Stephanie Kusibab

Stephanie Kusibab is a strategy consultant with more than twenty years’ experience assisting client organizations in the B2B, B2C and professional services arenas with a focus on high level business vision and strategy. Through broad business experience and perspective, she quickly understands and assesses a situation to identify growth opportunities across any industry or profession. As a skilled facilitator she leads high-stakes conversations and delivers training that resets expectations and establishes ground rules for ongoing success of boards of directors and leadership teams. She also helps organizational leaders guide their teams during uncertain times with leadership, change management and strategy coaching and serves as a sounding board and unbiased observer to help identify opportunities for improved performance. Stephanie is the CEO and Chief Strategist for Essentiam, a strategy consultancy that accelerates growth and mission achievement for businesses and membership organizations nationally and internationally. Essentiam improves revenue and effectiveness in both the for-profit and non-profit sectors through mission and vision creation, strategic planning, market research, leadership and team development, coaching, governance training, and change management initiatives. Stephanie’s professional experience includes high level roles in marketing as well as consulting. Prior to starting her own firm, Stephanie led the consulting team at SmithBucklin, an association management company, and served as Senior Director of Marketing Services. At SmithBucklin, Stephanie led a team providing strategic planning, team building and governance consulting services to boards of directors and executive teams across a wide range of sectors including healthcare, accreditation, technology, telecommunications, building products, retail, hospitality, professional services, manufacturing and transportation. Previously, Stephanie held a variety of positions at ACCO Brands, a house of brands that markets and manufactures office products through direct and indirect channels. At ACCO, Stephanie was responsible for strategic planning for a $200M division of the company and established the company’s first new product roadmap for the services category. Stephanie has managed global teams and processes both at ACCO and as a contract consultant for ABN AMRO Bank. For ABN AMRO, Stephanie helped establish a global account planning process to identify cross sell and upsell opportunities for the bank’s largest lending clients. In this capacity, she facilitated group planning sessions between account teams and product teams on four continents. Stephanie believes the most powerful ideas come from bringing people together. Through deliberate, structured interactions digitally and in-person, she helps organizations tackle high-stakes conversations, mine diverse perspectives, generate new ideas, build stronger teams, and understand market opportunities. When she is not working, Stephanie is a dedicated baseball and football mom and enjoys international travel and boating with her husband and teenage son.