About

Jonathan Eldridge is a keynote speaker, corporate trainer, leadership strategist, and National Bestselling author based in South Lyon, Michigan. He is the founder of Soul Focus, LLC, a company built on a simple premise: authentic, relatable leadership is the difference between a team that shows up and a team that wins.

Jonathan brings more than 25 years of sales and leadership experience to every stage and every training room — and his career is not a résumé bullet, it is a build. He spent 17 years at Brooksource, including a decade as Regional Director of East Coast Operations and four years as Vice President of Sales, where he was responsible for Fortune 1000 growth across the Eastern half of the company. From there he stepped up as Executive Vice President of Experience at Eight Eleven Group, then served more than five years as Chief Experience Officer, working across Brooksource, Medasource, and Calculated Hire. In February 2025, he founded Soul Focus, LLC to bring everything he learned in the trenches to leaders and teams who want to lead better. It is not a theory pulled from a textbook. It is a playbook written from the field.

In October 2025, Jonathan released Struggle to Strength: How Authentic, Relatable Leadership Shapes Success with Game Changer Publishing. The book became a National Bestseller. At its heart is the Twelve-Attribute CARE Framework — Jonathan's proven model for helping leaders develop their IT Factor: the intangible quality that makes people want to follow them, and the model behind a team people actually want to work for.

Why the CARE Framework Exists

Every leader has been in the moment where the textbook answer isn't enough. A team member who needs honesty, not a performance review. A customer who needs a real answer, not a polished deflection. A decision that has to be made on incomplete information, under pressure, in front of people watching.

The CARE Framework is what Jonathan built for those moments. Over two decades of leading sales organizations, he kept asking buyers a simple question: Why us, instead of a larger competitor? The answers came back, in different words, in the same shape, year after year — and they mapped to the twelve attributes you see below. CARE is not an idea Jonathan hopes works. It is the pattern his customers and teams already named for him. It's proven.

Twelve attributes. Four pillars. A shared language for leaders who want to be the person their team can count on consistently, authentically, and with the kind of energy that makes everyone around them feel collectively elevated.

From Struggle to Strength

Jonathan's perspective is his passion, and his passion is hard-earned. Four knee replacements. Learning to walk again — four times. Seventy pounds lost while still leading teams, closing deals, and showing up for the people who counted on him. The story he tells from the stage about the distance between failure and personal freedom is not a metaphor. He has walked it, literally.

That experience is why his work hits differently than the leadership talk most audiences are used to. He is not selling a polished idea of what leadership should look like. He is sharing what it actually takes to keep showing up — for your team, for your customers, and for yourself — when the conditions are not ideal and the textbook answer is not enough.

Beyond the Framework

Jonathan's work doesn't stop at the page or the podium. Through Soul Focus, LLC, he partners with companies that want their leaders to be people who know who they are, what they stand for, and how to lead a team to somewhere it hasn't been before. The CARE Commitment Program helps organizations — and the people inside them — curate the greatest version of their personal and professional lives, day after day.

Whether that starts with a keynote, a training program, or a copy of Struggle to Strength in every leader's hand, the goal is the same: better leaders, stronger teams, and work that feels worth getting behind.