Founder’s Story: Inspire and Equip Every Client to Innovate and Grow

Back in the late 1990s and early 2000s, I was working at a strategy consulting firm doing a lot of Voice-of-the-Customer (VoC) research. At that time, VoC was considered the best practice for discovering customers’ unmet needs to guide the creation of new or improved offerings. And yet, after applying VoC to a variety of different businesses and situations, I found that although it was reasonably effective at discovering opportunities for improving current products and services, it was far less effective at discovering opportunities for new products and services.

I was trying to figure out how to improve the process when I read an article in the Harvard Business Review by Tony Ulwick, Founder and CEO of Strategyn Consulting, in which he described the very same limitations that I was experiencing and how to resolve them as well. That article introduced a precursor to what we now know as the Jobs-to-be-Done (JTBD) innovation approach.

After some time studying that article and this new approach, I realized that my best next step would be to work with Tony and the team at Strategyn. So, I reached out to him and, fortunately, the timing was right, and we hit it off. I worked with Tony and the team for nearly seven years helping Fortune 1000 companies create new or improved offerings to achieve their revenue goals. In 2012, I started Reveal Growth Consultants to inspire and equip every client to innovate and grow.

Most companies don’t lack creativity or ideas; they lack focus. They lack clarity about where the market is underserved, where the best opportunities lie, so that’s what we reveal. We reveal the best opportunities in the market from the customers’ point of view (their important unsatisfied needs) so that our clients can apply their expertise to the issues they now know their customers care about most. What are your growth objectives?