Keryn Gold: Empowering Businesses to Accomplish More Without Burnout

In the fast-paced business world, transformational leadership, adaptability, and innovative ideas are keys to success. Keryn Gold, PhD emerges from this landscape as a trailblazing entrepreneur and visionary leader who fearlessly challenges the status quo to better set up teams and organizations for success and achieve what they once thought impossible. Keryn masterfully uncovers hidden profits and unleashes the potential of employees, generating transformative value for her clients.

Keryn — a cross-functional scientist turned consulting leader, strategist, executive advisor, and entrepreneur — is a force of nature in the business world. At the young age of 17, she graduated summa cum laude from a Top 15 university and was recruited to join a groundbreaking PhD program that aimed to bridge the gap between biomedicine and data science in the wake of the Human Genome Project. Little did she know that this would set her on a path to becoming a revolutionary business leader.

 Keryn’s venture into consulting was sparked by the recognition of a significant market gap: the need to empower businesses with prompt and actionable solutions that yield both immediate and long-term value to fund their strategic initiatives and bring new products that can change people’s lives for the better to market, faster. To bridge this divide, she systematically integrated data science and strategic consulting when she formed her first business in 2012. This fusion has enabled her to generate transformational outcomes for her clients, often exceeding a 50-fold first-year return on investment within just three months. 

Keryn’s accomplishments over the years have been recognized by multiple organizations, with accolades including: “10 Most Inspiring Business Women of 2023,” “Top 100 Innovators & Entrepreneurs,” “Top 10 Inspiring Innovators Pushing the Boundaries in Their Industries,” and “Changemaker of Distinction.” Her clients describe her as a “resourceful, perceptive, trusted advisor,” who “delivers transformational value with relentless compassion – phenomenally fast.”

Examples of the remarkable value Keryn has generated for clients include uncovering over $100M in savings opportunities at multiple Fortune 100 companies, manifesting and implementing the five-year vision of an education technology company inside of one year while 100x-ing their customer acquisition, establishing multiple analytics, data science, and consulting divisions and centers of excellence at three separate Fortune 50 companies while driving $10 million in savings within six months at each, building tools and lightweight processes that streamlined activities that previously took weeks into mere seconds, and completing a project quoted by others to take over $2 million and 1.5 years within four months at 90% cost savings – which her client then leveraged to secure over $500 million in additional revenue. She has also trained over 100 people to deliver similar results.

Central to Keryn’s approach is an unwavering commitment to expediting the realization of multi-year plans while improving schedule flexibility for employees. Through Keryn’s 3 businesses, OTBi Solutions, FocalPoint Outcomes, and SNAFU Guide, she empowers organizations to unlock hidden profits, accelerate innovation, unlock the potential of their employees, and improve balance and autonomy for leaders and individual contributors alike.

With an illustrious career history that includes leadership roles at Fortune 50 and FAANG companies, venture capital and private equity, and serving as CEO and COO of multiple startups, Keryn has an invaluable wealth of knowledge and expertise that informs how she operates. Her expansive repertoire of services, from strategic management and business consulting to cost reduction, executive coaching, recruiting, and talent assessments and development further distinguishes her from others in the field. 

Keryn’s businesses are set apart not just by her experience, breadth and depth of service offerings, and near and long-term value creation, but by her business model. In Keryn’s words: “I believe in aligned incentives, so we operate on full contingency and don’t make money unless our clients do.” The proof of her success lies in the fact that most of her business comes from repeat clients and referrals.

Keryn’s unique approach extends to how she partners with others as well: her passion for driving positive change within organizations and empowering as many people as possible has led her to equitably share her net earnings with those who refer her business, 50/50, in gratitude for their trust and providing her expanded opportunities to help others. This is all but unheard of in the business world.

In addition to her professional endeavors, Keryn volunteers at several youth and entrepreneur empowerment organizations. In her view, true success is not measured in monetary terms, but in the individual lives we touch and the positive change we bring to the world.

Beyond her success in business, Keryn has proven herself a thought leader, consistently providing valuable insights and challenging conventions that have proven dysfunctional. Keryn’s goal is to empower leaders and organizations to see that they truly can have it all: accelerated success, engaged employees, and work/life balance with minor modifications in how they operate. No matter an employee’s introversion, extroversion, communication and learning or behavioral styles, personality traits, or motivators, she is committed to providing organizations with the tools, systems, and frameworks to unleash the full potential of their employees, uncover hidden profits, and accelerate organizational success while improving schedule flexibility and autonomy (without the need to clone anyone). To enable this at greater scale, Keryn’s upcoming book, The Leadership Playbook, Revisited, distills Keryn’s extensive experience and insights into an accessible guide, aiming to help leaders and organizations achieve this goal.

Over 100,000 hours of research, testing, and refinement went into the strategies Keryn outlines in this book, which provides explicit implementable tools, systems, and processes she’s 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 her clients.

Everything about Keryn’s businesses, her philosophy, and how she operates align with her drive to create win-wins and empower others, and she sees the book as an opportunity to make an even greater impact, at scale.

We’re in a period of rapid disruption of business and technology, but Keryn sees it as an opportunity to empower even more people. When asked about it, Keryn said: “ChatGPT and generative AI are bringing about a great democratization of technology. Though it may seem daunting and scary to many, it also opens doors once closed to those who didn’t possess deep technical expertise. This provides even greater opportunities to empower those who choose to embrace it. It’s an exciting time. Now, more than ever, people, no matter their education, experience, or specific details of their resumes, are empowered to learn, grow and achieve what they once thought impossible or out of reach.” 

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