Case study: Sphere LLC

We branded a consulting start-up as approachable, insightful and distinctly valuable – the very qualities it would advise its market of bankers to express to their customers.

Shelly Schwieso came to Amalgam wanting to leverage her 20-year career with Wall Street and Main Street financial organizations into a startup consulting firm. Her vision for the company, Sphere LLC, was to offer workshops and follow-up consulting to banking executives struggling with the huge regulatory, technological and market changes in the industry.

Sphere’s inspired approach to financial advice combines the practical value of Shelly’s experience and her talent for scrutinizing trends from across the worlds of commerce, finance and management. Sphere would advise bankers on building business through differentiation (marketing) and innovation leadership (organizational development). The point of engagement with bankers was simple and refreshing: In an environment of chaos there is always opportunity!

In just two months, Amalgam was able to transform this entrepreneurial idea, a company name and a pile of notes into an identity and a set of sophisticated marketing and presentation tools.

How? For starters, Shelly realized the value in investing in marketing communications – a decision true to Sphere’s own business-development advice to bankers. Through weeks full of late-night emails and lunch deliveries, we worked very closely with Shelly to nail down Sphere’s value proposition and brand it into an array of business communications – a website, presentation deck, sell sheets, workshop booklet, folder and white papers – that would best complement her greatest marketing asset: the impressive Rolodex she’d compiled over a stellar career.

Not only did Amalgam’s mix of consulting and design help focus Sphere’s business plan, it allowed for the kind of intense collaboration, quick reactions and soup-to-nuts service you just don’t get at a typical agency. And in Shelly we got the ideal client for boutique firm like ours: focused, intelligent, considerate and responsive. We love to report wonderful engagements like this one, all the while recognizing they're the result of chemistry between client and consultant.