At American Bazaar’s “Leadership @ Inflection Points” conference, CEO Ann Ramakumaran and NFL legend-turned-entrepreneur Charles Mann offer candid stories of reinvention, resilience, and the mindset required to lead through chaos and change.
At first glance, the panel looked like many others on leadership: a seasoned CEO, a Super Bowl-winning athlete-turned-entrepreneur, and a moderator guiding a roomful of executives and founders through a discussion on “transformation.”
But within minutes, it was clear the panel on “The CEO: Mobilizing for Transformation,” part of American Bazaar’s daylong conference “Leadership @ Inflection Points”, held in Vienna, VA, on November 14, was going somewhere much more personal.
The panel brought together Ann Anjli “Ann” Ramakumaran, founder and CEO of Ampcus Inc., and Charles Mann, Washington football legend and CEO of Charles Mann Enterprises.
Moderated by Rohit Tripathi, curator of the event, the conversation offered a rare, candid look at what it really takes to mobilize an enterprise—and yourself—through uncertainty, risk, and change.
It started, fittingly, with humor.
Tripathi opened with a deceptively light question: What role has humor played in your leadership?
“Oh my god, we need to bring that every single day,” Ramakumaran replied without missing a beat. “Especially when you walk into the office… not all days are glory days.”
For a CEO leading a global consulting and staffing firm through recessions, shutdowns, and a pandemic, that isn’t a throwaway line. Humor, she suggested, is a pressure valve—and a way to keep perspective when the stakes are high and the decisions are heavy.
Mann, for his part, was less convinced of his comedic credentials.
“I am not very funny,” he deadpanned. “At least that’s what my children tell me.”
Watch the video of the panel
But then he launched into a story that had the room laughing—and perfectly captured the messiness and opportunity inside inflection points.
He recalled working with his wife during the pandemic and realizing, quite bluntly, who really ran things.
“I realized she really is the boss,” he said. “That was at year 36 in our marriage. She’s been telling me what to do all this time. I’m going to make her the real boss.”
So he did. Mann formally made his wife CEO of their company, unlocking a cascade of new possibilities: “That opened the door for 8A certifications, woman-owned business, all this stuff that I was leaving on the ground. Now, all of a sudden I could take advantage of it.”
The room laughed. But underneath the humor was a serious lesson: strong leadership often involves recognizing hidden assets—whether it’s a spouse’s strengths or a structural advantage you’ve overlooked—and then making bold, sometimes ego-bruising decisions to leverage them.
From basement startup to global enterprise
After the laughs, Tripathi shifted to origin stories.
Ramkakumaran, who moved to the United States more than 25 years ago, is the founder and CEO of Ampcus, a global business and technology consulting and staffing firm headquartered in Virginia.
“We’ve been in business for over 21 years,” she said. “This year marks our 21st year of business and we continue to grow, thrive, and succeed in the marketplace.”
What started in the basement of her home—with a one-year-old child at her side—has become a global operation: 18 customer support offices in the United States, more than 12 global delivery centers, two innovation labs, a security operations center, and a workforce of more than 3,000 professionals.
READ: Next frontier of AI: Explainability, ethics, and the future of intelligent systems (February 4, 2025)
“I started this business from the basement of the house with my one-year-old,” she said. “And here we are today with a global workforce of over 3000… We continue to bring impact in the lives of businesses.”
Beyond Ampcus, Ramakumaran serves on seven external boards, many of them nonprofits. “I’ve always believed in doing well by doing good,” she said. For more than a decade, she and her company have been recognized among the fastest-growing women-owned businesses in the country, and she’s been inducted into both the Women Business Enterprise National Council (WBENC) Hall of Fame and the Capital Region Hall of Fame.
Her motivation, she suggested, has remained remarkably consistent: “The hunger is still there—the hunger to solve business problems, the hunger to move the needle from where we are to where we need to go… and to bring positive impact in the lives of our clients, our employees, our communities where we live, serve, operate and support.”
A Super Bowl champ’s second act
Mann’s path to the C-suite began in a very different arena: the National Football League.
“I’m in the Washington DC Sports Hall of Fame, and the Sacramento Sports Hall of Fame,” he said. “I really would like to be at the National Football League Hall of Fame… My wife says it’ll happen when it’s supposed to happen. I just want to be alive.”
He played 12 seasons in the NFL, winning three Super Bowls and becoming one of Washington’s most respected defensive ends. But his defining inflection point didn’t happen on the field—it began with a personal loss.
“My father’s death bought me life,” Mann told the audience quietly.
His father died at 46 from complications that began with an untreated abscessed tooth. Mann was 20. Devastated, he returned home from college in Reno, Nevada, and began to reevaluate his life.
“I was not a good guy,” he admitted. “I was not a person of my word… This gave me a chance to redo my life.”
When he returned to school, he approached football—and life—with renewed purpose. He later met the woman who would become his wife of 41 years, rediscovered his faith, and entered the Washington locker room as a young player alongside stars like Art Monk, John Riggins, Dexter Manley, and Darrell Green.
“There was something different about them,” he said, recalling players like Monk and Green. “Those guys looked you in the eye when they spoke to you. They looked at you sincerely… I had a chance. I was 3,000 miles away. I could be anybody I wanted to be.”
He chose to align himself with the men whose values matched the kind of life he wanted to build.
“My inflection point was the crowd that I paced,” he said. “Picking the right people to line up with.”
Years later, those lessons followed him into business. After a brief stint in television that left him disillusioned—“They wanted me to talk bad about everything I could find in the athletic world”—he pivoted toward entrepreneurship.
“I realized these CEOs I was speaking to… they’re not the brightest tools in the shed,” he said, drawing laughter. “I said, I could do what they do.”
Together with Hall of Fame receiver Art Monk, Mann co-founded Alliant Merchant Services, a credit card processing company started in 2004 that still exists today, though it has since been sold.
“We built the team around our strengths,” he said. “Art came up with the graphics… My job was to sell everything I could sell. I was selling 30 new accounts a month for like eight years.”
In 2013, he launched Charles Mann Enterprises, a construction company he still owns and runs. “I am finding those inflection points,” he said. “I am finding a way to monetize my name and my celebrity. And that’s the funnest part about it—trying to figure out how it works.”
He has his eye on one particularly symbolic project: “I believe that if Commander Stadium is built at the RFK site, I will be on that construction site. That could be my legacy.”
Seeing the gap — and jumping in
If there was a single theme that kept resurfacing, it was this: transformational leaders develop a habit of noticing gaps—then taking gutsy, calculated action.
“When I see a gap in the market, that excites me,” Ramakumaran said. “When I see there’s a challenge, that excites me. When people say it can’t be done, I’m like, yes, it can be done.”
In the early 2000s, she saw a crowded field of technology and business consulting firms, but also a shift in what clients actually wanted.
Ramakumaran explained that she had come to understand that corporations were seeking partners that truly focused on solving business problems — companies that could “infuse the right technology solution” and deliver projects successfully by assembling the right talent. That insight, she said, is what convinced her it was time to launch the company, and “here we are.”
Her institutional knowledge from earlier work in India helping U.S. and European firms establish operations there gave her an edge. She also understood a growing ecosystem of corporate policies that favored small, minority- and women-owned businesses.
“What I realized was that corporations were putting policies in place to ensure that small businesses have a seat at the table,” she said. “They were putting policies in place to ensure that businesses like us—who look like us, and we all should be proud of who we are—got a fair chance to succeed in the market.”
The timing, she felt, was perfect: “Yes, there’s a gap in the market, and guess what—corporations are putting policies and procedures in place to ensure we all get a fair chance.”
That combination of market gap, policy tailwinds, and personal conviction became her launchpad.
Building teams for transformation
When Tripathi asked how each leader knew they had the team needed to achieve their vision, both panelists came back to the same anchor: people.
“People should be considered as the center of your universe, period,” Ramakumaran said. “You may have the best product or solution in the market, but if you don’t have the right people with the right attitude and positive mindset, you can’t take that product or solution to market.”
Her approach was deliberate. Ampcus started by focusing on one industry segment and bringing in leaders who deeply understood it. Then she layered in technology experts.
“Technology is just an enabler,” she explained. “You’re solving a business problem. If we don’t understand what business problem that industry is facing, you cannot bring in the right technology solution.”
Over time, diversification became essential. The company expanded from healthcare into banking and financial services, telecom, and utilities—tracking client needs as they moved from local to national to global operations.
“This region, the DMV, is a powerful region,” she noted. “Third largest economy in the United States, seventh largest economy in the world… A lot of our clients in this region were moving from local to national to global. And because they were going in that direction, we had to go with them.”
That meant not just hiring industry and technical leaders, but also leaders in the geographies where customers were growing.
Mann’s team-building playbook, forged on NFL sidelines and in boardrooms, echoed the same principle: know your strengths and build around them.
“With Art, we built the team around, ‘We don’t need our names, we’re going to use Alliant Merchant Services,’” he recalled. “Art was a graphic designer by trade… His job was to build the brand. My job was to sell everything I could sell.”
The lesson, he said, applies to any leader: “We were doing a great job of using our strengths to build a company.”
Finishing strong: Mantras for the hard days
Toward the end, Tripathi asked each of them for the mantra that carries them through difficult, uncertain moments—when the future is unclear and the stakes feel heavy.
“For entrepreneurs, we have to remind ourselves not all days end up being glory days,” Ramakumaran said. “We’ve got to believe in ourselves. We have to believe in the mission and vision of the company. And that belief is what will take us places.”
She cited her father’s advice: “He would always say, ‘Remember, there’s a solution to every single problem. You just gotta take a deep dive and explore.’”
What keeps her going after 21 years at the helm?
“The hunger is still there,” she said—the hunger to solve problems, move the needle, and create impact. “Patience and persistence is what has helped me to get to where we all are today.”
For Mann, the phrase is simple, but he’s lived every word.
“My little mantra is, it’s not how you start, it’s how you finish,” he said. “Everything we do, it’s about finishing strong.”
“I am not finished,” he added, smiling. “I am just starting. At 64 years old, I have the energy of a 40-year-old because I’m excited about the journey that I’m on.”
In a room full of leaders navigating their own inflection points—new roles, new markets, new risks—that message landed with particular force.
The chaos behind closed doors, the panel made clear, doesn’t magically disappear. But with the right people, the right mindset, and a willingness to jump when you see a gap, it can be transformed into clarity—and, ultimately, momentum.