Andrea Hill decides she is done with being a corporate hired gun. She wants to help others build their businesses, and wants to build her own business in the process. So she takes the plunge and strikes out on her own to launch her first-ever startup.

Though Andrea and her family are still living in New Mexico, she and her wife plan to relocate back to the upper Midwest. She hires a few former employees and they take up shared office space downtown Chicago.

The corporate entity is named Hill Management Group, LLC. But Andrea structures it so she can form several different companies beneath it. Her goals for providing business growth services are expansive.

The first brand is strictly a consulting brand, focused on business strategy, planning, and infrastructure development. Clients from Andrea's past lives in publishing, direct marketing, entertainment, and the jewelry industry start showing up.

Our client list is growing quickly, but the strategies we are developing for them demand digital marketing capabilities they do not have. So we launch Werx.Marketing to support more of our customers’ needs.

The New Mexico house is sold and it's time to move! Andrea and her family pull up stakes in New Mexico and relocate to Wisconsin to be close to their extensive family.

Internet technology has improved dramatically and so have online collaborative tools. Andrea and her team reevaluate, and decide they could all do with less travel time to the office and more quality time on personal pursuits and with family. They give up the downtown Chicago office space and go  virtual.

The company is constantly approached by micro-business owners who want business advice. But StrategyWerx-level consulting is out of their budgets. So MentorWerx is launched initially as a way to package strategic advice in accessible formats for smaller business owners.

StrategyWerx draws in big contracts for Andrea to function as a rent-a-CEO for corporations, often in other countries. She does two long projects in Dubai, a few short projects in various countries, a project in Mexico, and another long project in Italy.

She keeps Hill Management Group alive with small projects in each brand, but she’s mostly on the road and living out of a suitcase.

Andrea makes it out of Italy just before the world gets shut down for the pandemic. After a few weeks she actually unpacks her suitcase and spends a lot of time wondering what everyone else is wondering ... what will happen next?

As small businesses are shaken to their foundations, the Werx Brands jump in and produce 45 free webinars in 32 weeks. Nearly all of these webinars draw hundreds of attendees. Andrea realizes that she wants to refocus her business on helping many businesses at a time grow, rather than focusing on one large project at a time. She also rediscovers the joys of staying home!

With a year of disruption and hundreds of hours of listening to business owners behind us, we develop a new overall strategy and a clearer focus for each brand.

By March, all our brand websites have been updated with our new strategy and services, and we’re talking about our new offerings with clients.

One of our new strategic pillars is to form meaningful partnerships with software companies serving our markets. We start this process by partnering with Keap CRM.

Now come the months of building the infrastructure to support our planned growth. We begin operationalizing our processes and hiring to the new strategy. If we’re going to grow this company, we’ll need a strong team and highly evolved processes!

Andrea has grown and run medium-sized corporations many times, but she has never scaled a company from scratch. It’s time to build some new skills in preparation for our big plans. So she applies to the Goldman Sachs 10,000 Small Businesses Program and gets accepted for the program starting in July.

Andrea graduates from the Goldman Sachs 10ksb program, and the Werx Brands have access to an entirely new (and extensive) network.

One condition of graduation is to develop a growth plan. The program gives Andrea some additional ideas for scaling that are not so service intensive. Andrea’s final project (a condition for graduation) is to introduce the concept of ProsperWerx.

By April, the details of the ProsperWerx brand are worked out and a new website is created. But we’re not promoting yet … it will be many months before the playbooks and tool kits envisioned in the ProsperWerx brands have been developed.

We begin a process of extensive product development.

To maintain true to our technology-agnostic philosophy, we evaluate and select several CRM, HR, martech and productivity software companies to partner with. We engage in an extensive period of training and certification to get our team up-to-speed.

StrategyWerx is taking on so much organizational design consulting that it makes sense to redirect MentorWerx energy to that sector. With ProsperWerx in place as the resource for downloads, playbooks, and self-directed training, MentorWerx is repositioned to what it is today.

We tier up not once,  but twice in our first seven months as HubSpot partners — an unusually fast progress in the CRM space. We continue to add other software partners, train and certify.