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.

Where are the women at?

Amalgam's attendance at the Society of Chartered Financial Analysts Minnesota Career and Professional Development Day proved an interesting change of scene and a window into the world of our client, McGovern Executive Search. Our take-away question from the event: Where are the women at?

The handful of women CFA members who attended huddled together during the networking sessions, taking me back to my middle school dance days. When I asked, they told me that women are progressing in the industry: two generations ago, there were no women; in the '80s, when women began to enter the industry, they were utterly ignored; today, they are merely undervalued. Investment by and large is still a man's world, they said, in a tone that was less complaint than rallying cry. Maren Amdal, CFA Minnesota's dynamic young Executive Director, told us her organization's membership is 80/20, men/women.

Now, back to our previous blog post about market risk: Treasury Secretary Tim Geitner is out there trying to sell the virtues of taking less risk to a fraternity of aggressive, Type A analysts and investors. Our new theory, backed by CFA's own research, is that women tend to invest more conservatively than men. They're less likely to "bet the farm" on speculation. Thus, getting more women into the investment industry -- and into the elite credential that CFA confers -- would reduce the aggregate risk pursued by the investment industry.

What would a concerted strategy of marketing to women deliver for organizations like CFA Minnesota? A real opportunity to affect change in the current economy.

Mallaby: Market health = less risk

In today's Washington Post, Sebastian Mallaby makes a straightforward case for Treasury policy that balances risk and regulation. The column addresses the big issue: can free markets accept less risk as a condition of sustainability?

Today, Angie and I are attending the Minnesota Society of Chartered Financial Analysts' First Annual Professional Development and Career Day. The "First Annual" tells its own story. Analysts, once the indispensable wizards of the economy, are now looking for work.

We're at the fair by invitation of our fabulous client, executive search guru Trisha McGovern, who will be giving a talk -- with a deck we put together -- on how financial executives can get back on the horse after being thrown. Trisha acknowledges that a typical "job search" is anathema for executives: a morass of process for people who are used to making decisions. By contrast, Trisha positions "career transition" as an educated sales proposition that favors the executive mindset: a market of talent and talent buyers. By knowing their strengths and the demands of buyers, merchandising accordingly and leveraging networks, executives are empowered to land plum new positions.

Bringing us back to markets and risk. Give a little to get more. Can aggressive personalities, and the financial industry that employs them, accept less risk when they want to score impressive gains? Can conservative personalities risk wandering outside their career brackets if they recognize their strengths are pointing elsewhere?

clipped from www.washingtonpost.com Geithner on the High Wire A Rescue Plan Has to Reduce Risk, Not Just Regulate It In his stunningly ambitious House testimony yesterday, Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner laid out three ways to fix finance. Large players -- be they banks, insurers or hedge funds -- must take less risk. A rejuvenated regulatory machinery must monitor the risks they do take, reining them in when they go too far. And if the first two measures do not prevent the failure of a major institution, the government must have the power to manage its collapse in an orderly fashion.