By Mike Marshall, The Huntsville Times
“This is where Mommy works,” she recalls him saying.
At the time, she was working in the living room of her home off County Line Road in Madison.
She was operating her new company, Leadership Strategies Inc. (LSINC), which provides leadership strategy consulting to senior leaders in government and commercial businesses.
In the dining room were Ryan’s four employees, all women whom she barely knew at the time.
“And this is where Mommy’s friends work,” she recalls Jason saying.
From those beginnings in April 2008 came a company that does business with many of the area’s foremost government and commercial entities, including NASA and SMDC.
Leadership Strategies Inc., now located at 4825 University Square in Huntsville, has a national and international presence, doing business with companies in Germany, Florida, Texas, Virginia and Seattle, among other places.
Working with senior leaders, the company’s goal is to provide the “space to think, ability to think strategically and market intelligence to function strategically.”
“I thought I’d stay an independent consultant,” Ryan said. “It just so happened we did this. The thing about it, there are companies that provide management consulting.
“We do it at the senior level.”
Before moving to Huntsville, Ryan led the Strategic Business Intelligence Group at Booz Allen Hamilton in the Washington, D.C. area. Looking for a better place to raise their family, she and her husband moved here in 2004.
Sensing a shortage in companies here that work with senior leaders, she opened her company in mid-April 2008.
“We started with no money,” she said. “(There were) no investments, and we’ve never gone in debt.”
Much of her success has been through word-of-mouth recommendations, in her view.
“I have a belief that you can’t sell strategy,” she said. ‘You’re either ready to be strategic or you’re not.”
LSINC works with 10 companies at a time. All are “middle- to larger-size companies,” Ryan said.
“We don’t try to tell (senior leaders) we know more,” Ryan said. “We’re listening. We’re taking their insights and pulling it all together.
“I have a firm belief that senior leaders know 90 percent of the time where they want to go. It goes back to having the space to think. They’re the experts, and we’re supporting.”
