29 Feb

Our Journey Continues

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Welcome!

This – the creation, care, and feeding of the Line of Sight Group consultancy – all started as a passion for two kinds of challenges:

  1. the challenge of impacting the strategy of organizations, and
  2. the challenge of making sense of seemingly random data and turning it into meaningful, strategic insights upon which our clients could act.

Since 2002, it has been our clients, staff, partners, and mentors guiding me and shaping Line of Sight Group into what we are today…and where we are headed next.

I started Line of Sight having worked in various sales, product development, market research, and strategy roles with three respected Twin Cities organizations across three different industries – Deluxe Corp, Jostens, and Optum/UnitedHealth. Building out and leading competitive intelligence functions at those organizations leveraged my skills and provided the kinds of challenges I was seeking.

The idea of Line of Sight was to do work similar to what I was already doing as an employee – only to do it as an outside partner. I soon learned that it was much more complex and risky than I had thought. However, it was the relationships formed during those years that led to our early success.  We grew through referrals and those who knew my work. I’d get calls from people I’d worked with previously who had moved on to another organization saying, “Remember that strategic analysis you did for us last year at my old company? We need a similar ‘deep dive’ at my new company!”

The work load quickly grew beyond what I could handle; I was able to convince talented people who had similar skill sets and passion to join me. Jen Loehr was just out of college with a degree in Journalism and a strong, Midwestern work ethic, and helped to build out Market-i, our cloud-based platform and the first intelligence monitoring programs. I had previously worked with Sara at Deluxe and at a weak moment she agreed to help me with analyzing the newly developing Medicare Advantage industry. Derek was a student in my competitive intelligence course at St. Catherine’s and began doing part-time monitoring work before becoming our first full-time employee. Others have joined along the way, each adding their own unique skills and personalities. Jennifer S., Jennifer E. (yes, we have 3 Jennifers), Jessica, Mike, Glenn and Brett all share the same values and drive for helping our clients better serve their customers by understanding and taking advantage of change in the business environment.

Our new website and brand refresh is just part of our continued evolution. It started with feedback from our clients – those corporate researchers and their associates who are developing products, communicating with the market, selling, and sometimes running the entire organization. They told us what they value most about how they work with us. We kept those things and built on them. We looked at our competition. We focused on where we are different and better. We listened to our clients’ stories, we observed, we made some strategic decisions. We brought on new talent and developed new relationships. We re-prioritized some activities and reallocated some resources. As Peter Drucker said, “The first step in a growth policy is not to decide where and how to grow. It is to decide what to abandon.”  We stepped back to better understand how we provide value to our clients and developed the Grow, Protect, Focus mantra to reflect what we had been doing all along.

The future for Line of Sight Group is bright. Not only do we have a new look and feel but a new focus and energy. We excel at helping our clients grow their business in health, financial, education, and manufacturing/retail spaces and will continue to do that. We have assembled the skills, technology and talent to better serve our core clients:

  • Executive teams and CEOs with sharper strategy creation and alignment of Sales, Marketing and Product functions;
  • Sales teams so they can win more and target more accurately;
  • Marketing teams can listen to the market to create superior content and messaging; and,
  • Products teams to create differentiated products the market ultimately wants to buy.

Through it all, our core purpose and passion will remain as it has been: To help our clients grow, protect, and focus their business by making strategic moves that provide unique and better value to customers than their competition.   

As always, we’re here to help. Have a look around our new website and (newly launched) social media presences (links below), and take a moment to say “hello” from wherever you may be.  We’d love to connect.