Strategy Is All About Risk.
Taking the right risks at the right times to capture opportunities and gain competitive advantages, all while staying within acceptable risk tolerances.
Regardless of planning methodology, a balanced approach to purpose, growth and survival is essential to a healthy risk/reward appetite.
I work with my clients to improve risk visibility, fine-tuning strategy decisions and tactical execution plans without unnecessary reinvention or complexity.
Welcome to Essential Strategy.
Who We Work With
We work with public and private organizations in all industries and of all sizes, and types, using a blend of your unique, internal expertise, experience-based knowledge, and guiding principles that apply across organizational boundaries to inform the consulting services you receive.
Think you need an industry expert to support your risk and strategy needs?
Think again.
Our clients range from start-ups to $1b global entities, for-profits, non-profits, and local government and tribal entities. Our extensive experience takes us across more industries than most, and we succeed in any environment because we focus on bringing new insight to the strategy-risk discussion in a way that adds significant value to your own process.
We are strategy and execution risk experts – it is simply all we do.

What Makes Us Different?
Our uniqueness is summed up in our ability to assess and identify the drivers of strategic performance risk wherever it exists within your organization. You and your team know what your strategy needs to be – we will make it even better by assessing potential gaps in the design and execution of your plan.

Our Promise to You
We will NEVER try to fit your problem into a pre-determined solution, ask you to start over from scratch, create more complexity than you need, or sell you a service that doesn’t solve a problem.
We WILL bring greater visibility to what is slowing you down.
We WILL reveal how to improve goal execution success..
We WILL help you define and articulate risk appetite and tolerance.
We WILL show you how to strike a balance across purpose, growth, and survival.
We WILL teach you how to create actionable, sustainable process and programs.
“We worked with Black Fox Strategy in 2019 to gap assess an issue we had affecting client capture in one of our groups. From the start, we thought we knew what the problem was and that Erin would simply confirm our suspicions. We were enlightened when her analysis revealed that what we thought was an issue wasn’t one at all – we actually had a completely different problem. She then worked with our team to create an action plan to get the group back to an optimum level of performance. The results have been extremely successful – we couldn’t be happier! Erin’s ability to get at the root of a problem and then support a team in crafting the solution is exceptional.”
~ Lydia Griffey, Senior Principal at Stantec

Our Services
Our clients are unique and so are the solutions we design for them. While we use the best industry tools and analytical processes to diagnose and solve problems, you will not find us depending on a one-size-fits-all product. Our goal is to help your organization so we will scope and design a project that gives you the results you need within the budget you have.
Strategic Performance Alignment
TM