Clients consider her a “resourceful, perceptive, trusted advisor” who “proactively delivers transformational value with relentless compassion — phenomenally fast.” Keryn has also received numerous awards and accolades throughout her career running startups and consulting groups, working in venture capital and private equity, and leading divisions and centers of excellence at multiple Fortune 50 and FAANG companies, and has a career history delivering multiple-fold first-year ROI to clients in less than 3 months, across industries. 

We had the opportunity to sit down with Keryn to discuss her business ecosystem and the work they’ve been doing to empower companies at all stages of growth.

We’re intrigued by your business model, but before we get into that, tell us a bit about your mission.

My mission is to empower organizations and their people to accelerate achievement of their goals and successfully adapt to change without compromising quality, sacrificing balance or having to clone themselves.

How do you go about empowering businesses to achieve more in less time?

Our services are designed to uncover hidden profits and accelerate goal achievement, improving outcomes while reducing costs, without layoffs or negative impact to people, product or service quality. We simultaneously empower organizations to more effectively innovate, improve engagement and unleash the potential of their employees, without taking up undue bandwidth & time our clients are already struggling to find.

We leverage data science and exploratory data analysis to reveal low-hanging fruit for both rapid near-term impact and long-term value-generation. We also design and implement lightweight solutions to streamline workflows and processes, freeing up our clients’ time and empowering their employees to collaborate more effectively. This approach allows us to deliver significant value within weeks, and we have a career history delivering multiple-fold first-year ROI within 3 months.

What specific services do you offer to enable businesses to stay ahead of the curve?

We provide a range of consulting services, a subset of which includes: strategic planning and management consulting, data science & AI, cost management and expense reduction, process optimization, procurement and supply chain optimization, talent identification and leadership development, coaching, and culture transformation. 

We aim to address the interrelated challenges that businesses face holistically to enable clients to stay ahead of the curve while achieving improved work/life balance for all. This involves not just mitigating the challenges posed by change but also capitalizing on the opportunities it brings. From process improvement to strategic innovation, we help our clients navigate change in a way that accelerates success.

For us, it’s less about the specific service, and more about looking across the organization and determining unmet needs and what’s going create the most value for our clients. We measure our success by the ROI we generate for our clients.

Your business model is success-based – can you tell us more about that?

My goal is to generate transformational value for clients, and I believe in aligned incentives. If we don’t add value and produce savings, we don’t get paid. This ensures there isn’t any risk for our clients, and that we always deliver tangible, measurable value.

We understand you also share revenue 50/50 with those who refer business to you – How does that work?

Yes. I’m passionate about driving positive change within organizations and empowering as many people as possible. Sharing my net earnings 50/50 with those who refer business to me is my way of expressing gratitude for their trust in providing me with opportunities to help even more people. This isn’t a terribly common practice in the business world, but it enables us to amplify our impact and aligns with my philosophy of creating win-wins and making sure people know they’re truly valued.

You have a diverse background, having led start-ups and consulting firms, worked in venture capital, and run data science and strategy centers of excellence at Fortune 50 and FAANG companies. How does this influence your approach?

I’ve worn a lot of hats and learned a lot over the years. I genuinely want to help and empower others, and I’m wired to be proactive and resourceful, continuously learn, improve, and generate value irrespective of what environment I’m in. This mindset and diversity of experience enables me listen well, quickly assess and identify root cause challenges and opportunities where others may not, take action, and deliver meaningful results. Clients appreciate the fact that we can navigate complex environments and drive significant ROI, irrespective of industry or scale of operations, which is why they rave about the value and speed with which we deliver results.

What are some examples of the transformational value you’ve driven for clients? 

Our solutions empower people to gain back time in their busy days, better collaborate, and uncover hidden savings for rapid and measurable ROI. A few examples include, on the start-up side, working with an education technology company to manifest and implement the CEO’s five-year vision within just one year, while multiplying their customer acquisition 100x. Another involves establishing and training new consultative data science divisions at multiple Fortune 50 companies, leveraging their data to find over $10 million in cost savings at each within just six months. Another process optimization example includes creating automated data analysis and predictive “next best action” tools for sales and marketing departments that reduce time-to-insights from weeks to mere seconds at a Fortune 1000 company. 

I love coming into organizations and improving processes so people are empowered to be better heard and understood and work smarter, so they can more rapidly achieve their goals while spending more time with their loved ones.

You have a book coming out soon. What is “The Leadership Playbook, Revisited” about and what inspired you to write it?

The Leadership Playbook, Revisited, is a culmination of over 100,000 hours of research and development, testing, and refinement, and provides specific, actionable, implementable tools, systems, and processes that I’ve successfully implemented to drive transformational value at start-ups through Fortune 50 and FAANG companies, across industries. The strategies outlined in this book distill my experience into 1-page “plays” (with a companion website) to help more people, at scale, to achieve results similar to my clients. All without anyone having to work the 100+ hour weeks that I did for so much of my career. My goal for the book is to empower leaders and organizations, at greater scale, to realize that having it all isn’t out of reach – that they can have accelerated goal and multi-year plan achievement, engaged and happy employees, along with schedule flexibility for all – and do so without having to clone themselves.

Pull Quote: “My mission is to empower organizations and their people to accelerate the achievement of their goals and successfully adapt to change without compromising quality, sacrificing balance, or having to clone themselves”

Company Description: OTBi Solutions is a business consulting firm that helps companies to improve outcomes at lower costs without negative impact to people, product or service quality.

Company Name: OTBi Solutions

Founding Year: 2012

Headquarters: San Luis Obispo, CA

Official Website of the company: https://www.otbisolutions.com/ 

Name of the Featured Leader: Keryn Gold, PhD

Designation of the Leader: CEO