We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Lynne Cuppernull. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Lynne below.

Lynne, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. What’s the backstory behind how you came up with the idea for your business? 

I need to preface all my answers by saying I launched this company with a partner. My former work colleague and friend Dan Ward. We are an amazing partnership.

The SparkLit Group was not our original name. We thought about calling ourselves LIT Consulting, with LIT as an acronym for Learn Innovation Together. The brand company we worked with was kind, but clear when they told us it wasn’t a great name. We came from government contracting! We only thought in acronyms. Ha. That’s been one of the many shifts we’ve been making as we explore the new world of entrepreneurship.

And the name? We love it. We are about sparking things…insights, partnerships, new ways of working. And our role isn’t to come up with all the new things – it’s to provide that spark, to be a catalyst that helps team, organizations and individuals do their next big thing. We’re about people powered innovation. We believe the answers are already within the people we serve – our role is to help unlock them. We equip individuals and teams to grow their own capacity for innovation, problem solving and leadership.

Lynne, love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations? 

I have worked in the non-profit health care space for 23 years. Along the way I’ve built leadership development programs, led process improvement teams, partnered with physician leaders to make change in health care payment policy and led public health initiatives for the federal government. I am a certified leadership coach and a full time innovator. I am also a triathlete with two Ironman triathlons to my credit (and dozens of shorter distance races). I am a mom of two fantastic young men.

At the SparkLit Group, the company I launched in June 2025 with my business partner Dan Ward, we lead workshops and strategic planning, consult and provide coaching to individuals and teams on innovation, culture and change. See question 1 for more details. :) We bring a powerful mix of dynamic interaction and quiet listening, combining learning innovation with executive and peer coaching to help people become better leaders together.

In this work, we support changemakers across sectors – from startups to schools, health centers to climate tech — we partner with those building bold solutions to society’s biggest challenges.

Here’s what I am proud of…our clients consistently report learning something practical that they can use right away AND that they have a lot of fun in our workshops. Both of those things are critical to the work we do. We make sure we always focus on solving real problems in our workshops, not hypotheticals. There are enough real problems in the world. We don’t need case studies. And we spend a lot of our lives working. We really should make it fun.

Some of the real problems we’ve helped clients with recently: how do we better serve the people of X city by providing them with affordable high quality health care through a unique collaboration of health centers? How do we make X company an employer of choice within 5 years? How do we evolve our culture to be more innovative? How do we make it safer to talk about failure?

We’d love to hear about how you met your business partner. 

We met in the heart of the pandemic, fall/winter of 2020-2021. Dan brought me in to be part of a small intrapreneurial team at our former employer where we built an “innovation toolkit” with 26 easy to use tools for innovation based in human centered design principles. Dan and I began delivering innovation workshops together in 2023, and In 2024, we delivered 11 innovation workshops together.
Doing innovation workshops was NOT our full-time job. We already had other full-time jobs in two totally different areas of the company. (Me in health care and Dan in military technology.) Some of the workshops were internal for our mutual employer, some were for clients of our employer. We noticed a couple things along the way:
1. We really enjoyed it
2. We’re quite good at it (if we do say so ourselves)
3. We’re REALLY good together
4. Participants found it helpful – sometimes even transformative

So, we found ourselves wondering if we could turn this side hustle into a full-time gig. Actually, we asked a LOT of questions. (We’re consultants and coaches – it’s one of our superpowers.) Two we found particularly helpful: “Who do we want to help?” and “What could we do that would be helpful to them?” We continue wrestling with those questions, and our answers keep evolving as we experiment and learn. But really, those questions are at the heart of what we do…we call it “joyful disruption.”

Our first step of joyful disruption was to leave our full-time jobs with the security of direct deposit and health insurance and leap into entrepreneurship.
Several people have asked how we knew we were ready to launch our own company, or how we knew it was the right time. That’s a super easy one to answer: we didn’t. Pretty sure there’s no “right time” – there’s only “right now” and “what’s the worst that could happen?”

That’s the quick recap of how we got here. What happens next? Where are we heading? Stay tuned to find out!

Can you share a story from your journey that illustrates your resilience?

When we left our full-time jobs, we had two clients already lined up with contracts signed. The second was a workshop for a branch of the military and was a sizeable chunk of income for us. One morning, just 3 days before we were set to travel for the workshop, we learned the client needed to cancel the workshop (there goes the income). Later that day, we were offered a chance to do a spur of the moment hackathon instead of the workshop. We had no idea what we’d do for the hackathon, but we said yes. Essentially, saying YES this year is how we are adapting on the fly to the many shifts that have already happened. Less than 5 months into this journey of entrepreneurship, I have learned the way to resilience is being brave and saying yes.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://sparklitgroup.com/
• Instagram: @lyncup
• Facebook: Lynne Outland Cuppernull
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lynnecuppernull/
• Other: Listening for the Questions – it’s on Apple, Spotify, and other podcast places