strategic-planning
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Eric Ewald Keeps the Boardroom Honest
For more than three decades, the Minneapolis association executive has worked on the quiet craft of making boards clearer, braver and more useful - one agenda, assessment and difficult question at a time.
The Consulting Firm That Turned a Stormwater Tax Into a Day at the Park
Shockey Consulting sells something city halls badly need and cannot manufacture on command: a credible conversation. Its best work begins where the engineering ends and the public questions start.
The People Between the Rooms
Nation Consulting built a business in the awkward space where a press statement, a government decision and a roomful of stakeholders all become the same problem.
The Publisher Who Turned a Rolodex Into a Consulting Firm
After 250-plus publications and a decade of community events, Scott Costello made an intriguing wager: the real product was never the magazine. It was the ability to turn relationships, strategy and follow-through into institutional momentum.
The Ad Agency That Learned to Speak Emergency
From credit-card-sized biothreat guides to a one-penny airport campaign, the Lafayette firm built a business by making complicated public information usable before the clock runs out.
The Meeting Was Never the Point
Cortez Consulting built a business by noticing who was missing from Austin's public conversations. A decade later, it is taking the same habit inside the organizations that run them.
The San Diego PR Firm That Made Boring Things Travel
For half a century, Nuffer, Smith, Tucker has sold an unfashionable advantage: knowing the subject before trying to make it famous. Its best work turns lubricant, citrus pests and downtown office space into stories people actually pass along.
Mission Minded Sells the Sentence Before It Sells the Logo
For nonprofits and schools, the expensive problem is rarely an ugly logo. It is the fuzzy sentence underneath it. Mission Minded built a business finding that sentence - then making donors, families, boards, and staff act on it.
ACS Quantum’s Quiet Product Is the Meeting After the Meeting
A small Sacramento consultancy has spent a quarter century turning stakeholder interviews, boardroom friction and sprawling ambitions into plans people can approve - and, sometimes, use.
CV Strategies Built an Outsourced Newsroom for Public Agencies
A former television news director turned the overlooked work of rate notices, board meetings and water reports into a durable communications business - one small, consequential detail at a time.
DC Design asks who your plan forgot
A college asked for a strategy. DC Design gave it a workbook. Inside the consulting firm that lets the people living a problem change the assignment.
Andy Bailey Built a Business. Then He Built a System for Building Yourself.
The Petra Coach founder spent three decades turning ambition into a repeatable practice. His latest chapter asks a more personal question: what happens when the operator finally applies the operating system to life?
Petra Coach Turned the Quarterly Offsite Into a Business Operating System
Most business coaches sell advice. Petra Coach sells a cadence - one strategic coach, one accountability coach, and enough public scorekeeping to make a leadership team’s promises difficult to forget.
Becky Flint Spent 20 Years Building the System That Became Dragonboat
Before Dragonboat was software, it was a trail of spreadsheets carried through PayPal, Shutterfly, BigCommerce and Feedzai. Becky Flint turned a recurring operating problem into a company - and a career-long argument for solving what hurts.
Mike White and the Quiet Architecture of a Personal Financial Brand
For more than two decades at Raymond James, Mike White has worked on a delicate brief: give thousands of financial advisors the tools of a large institution without sanding away the personal voices that clients trust.
ActionCOACH Global
ActionCOACH turned an intangible service - advice - into a repeatable franchise sold in more than 80 countries. Its real product is a weekly rhythm that helps owners replace improvisation with systems.
Jack J. Gindi
Jack J. Gindi is EVP and Chief Marketing Officer of Gina Group, the privately held New York fashion, lifestyle and branding company founded in 1985 that designs, licenses, manufactures and distributes products across hosiery, footwear, handbags, small leather goods, fashion accessories, athletic and wellness, gourmet foods and, since 2025, pet. He joined the company while still an undergraduate at Baruch College and has spent more than thirty years there, where he now runs brand and business acquisitions, strategic planning and general marketing. He is the executive whose name appears on Gina's licensing announcements, from K-Swiss legwear and Laundry by Shelli Segal to the launch of the company's pet division, and he works from Gina's showrooms at 10 West 33rd Street in Manhattan. Outside the office he is a father of five, an avid athlete, and an active supporter of public affairs and charitable causes.
Katahdin Group
Katahdin Group is a Boston-based leadership development and peer advisory firm that runs process-driven CEO and executive peer groups plus strategic planning programs for leaders of mid-market growth companies. Founded in 1999 as The Raffoni Group by Melissa Raffoni out of Inc. Magazine's discontinued 'Inc. Eagles' CEO program, it uses a case-method meeting format so CEOs can get candid, structured feedback from peers. It rebranded to Katahdin Group - named after Maine's Mount Katahdin, 'The Greatest Mountain' - to evoke the climb of building and eventually exiting a business.
Stacey Paynter
Stacey Paynter is the founder and CEO of Strategic Connections, LLC, a San Francisco Bay Area strategic planning and brand consultancy she launched in 2004 after a career spanning some of the largest names in global advertising. As former CEO of Publicis Dialog's San Francisco office and COO of EvansGroup, she co-authored the 'Holistic Communications' framework later adopted worldwide by Publicis Groupe. Today she advises C-suite executives on brand strategy, customer acquisition, and operational transformation — and serves on the board of the OSET Institute as a Brand, PR & Media Advisor.