CIO Bulletin

OTBi Solutions: Faster Results, Lower Costs, Greater Work/Life Balance

With rising interest rates, organizations worldwide are looking for ways to drive down costs while staying ahead of the curve. This is a tall order, and many businesses have had to resort to layoffs, which negatively impacts employee morale, workload, innovation speed, 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 – improving work/life balance for leaders and individual contributors alike in the process.

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

Q. What drives you? What are your mission and goals?

I genuinely enjoy empowering people to achieve what they once thought impossible. My businesses focus on uncovering hidden profits and unleashing the potential of employees to create transformational value for clients. Essentially, my goal is to help more organizations realize that they can indeed 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. What unmet needs led you to create your business ecosystem?

The need to empower businesses with actionable solutions that deliver both immediate and long-term value and rapid ROI, looking at the business pain points and their root causes more holistically. This drove me to integrate data science and compassionate strategic consulting when I formed my first business in 2012.

Our solutions move beyond high-level strategies that may not be implementable or are obsolete by the time they’re fully realized, and beyond strictly tactical implementation of technical solutions, to prompt and actionable business solutions that yield rapid, within-weeks ROI and lasting long-term value that benefits and empowers people across the organization – leaders and individual contributors alike.

Q. How do you empower people to achieve what they once believed to be out of reach?

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 – and 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. 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. Can you give us a better sense of the range of services you offer?

We provide a range of consulting services, a subset of which includes: strategic planning and management consulting, data science and AI consulting, 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 brought on by change but also capitalizing on the opportunities it enables. From process improvement to strategic innovation, we empower our clients to navigate change in a way that accelerates success by understanding their core needs and the root causes of their challenges - and then unblocking them.

For us, it’s less about the specific service, and more what’s going create the most value for our clients - we measure our success by the ROI we generate for them.

Q. How do you differentiate from your competitors?

In addition to the learnings I bring to the table from my past history as CEO and COO of start-ups and running consulting groups, working in venture capital and private equity, and building and leading centers of excellence within Fortune 50 and FAANG companies, we have a career history delivering multiple-fold first year ROI within 3 months to companies across industries and stages of growth. We consistently accelerate multi-year plan achievement 3x+, and for the larger companies, enable clients to realize savings upwards of $10M within months.

In addition to this proven history, the breadth and depth of our service offerings, and the diverse array of expertise we bring to the table, what sets us apart is our success-based business model. This means we don’t make money unless our clients do.

I’m committed to finding opportunities for clients to improve outcomes while reducing costs, without layoffs or compromising on product or service quality. We help organizations innovate, improve engagement and unleash the potential of their employees, and achieve more without burnout and improving work/life balance without taking up excessive client time or bandwidth. We’re time savers. And 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. We understand you also share profits 50/50 with those who refer you business – How does that work?

Yes. I’m passionate about driving positive change within organizations and empowering as many people as possible. In addition to our success-based business model, sharing my net project earnings 50/50 with those who refer me business is my way of expressing gratitude for their trust – for them 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 of the challenges you’ve overcome?

There have been many challenges over the years, from familial health and financial challenges to work/life balance, and more. We can’t control what life throws us, only how we respond. On the work/life balance front, I’m very driven, and I strive to solve all-the-problems, empower people, and give my all to everything I do. When I was younger, I would just hyperfocus for 15-18 hours at a time, pull all-nighters and knock things out, but that doesn’t work when you’re leading people or are a working parent. I had to learn how to empower people and have balance at the same time, which was not something I achieved overnight. Over the years, I’ve developed strategies to overcome these obstacles and am passionate about helping others achieve the same, without having to work the 100+ hour weeks I did for so many years.

Q. What advice would you impart to up-and-coming entrepreneurs?

Seek to learn something from every interaction you have, it will make you a better listener, which makes you a better entrepreneur and leader. Be clear on the problem you seek to solve, articulate it simply, ensure it’s a real unmet need and pain point of your customers, and resolve it. Meet your clients and your people where they are, accept that change is inevitable and embrace it - and help your clients to do the same. Ensure value-generation is first and foremost in everything you do.

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

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.