Director of Strategy Consulting
Director of Strategy Consulting | Imagine Deliver
A consulting firm for the ‘new majority,’ Imagine Deliver helps clients activate insights and strategies that benefit everyone. Imagine Deliver knows that the best systems, services, and products are designed by the people who use them. Focused on equity-centered service design - and rooted in community based research and creative engagement methodologies - Imagine Deliver connects the most relevant community insights to their clients’ strategic goals. Recent clients include Hennepin Healthcare, United Healthcare, the McKnight Foundation, Wilder Foundation, the University of Minnesota and the City of Saint Paul.
The Director of Strategy Consulting is responsible for advancing Imagine Deliver’s thinking and practice of equitable insights & strategy. Importantly, they know how to turn these theories and methods into practical frameworks for use in client engagements. This role will function as a consulting principal across the firm's portfolio and will lead and grow our consulting team towards excellence in all aspects of client delivery. They will be given a national platform at Imagine Deliver to continue to build upon the success of the firm’s proprietary methods in equitable insights and strategy, as well as being tasked with co-creating novel, market-leading approaches to design. Successful candidates will have a unique combination of business consulting, strategy and insights generation, and thought capital development. They also have an applied lens on equity and justice.
The Director of Strategy Consulting needs to be a naturally curious and empathetic consultant who gains energy from client success, broad team collaboration, and nurturing team developmental growth. They will need to be well versed in the shortcomings of traditional design methodologies, and creative in thinking about how Imagine Deliver’s intellectual property can be best positioned in the marketplace.
This role will be based in Minnesota with up to 25% travel, and reports to the CEO.
As the Director of Strategy Consulting, a typical day might include the following:
- Globally managing the full portfolio of consulting project work through a mix of direct and indirect client delivery, project management, strategy and insights work
- Managing client delivery team members through the day-to-day execution of consulting projects
- Advising senior clients as a highly credible subject matter expert
- Leading strategy development in partnership with insights and engagement teams
- Providing quality assurance for all client deliverables and proposals
- Proactively leading and supporting business development and networking activities on behalf of the company, including participating in pipeline development, proposal writing and delivery
- Supervising members of the client delivery team, as well as overseeing vendor, sub-contractor and collaborator relationships
- Building and maintaining strong, long-lasting client relationships
- Supporting facilitation at client sites and in virtual spaces
- Distilling emerging concepts under the Managing Director’s guidance to create new areas of work
- Partnering with research and consulting colleagues within the firm to spearhead the creation of thought capital and methods
- Building new thought capital (i.e. white papers, podcasts, or blog posts) and coordinating with marketing to proliferate content publicly
- Planning the strategy for a new business proposal
This role is broken down as follows:
- 60% team leadership and client delivery
- 20% writing & communication
- 20% new business development
The details:
We offer an equitable salary and competitive benefits. We are committed to fair compensation, pay equity and salary transparency. This role is a full-time salaried position.
Base salary: This role, at this level, is ranged from $110,000- $130,000 in yearly base salary. We target the median salary ($120,000 for this role) for new hires.
Bonus structure: Sales Bonus: You’ll get 5% of any sale you bring in the door Annual Bonus: this role is subject to a 10% annual bonus depending upon firm profitability and annual revenue targets.
Benefits: Imagine Deliver offers competitive benefits, such as gender-inclusive healthcare, dental, vision and 401K.
Time away from work: We balance the demands of our growing company with unlimited sick time and paid time off.
We’re built for flexibility. We operate in a hybrid space, and we’ll provide you with the equipment and tools you need to thrive in a hybrid work environment.
We have the best clients (and the most exciting projects). Our ideal customers are bold intersectional leaders ready to take risks and transform their fields of work. That means the logos are great, but our clients also become friends along the way.
We support your intentional growth. We’ll give you all the credit for every bit of work you do at Imagine Deliver. You’ll sometimes find that we don’t have all the answers, and we welcome you to suggest and create solutions. You can stack your resume in a short amount of time. We won’t limit you by your job description. We want to see you thrive here and everywhere you go. You’ll build your network and the company’s network while you’re with us.
We invest in your development. Imagine Deliver will invest in your growth with a professional development budget, which you can use on coaching, training, and learning opportunities aligned with your goals.
Requirements:
- 10+ years experience in a professional setting with credibility in philanthropy, government or healthcare sectors
- Proven management consulting experience with increasing leadership and responsibility
- Experience in strategy, human-centered design and/or service design
- Fluency and comfort with concepts of intersectionality, equity, and justice
- Proven experience with persuasive writing, storytelling, data visualization, and research
How to apply?
Introduce yourself to our team via email in a way that reflects your personality. Please be sure to include:
- A link to your complete and up-to-date LinkedIn profile (or a PDF resume)
- Three bullets sharing why you’re a perfect fit for this role
- An attached PDF of a client project or work sample
Your email subject line should include both your name and also the role for which you are applying. Send the email to kate@imaginedeliver.com cc’ing hello@imaginedeliver.com. We will accept applications on a rolling basis, but our target date for applications is August 19, 2022 at 5:00 pm CST.
Target start date: September 12, 2022
This role might be for you if:
- You live values of equity, justice and belonging. You have a lived experience and/or a personal accountability that gives you the foundation to operate in a multi-cultural creative context with a highly intersectional team.
- You have a growth mindset. You have great ideas and aren't afraid to share them. You have a love of learning and learn quickly. This, coupled with personal resilience, means you work hard until you achieve your goals. You don’t give up easily. You volunteer for new challenges without waiting to be asked. You are going to take ownership of the time you spend with us and truly make a difference.
- You are a leader and a doer. You pay attention to the details. As far as you’re concerned, anything worth doing is worth doing with excellence, and you take pride in both big and small successes - and celebrate tasks marked ‘done.’
- You are a team motivator. You push hard and bring others along with you, but you’ve got a strong sense of humor. You like to laugh, tell jokes and be human with your team. You are a positive person who builds community and common ground.
- You have an entrepreneurial spirit. You are comfortable with uncertainty and seek to be a ‘builder.’ When change happens, you ‘roll with it,’ asking good questions to help your team gain clarity. You thrive in a fast-paced environment, and to keep pace, you proactively ask questions of yourself and your team, ensuring your own success and the success of the group.
- You practice self-awareness. Building a company like ours is both challenging and fulfilling. You practice solidarity, look out for your team members and you are assertive about refilling your ‘fuel tank.’
What success looks like in this role:
- You set the pace. You have urgency in how you complete tasks and do not wait for others. You know how to prioritize in order to contribute to what's needed next.
- You communicate persuasively. You are a very strong writer, but you can also speak boldly and back up your ideas even when they are unpopular.
- You demonstrate poise. You are self-aware about your role, your identity, and your surroundings. You know how to communicate with executives and you do so with detail-orientation and confidence. Being around people with power doesn’t keep you from being yourself - or living your values. You use correct name spelling, pronunciation, pronouns and punctuation. You speak up in solidarity and demonstrate accountability; you recognize the difference between inviting someone ‘in’ and calling someone ‘out’.
- You practice excellent listening and cultivate a habit of resourcefulness. First, you seek to understand. Your habit of curiosity helps ground your team. Empathic questions are part of your job. Before asking a technical question, you try to figure it out first. If Google doesn’t have the answer, then you are not shy to ask for help.
- You are technology forward. You can learn and recommend new technologies and use them to automate processes. You can create a clean agenda, a beautiful powerpoint, a template, a spreadsheet and a set of notes without any help or editing.
- You have a mastery of logistics. You use a to-do list, task management process, editorial checklist, etc. so nothing falls through the cracks. Booking a room and arranging a web conference are not below you.
- You make creative recommendations. You come to a meeting with ‘well-baked’ ideas and recommendations, sharing them freely in internal team meetings and one-on-ones, and asking for direction on how to socialize them externally, where relevant. ‘Well-baked’ means there's a clear question, proposal, model or approach developed ahead of their presentation.
- You are confident in leading diverse groups. You are comfortable managing complex situations and conflicts; you can keep teams on track from the front of the room as a facilitator. You honor all experiences while demonstrating command.
- You are adept on social media. You use your platform with professionalism and self-awareness. You are comfortable sharing thought leadership online.
Diverse Teams Innovate
A certified woman-owned business and a registered B-Corp, Imagine Deliver is actively dedicated to the local community, serving 80% local and independent clients, giving 20% of services away pro bono, and donating 10% of annual profits to nonprofit organizations led by Indigenous, Black and People of Color working in their communities to advance equity and justice. Imagine Deliver champions the talent of intersectional teams because we know (and the data shows) that diverse groups of people innovate when they work together with intention. We live out that value in our own work by creating a professional environment that welcomes, celebrates and invests in people who bring different perspectives and plural identities to the work. It starts at the top. We’re a woman, Muslim and person of color-owned business, and for years our founders experienced work environments that weren’t designed for people with intersectional identities. We’re changing that with our consulting firm by valuing potential candidates for their lived experiences as much as their college degree, by giving staff unlimited paid time off to take care of themselves and observe the holidays they celebrate, and by creating intentional space to unpack - and unlock - our differences together. By leaning into our diverse team's intersections, we unleash original thinking and design elegant solutions and strategies that give our clients a competitive edge.
Imagine Deliver is deeply committed to principles of equity, justice and belonging - and to providing our teams with an affirming work environment free of discrimination. All employment decisions at Imagine Deliver are based on business needs, job requirements and individual qualifications, without regard to age, race, ethnicity, religion or belief, sexuality, gender identity, size, ability, family structure, parental status, or any other identity.