and solve similar problems for other firms. A few years later he launched his own company, FASTCO, focusing on refining the process of debt collection, teller sales, and outsourced customer services. Today they operate internationally, employ more than 2,000, and have clients such as Liberty Global, Scotiabank, Abbot, and Porsche.
Though Hernán’s journey from a small city in southern Chile to running an international company may have seemed ideal from the outside, the intensity took a toll. Exhaustion and stress resulted in illness and exacerbated a hyperthyroid condition. Thyroid treatment left him with vocal cord nerve damage and vocal paralysis. Today, in order to speak, Leal uses a throat implant, which reduces his oxygen intake by about 20 percent.
His passion for mountaineering, a sport that was as much a mental practice as a physical achievement, only intensified during this time. Even a severe injury to his right rotator cuff (caused by a golfing accident), which limits the use of his right arm and hand extensively, combined with his impaired breathing, couldn’t keep him off the mountains.
He has climbed the Seven Summits—the highest peaks on all seven continents: Aconcagua in South America, Kilimanjaro in Africa, Denali in North America, Elbrus in Eastern Europe, Carstensz in Oceania, Vinson Massif in Antarctica, and Everest in Asia. In fact, Leal has twice scaled Everest.
Awards and recognitions:
He was awarded a Guinness World Record for climbing Mount Everest and Lhotse - two of the four highest mountains in the world - in 48 hours, earning him the “Fastest Double-Header of the Higher Eight-Thousanders” for a climber with an upper-body impairment and using bottled oxygen.
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