Every business has someone quietly holding it together.
For twenty years, that was me.
Megan Effertz · Founder and CEO
I was the person who knew how it actually worked. Who caught the thing three steps upstream. Who translated between two departments that had stopped understanding each other. It never showed up on a job description, and it worked right up until it didn’t.
I built this company to make that work visible, so a business doesn’t have to depend on one person’s memory, goodwill, and weekends.
It’s also what I speak about. See the talks →
The job title changed. The job didn’t.
Marketing, sales, HR, technology, operations, a P&L of my own. Different companies, different industries, and every time the same thing. I was the person brought in to see what was really happening and say it out loud.
Sometimes that was translating what the engineers meant into something a customer could act on. Sometimes it was rolling three acquired competitors into one company without breaking the people who came with them. Sometimes it was leading a bank through a pandemic and building the process for a federal loan program that didn’t exist yet.
The common thread was never the function. It was this. You want to go there, here’s where you actually are, and here’s what it will take. Then getting the team to believe it enough to do it, with enough room to say “this won’t work” before we built it wrong.
That worked because people trusted me with the truth. It’s the only reason any of it worked.
I built this service inside a company first.
At a logistics and fulfillment firm serving Fortune 500 clients, I built a solutions group that assessed how a client’s work actually moved, showed them what we could build for them and what it would change, then handed the roadmap for the tech team to build.
Same work. Different letterhead.
Later I bought a marketing company, grew it, and sold it. I ran a business magazine and spent two years listening to Minnesota executives describe what was and wasn’t working. I did fractional work and kept seeing the same patterns I’d watched from the inside for two decades. Good people, working hard, in a process nobody had looked at end to end since it was invented.
So I stopped being the glue and started teaching companies how to work without it.
Thinking is the work.
Leaders have been trained to move fast. Hit the number, clear the queue, put out the fire, cross it off the list. Somewhere in there, think time disappeared. Most of what I get hired to fix is the accumulated cost of decisions made at speed by people who never got time to look at the whole thing.
I’m not interested in documenting a broken process so your team can follow it more faithfully. I’m interested in why the flow is broken, what everyone knows and has stopped saying, and what becomes possible when ten people finally see the same picture at the same time.
Fix the flow and most of your people turn into rockstars. They were never the problem.
“The best moment in this work isn’t the map. It’s when something a team had written off as impossible turns out to be doable, and they look around the room and go, whoa, we could do that.”
President of a marketing firm serving manufacturers, banks, and healthcare. Chief Experience Officer at a regional bank, with brand, culture, and roughly 70% of the organization reporting to me. Executive Editor of Minnesota Business magazine. SVP, Marketing at a print, logistics and fulfillment company serving Fortune 500 clients. Sales, marketing, tech, operations, HR, compliance and product leadership across a variety of industries over the last couple of decades.
I build and fix things that turn into real value, usually alongside people who deserve the credit with me.
Helped grow a logistics and fulfillment company from $1M to $30M in EBITDA, through to its sale. Bought a marketing firm, grew it, and sold it. Took a business magazine to profitability and readied it for sale. On the acquisition team six times, working across newly combined businesses to figure out how the pieces actually fit together and to keep the people through it. Two executive-education brands launched from zero, built with Fortune 500 leaders on subjects that had no playbook yet. A federal lending program stood up under deadline, twice, with the technology to run it. More recently, a client who sold their business during our work together, and another who grew profit more than tenfold in a year getting it ready for sale.
- ✓Woman in Business, Minneapolis/St. Paul Business Journal
- ✓Top Women in Banking, Bank Beat Magazine
- ✓Notable Women in Finance & Banking, Twin Cities Business Magazine
- ✓BA in Communications, University of Minnesota
- ✓Master of Business Communication, University of St. Thomas
- ✓Adjunct professor at St. Thomas, teaching business, strategy, and marketing to undergraduate and graduate students
My strong suit is numbers. I chose words for a living. That makes me unique. I can easily switch from creative to analytical and understand decisions impact different departments and workflow.
The full history, title by title, is on LinkedIn.
I grew up on the water. The nautical thing here isn’t a brand exercise.
Summers on my grandparents’ houseboat on Lake Minnetonka. A sailboat through the Panama Canal as a kid. Racing out of Wayzata Yacht Club. A marina job all through high school and college that I kept longer than I needed to because I loved it. A water safety column for Lakestyle magazine. Now a cabin and a boat of my own, and a paddle board when the lake is quiet. Being on the water is good for my soul and my creative mind.
I wrote a novel. Maddie + Max, set in Excelsior in the nineties, on the shores of the same lake. It’s about heartbreak and hope, and about how two people can watch the same thing happen and see something completely different, and how much gets lost when the context goes missing.
Which is, it turns out, close to what I do for a living.
The sequel is in progress. A leadership book is somewhere behind it. And if you run a book club or a book event, I will absolutely come talk about it.
Dogs are good for my soul too. I foster for Coco’s Heart Rescue out of Hudson, Wisconsin, and I’m a sucker for anything with a fluffy face — samoyeds, eskies, malamutes, huskies, shepherds. If you love dogs, water, or talking business we already have a lot in common.
Let’s talk.
Thirty minutes, nothing to prepare. Tell me what’s going on and I’ll tell you whether I can help. If I can’t, I’ll tell you that too, and point you at what you actually need.
Not sure where to start? Take the free mini-diagnostic →