Why StrategyWerx Exists
Big Business Strategies
for Any-Sized Enterprise
The advent of the internet introduced a new era of competitive challenges for small and medium-sized businesses. The upside is that now, any business can compete in any corner of the market. You just need to learn the new rules and technologies and how to apply them. We exist to give businesses the tools they need to compete. We believe that healthy businesses lead to healthy communities, by creating jobs, increasing wages, and making work more productive and meaningful.
Four Brands — Each With a Specific Growth Focus
In addition to StrategyWerx, which offers strategy, business development, and business improvement services, we have three other brands dedicated to serving small business owners. Please visit our other brand sites to see how we can serve you!
Our History
Taking the Plunge
Andrea Hill decides she is done with being a corporate hired gun. She wants to help others build their businesses, and wants to build her own business in the process. So she takes the plunge and strikes out on her own to launch her first-ever startup.
Chicago Location
Though Andrea and her family are still living in New Mexico, she and her wife plan to relocate back to the upper Midwest. She hires a few former employees and they take up shared office space downtown Chicago.
Hill Management Group
The corporate entity is named Hill Management Group, LLC. But Andrea structures it so she can form several different companies beneath it. Her goals for providing business growth services are expansive.
StrategyWerx Officially Launched
The first brand is strictly a consulting brand, focused on business strategy, planning, and infrastructure development. Clients from Andrea's past lives in publishing, direct marketing, entertainment, and the jewelry industry start showing up.
We Launch Our 2nd Brand
Our client list is growing quickly, but the strategies we are developing for them demand digital marketing capabilities they do not have. So we launch Werx.Marketing to support more of our customers’ needs.
Moving Across the Country
The New Mexico house is sold and it's time to move! Andrea and her family pull up stakes in New Mexico and relocate to Wisconsin to be close to their extensive family.
Work-from-Home Begins
Internet technology has improved dramatically and so have online collaborative tools. Andrea and her team reevaluate, and decide they could all do with less travel time to the office and more quality time on personal pursuits and with family. They give up the downtown Chicago office space and go virtual.
MentorWerx 1.0
The company is constantly approached by micro-business owners who want business advice. But StrategyWerx-level consulting is out of their budgets. So MentorWerx is launched initially as a way to package strategic advice in accessible formats for smaller business owners.
The Consulting Years
StrategyWerx draws in big contracts for Andrea to function as a rent-a-CEO for corporations, often in other countries. She does two long projects in Dubai, a few short projects in various countries, a project in Mexico, and another long project in Italy.
She keeps Hill Management Group alive with small projects in each brand, but she’s mostly on the road and living out of a suitcase.
Pandemic and Reassessment
Andrea makes it out of Italy just before the world gets shut down for the pandemic. After a few weeks she actually unpacks her suitcase and spends a lot of time wondering what everyone else is wondering ... what will happen next?
Being of Service
As small businesses are shaken to their foundations, the Werx Brands jump in and produce 45 free webinars in 32 weeks. Nearly all of these webinars draw hundreds of attendees. Andrea realizes that she wants to refocus her business on helping many businesses at a time grow, rather than focusing on one large project at a time. She also rediscovers the joys of staying home!
A New Strategy is Defined
With a year of disruption and hundreds of hours of listening to business owners behind us, we develop a new overall strategy and a clearer focus for each brand.
New Branding
By March, all our brand websites have been updated with our new strategy and services, and we’re talking about our new offerings with clients.
First Software Partnership
One of our new strategic pillars is to form meaningful partnerships with software companies serving our markets. We start this process by partnering with Keap CRM.
Laying the Track Before the Train
Now come the months of building the infrastructure to support our planned growth. We begin operationalizing our processes and hiring to the new strategy. If we’re going to grow this company, we’ll need a strong team and highly evolved processes!
Building Our Knowledge Base
Andrea has grown and run medium-sized corporations many times, but she has never scaled a company from scratch. It’s time to build some new skills in preparation for our big plans. So she applies to the Goldman Sachs 10,000 Small Businesses Program and gets accepted for the program starting in July.
A New, Powerful Growth Network
Andrea graduates from the Goldman Sachs 10ksb program, and the Werx Brands have access to an entirely new (and extensive) network.
One condition of graduation is to develop a growth plan. The program gives Andrea some additional ideas for scaling that are not so service intensive. Andrea’s final project (a condition for graduation) is to introduce the concept of ProsperWerx.
One More Brand (and we're done!)
By April, the details of the ProsperWerx brand are worked out and a new website is created. But we’re not promoting yet … it will be many months before the playbooks and tool kits envisioned in the ProsperWerx brands have been developed.
We begin a process of extensive product development.
More Software Partnerships
To maintain true to our technology-agnostic philosophy, we evaluate and select several CRM, HR, martech and productivity software companies to partner with. We engage in an extensive period of training and certification to get our team up-to-speed.
MentorWerx 2.0
StrategyWerx is taking on so much organizational design consulting that it makes sense to redirect MentorWerx energy to that sector. With ProsperWerx in place as the resource for downloads, playbooks, and self-directed training, MentorWerx is repositioned to what it is today.
Rapid Progress on Software Partnership Front
We tier up not once, but twice in our first seven months as HubSpot partners — an unusually fast progress in the CRM space. We continue to add other software partners, train and certify.
- Taking the Plunge
- Chicago Location
- Hill Management Group
- StrategyWerx Officially Launched
- We Launch Our 2nd Brand
- Moving Across the Country
- Work-from-Home Begins
- MentorWerx 1.0
- The Consulting Years
- Pandemic and Reassessment
- Being of Service
- A New Strategy is Defined
- New Branding
- First Software Partnership
- Laying the Track Before the Train
- Building Our Knowledge Base
- A New, Powerful Growth Network
- One More Brand (and we're done!)
- More Software Partnerships
- MentorWerx 2.0
- Rapid Progress on Software Partnership Front
Our Philosophy
Our company exists to give business owners, executives, managers, and teams the tools they need to compete and grow. We believe that healthy businesses lead to healthy communities by increasing wages, creating jobs, and improving wellbeing.
We also believe that meaningful work contributes to meaningful lives. Time spent doing meaningless tasks, duplicative work, or trying to find work-arounds to frustrating problems is time wasted. When companies and their employees have the right tools to do their work so they can focus more of their energy on building relationships, being creative and adding value, they naturally thrive.
Our mission is to remove the roadblocks to growth by providing the strategies, tools, and training that foster innovation and make work more productive, more gratifying, and ultimately, more profitable.
Our Customer Philosophy
Our customer philosophy can be expressed in a few key principles:
- Live By Our Principles. Our company principles aren't just an internal thing. We use our principles to guide every aspect of customer care.
- You Deserve Experts. We will only offer advice and solutions in areas in which we have genuine expertise.
- No Golden Handcuffs. We want you to stay with us because we are delivering every-day value. Every solution we set up for you will be fully in your control and easily transferrable to another provider.
- Shared Knowledge. We will share our knowledge, train you and your team, and make sure you understand why and how we conduct your marketing activities.
Our Software & Technology Philosophy
There's a big difference between selling technology and using technology to solve problems for customers. Technology solutions should be tailored to fit each customer's business strategy, marketing objectives, and brand.
For example, Wordpress, Joomla, Shopify, and Magento are all perfectly viable website platforms, with different pros and cons associated with them. Which platform you choose should be based on the relative strengths and weaknesses of those platforms compared to your business needs.
The same thing is true of CRM systems. Keap, Hubspot, Greenrope, Salesforce, and Zoho are all excellent systems with very different super powers and different price points. Which CRM system you use should be tailored to your specific business objectives and budget.
At WerxMarketing, we're technology agnostic. What that means is that we can implement and support all the systems mentioned here (and dozens more). We're committed to giving you the right solutions for your business. That means mastering many different systems and constantly staying on top of new technology advances, and we're fine with that.
Our Knowledge Philosophy
Our commitment to providing the best strategies, tactics, change management, software, and technology solutions to meet your business needs, combined with our Principles and our determination to never put our clients in golden handcuffs, lead to this one significant commitment and responsibility:
We must learn about, master and certify in as many website platforms, CRM systems, marketing technologies, and business systems as we can to support our clients and their myriad requirements. Our employees are not just encouraged to spend time learning and certifying — they are paid to do it.
You deserve expertise, to be treated with principled behavior, and to be given the tools you need to achieve your business goals. So we are committed to doing the work necessary to deliver on those promises. That's our philosophy.
Our Marketing Philosophy
Just because you can use a hammer or a plier doesn't mean you know how to make jewelry. And just because you can create a website or write a blog doesn't mean you know marketing.
Marketing isn't just a set of tactics to be deployed by the computer savvy. Marketing is the discipline of promoting and selling products and services, using market intelligence, buyer psychology, and the ability to create, communicate, deliver, and exchange offerings that have value for customers.
When we offer our customers "marketing," that's what we offer: Theoretical and practical knowledge based on decades of experience and enduring appreciation for the art of bringing products and services to market.
Here are our marketing commitments to our customers:
- We are committed to bringing our customers marketing advice and services based on deep study, practice, and ongoing learning.
- If we make a recommendation for your marketing, we will be able to explain the reasons behind it.
- If we make a recommendation based on gut or hypothesis, we will tell you that too.
- If we do not know the answer to something, we will admit it, and then go find it. We will not just MSU (make stuff up).
- We are committed to being marketing experts in every sense of the word, which includes commitment to ongoing learning and adding additional experts to our team. This insures we remain experts even as marketing dynamics and technologies change.
Our Principles
Our company is principle-based, which means we don't operate off a handbook or a rulebook — we all live by a shared set of principles that guides our personal and team behavior.
Accountability
We are accountable to ourselves, each other, our customers, our vendors, our communities, and our world. No passing the buck or pointing fingers! "I own it" is a valuable phrase around here.
Honesty and Integrity
We are committed to being truthful, transparent, and consistent in everything we do.
Dignity and Respect
We treat everyone with dignity and respect. We do this in our actions, words, tone, and intentions.
Fun and Joy
We believe it is important to have fun with and find joy in one another, our customers, our partners, and in our work. But what does that mean? There's no foosball table or cringy teambuilding games ... "Fun and joy" can include many things, but some of the highlights are working together without politics, leaving space to be goofy and unique humans, agency, autonomy, giving everyone the opportunity to exercise their creativity ... there's more, but those are some highlights.
Life Balance
We work individually and with/for one another to maintain work/life balance. There are no timeclocks ... only due dates. As long as customer and teammate needs are met or exceeded, that can be done from wherever, whenever.
Genuine Understanding
Most mistakes (and therefore, bad days) are due in some part to misunderstanding something. We work hard to understand, well, everything. Each other, the roots of problems, why a customer wants something they want, why we reacted (or didn't) the way we did (or didn't). Genuine understanding is a precursor to excellence.
Personal Growth
We are committed to constantly pursuing personal, intellectual, and creative growth. We back up this commitment by allotting time and pay to training, certification, professional development, creative experimentation, and the occasional internet rabbit hole.
Know Our Priorities
We seek to understand what is most important, and to prioritize accordingly. We look to the other principles to help us do this!
Learn from Our Mistakes
We value embracing our mistakes and being open about them so everyone can learn from them. If you haven't made a good mistake lately, you're probably not trying hard enough ...
I've seen Andrea in action as both a senior executive and in her consulting role. She is smart, thoughtful, decisive and hard-working. She is an excellent choice to get you from point A to whatever point you're trying to get to down the alphabet. Highly recommended.
Andrea Hill
Andrea Hill owns Hill Management Group, LLC, with the brands MentorWerx, StrategyWerx, and SupportWerx. She has over 35 years professional experience as the CEO and president of start-up through mid-sized companies, and she has demonstrated serial success in leading companies through rapid and profitable growth. Her experience spans multiple industries as the CEO of Rio Grande Jewelry Supply, the president of international clothing manufacturer and direct marketer Fulcrum Direct/After the Stork, president of marketing services firm Anthill Marketing, and a founding senior executive of Playboy’s direct marketing catalog operations in music and video.
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The Bell Group (where Andrea was CEO) set extremely high standards of excellence and accountability- and creative contribution!-for all levels of the company. Through Andrea's stewardship, every individual from the shop floor to the executive boardroom took ownership and great pride in their lives at The Bell Group. My experience with Andrea Hill transformed my understanding how senior management could and should function.