Transformative Success Stories

This mature business, once a leader in its industry, found itself in a stagnant and declining phase. Having experienced years of success, it failed to evolve with changing market trends and customer demands. Its core offerings remained unchanged while competitors embraced innovation and were effectively competing on price. The company’s internal processes, though well-established, were rigid and inefficient, with no efforts to streamline or modernize operations. Further, leadership struggled with a lack of clear direction, hesitant to embrace new approaches. This led to a loss of relevance in the market, shrinking customer base, and declining revenues.

Serving in a strategic leadership capacity, accomplishments included:

* Helping lead efforts to transform the organization from stagnant to innovative, growing, and profitable.

* Steering development and implementation of a 3-year strategic plan that innovated the business model, increased Total Addressable Market (TAM), grew client assets by 40% over 3 years, reached peak profitability, and resulted in company valuation of 2x+ within 4 years and acquisition by ETRADE for $275M.

* Managing top strategic priorities, including planning, research, investment case evaluation and prioritization, and revenue diversification.

* Identifying, prioritizing, and implementing several growth and scalability opportunities with project-specific results such as a 5% increase in company net income and a 10%+ improvement in company net income while simultaneously improving customer functionality.

* Subsequently being entrusted to evolve the Product and Client Experience teams, better aligning the functions to customer value chain.

This startup property management company began with a blank slate, driven by a vision to provide quality, customer-focused services in the real estate sector. They faced the challenge of building their business from the ground up.

The focus initially was on building out the core services, which ranged from tenant management and maintenance coordination to property marketing and financial reporting. But, they also had to navigate the complexities of legal compliance, vendor partnerships, and accounting systems.

A strong emphasis was placed on building a brand identity that reflected their commitment to high-quality service and transparency, while also creating marketing strategies to attract both property owners and tenants. The operational side of the business needed to back this up and do so efficiently, so we worked to establish scalable processes, integrating technology platforms for leasing, rent collection, property maintenance requests, and day-to-day task management.

Working in the trenches with this business to independently and quickly build out the business, accomplishments included:

* Reaching profitability in under a year.

* Meeting growth projections quarter-over-quarter.

* Accumulating 5-stars from 100% of client reviews.

This “unicorn” company experienced rapid growth and transformation, increasing its valuation from $1B to $4.4B in just over two years, while navigating the complexities of scaling as a pre-IPO, Series F company. While market fit and momentum were not a challenge, the company faced several challenges including balancing innovation and scalability and change management.

Serving in an operational planning capacity, accomplishments included:

* Designing the company’s first multi-year product roadmap aligned with the strategic plan and goals.

* Establishing data-driven investment and governance frameworks.

* Directing cross-functional teams to enhance organizational alignment and performance around the plan.

* Strengthening corporate transparency through improved communications, including board presentations and internal updates.

* Developing change management frameworks to ensure company-wide readiness for new products and ways of doing business during frequent and rapid transitions and product rollouts.

This young fintech business was in its early stages, fueled by a bold vision but lacking the structure and strategy needed for long-term growth. While the founder had developed a promising product, he had yet to formalize a clear product strategy. The operations were still in a nascent, ad-hoc phase. The business struggled to command revenue rates to uphold their operations, let alone continue to innovate and grow. The were highly reactive and had a limited ability to meet increasing customer demand despite having developed a solid core technology offering in a niche market. The focus remained on surviving the startup phase and never getting off the rollercoaster ride they were on.

Serving in a “chief of staff” capacity and a trusted extension of the CEO to help generate significant growth, evolution, and maturation for the company, accomplishments included:

* Leading development of a new product strategy that restored the company’s strategic positioning in the market, yielded contracts valued at 4-5x those generated by previous product approach, and led to its eventual acquisition by Fidelity.

* Managing the company’s largest F100 client relationship, generating the largest new revenue contribution over a 3-year period (with 76% of new revenue in 2008, 43% in 2009, and 55% in 2010). Identified gaps, opportunities, needs and actions to drive overall business performance.

* Optimizing prioritization, communication, and decision-making processes by building tools, forums, and programs to strengthen and accelerate the organization.

In 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic forced this non-profit microfinance organization to reassess its strategy and survival plans in the face of immense uncertainty. As the crisis unfolded, the organization quickly realized that its traditional approach to providing small loans to underserved communities may not be sustainable. With borrowers—many of whom were small business owners—struggling to make repayments, the non-profit had to pivot from its standard operations to focus on immediate crisis response.

Stepping in as a pro-bono consultant during this unprecedented time, accomplishments included:

* Providing templates and frameworks for the organization to leverage when assessing and analyzing their business, market and strategy.

* Guiding and supporting the team leader for the strategic planning process while providing insights on how to bring clarity amidst the organization’s information overload and prioritization challenges.

* Offering support and encouragement to foster resilience for a critical mission during an exceptionally challenging time.