OTBi Solutions: Empowering Leaders To Stay Ahead of the Curve

Work/life balance has been increasingly difficult to come by in recent years. As cost pressure increases with rising interest rates, businesses worldwide are looking for ways to cut costs while staying ahead of the curve, often at the expense of employee workload and work/life balance.

OTBi Solutions enables leaders to achieve the seemingly impossible: improved outcomes and accelerated innovation and success at lower costs, without layoffs or negative impact to people, product, or service quality – while improving work/life balance for leaders and individual contributors alike in the process.

Bulletin sat down for an interview with CEO and Founder Keryn Gold, PhD to discuss how she and her business ecosystem empower clients to achieve these transformational outcomes.

Q. How did you and OTBi Solutions get your start?

I’ve always been driven by understanding how things work and using that knowledge to empower others. When I first started working, this led me to accept an offer to be trained as a new “hybrid” consultative scientist in the wake of the Human Genome Project. The goal was to understand how disease happens inside the body, how to quantify and predict it to determine the best action to take, as early as possible. This work took me across 6 departments and 12 different labs to learn how to think about problems from multiple angles and use this knowledge to predict outcomes. I loved the work and earned my PhD, but ultimately found the academic culture wasn’t for me.

I was fortunate to be recruited by a newly formed, PhD-led non-profit biotechnology and life science advisory group that had just completed its first project. I started as a consultant, and once the founders saw the value I delivered, they ultimately elected me President of the group. By the time I left, I’d developed best practices and helped scale the organization from 7 consultants completing their second engagement to 100+consultants with 25+engagements in just 1.5 years.

I found that I loved consulting and empowering businesses, and observed that many of our clients with some of the most transformational ideas often used our deliverables to help them secure funding. Being a person who values seeing problems from all angles so I’m better equipped to help, I felt I needed to understand how investors make financial decisions so I could more holistically empower my clients. This was out-of-scope for the non-profit consulting group I ran, so I established strategic partnerships to ensure the group’s ongoing success, handed over the reins of the organization, and formed my first business, OTBi Solutions, in 2012.

Q. How has OTBi Solutions evolved over the years?

My first act with OTBi Solutions, which stands for “Outside the Box, Innovative Solutions,” was doing free consulting work for local venture capital and private equity groups I wanted to learn from - evaluating investment opportunities for them. They liked what I delivered and how I thought about problems so much that they hired me and provided me with invaluable opportunities to wear a variety of hats, learn, grow and take on as much as I dared, including being COO of one of their education technology holdings in my 20s, while also doing end-to-end M&A. I’m immensely grateful for these opportunities, as they opened doors for me and shaped how I viewed business challenges and addressed unmet needs for my clients.

Over the years, the deliverables I completed for clients led to multiple director through C-suite employment offers. Sometimes I accepted them, sometimes I didn’t. Over the past 20 years, including my R&D and consulting work, I was CEO and COO of start-ups, worked at different incubators, venture capital and private equity firms, and ran centers of excellence at multiple Fortune 50 and FAANG companies. Through these myriad experiences, I saw a common theme: in times of stress, change, or disruption, “default mode” for many companies was layoffs. While I have no issue laying people off who deserve it, there are better, more effective, less disruptive and destructive ways of improving margins than laying off good people. We show organizations that they can have it all: accelerated success, engaged employees, and work/life balance, and that profitability and empowering people don’t have to be in conflict.

Q. How do you empower businesses to improve profitability without resorting to eliminating jobs?

Our services are designed to generate profits and accelerate goal achievement, improving outcomes while reducing costs, without layoffs or negative impact to people, product or service quality - without taking up undue bandwidth and 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 innovate and collaborate more effectively and achieve improved work/lift balance. This enables us to deliver significant value within weeks, and we have a proven history delivering multiple-fold first-year ROI within 3 months.

Q. What distinguishes OTBi Solutions from its rivals in the market?

Beyond this proven history, our extensive, diverse array of experience, and the breadth and depth of our service offerings, what sets us apart is our success-based business model. This means we don’t make money unless our clients do. Most of our business comes from repeat clients and referrals, who consider us “resourceful, perceptive, trusted advisors” who “proactively deliver transformational value with relentless compassion — phenomenally fast.”

Q. You also shared that you split profits 50/50 with those who refer you business – How does that work?

I’m passionate about driving positive change within organizations and empowering as many people as possible to thrive and innovate. In addition to our success-based business model, sharing my net project earnings 50/50 with those who refer business our way is how I express gratitude for their trust and for providing me with opportunities to help even more people. 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.

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

A few examples include working with an education technology startup to manifest and implement the CEO’s five-year vision within just one year while multiplying their customer acquisition 100x. I’ve also established new consultative data science divisions at multiple Fortune 50 companies, driving over $10 million in cost savings at each within six months. We also created a point-of-care tool that was quoted by others to take 1.5 years at a cost of $2M. It took us four months at a 90% lower cost, and the client secured over $500 million in additional revenue by leveraging our deliverables. Another example is developing automated data analysis and predictive insight tools for sales and marketing departments that reduce time-to-insights from weeks to mere seconds and suggest the “next best action” for them to take to drive the most value.

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.

Q. What does the future hold for you and your business ecosystem?

Greater scale, expanded global impact, and continuous learning.

We have some exciting new strategic partnerships that enable us to more rapidly scale, and the release my forthcoming book later this year: “The Leadership Playbook, Revisited.” Over 100,000 hours of research, testing, and refinement went into the strategies I outline in this book, and it provides explicit implementable tools, systems, and processes I’ve enacted successfully at start-ups through FAANG companies along with bite-sized 1-page “plays” (and a companion site) so readers can achieve similar results to my clients, at scale. All of these projects are for the same ultimate goal: for me, it’s all about the joy of unblocking people and helping them achieve what they once thought impossible.

A brief biography of Managing Partner & CEO, Keryn Gold

Keryn Gold, PhD is an entrepreneurial business leader who consistently drives transformational value for her clients. Combining her extensive experience leading startups and consulting groups, work in venture capital and private equity, and history running centers of excellence and billion-dollar divisions at Fortune 50 and FAANG companies with a uniquely compassionate approach, she empowers organizations to overcome their most daunting challenges and accelerate success while improving work/life balance. She defines her success by the value she generates for clients, has a career history delivering multiple-fold ROI in less than 3 months, and has received numerous awards and accolades over the years for her work. Keryn doesn’t just adapt to change, she helps to shape it, and ensures her clients are always ahead of the curve.

“We reduce costs without layoffs and empower employers and employees to stay ahead of the curve.”