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Why StrategyWerx Exists

Big Business Strategies
for Small and Medium-Sized Enterprises

The advent of the internet introduced a new era of challenges for small business owners. Just as Big Box stores started crushing independent retailers in the 1990s, the internet made it possible for large corporations in every industry to directly compete throughout their verticals — often against their own customers. Smaller manufacturers and suppliers with localized distribution were feeling the same pinch that retailers had been feeling.

But the thing that makes it possible for large corporations to compete in every corner of the market also makes it possible for smaller players to compete. You just need to learn the rules, and how to apply them. 

We exist to  give small business owners the tools they need to compete. We believe that healthy small  businesses lead to healthy communities, by increasing wages, jobs, real estate values, and increasing public services. A nation of strong small businesses would see less income inequality, which would contribute to to less poverty and more social justice.


Healthy Small Business

Makes Healthy Communities

  • Wages

  • Jobs

  • Real Estate Values

  • Public Services

Four Brands — Each With a Specific Growth Focus

In addition to StrategyWerx, which offers strategy, business development, and business improvement services, we have three other brands dedicated to serving small business owners. Please visit our other brand sites to see how we can serve you!

Planning and Infrastructure for Growth

Marketing and Sales Technology & Services for Growth

Strategic HR: Organizational Design for Growth

Playbooks, Roadmaps and Tools for Growth


I've seen Andrea in action as both a senior executive and in her consulting role. She is smart, thoughtful, decisive and hard-working. She is an excellent choice to get you from point A to whatever point you're trying to get to down the alphabet. Highly recommended.

Jim Jerue, Horwood, Marcus & Berk

Andrea Hill

CEO & Founder
Image of Andrea Hill, the owner of Hill Management Group.

Andrea Hill owns Hill Management Group, LLC, with the brands MentorWerx, StrategyWerx, and SupportWerx. She has over 35 years professional experience as the CEO and president of start-up through mid-sized companies, and she has demonstrated serial success in leading companies through rapid and profitable growth. Her experience spans multiple industries as the CEO of Rio Grande Jewelry Supply, the president of international clothing manufacturer and direct marketer Fulcrum Direct/After the Stork, president of marketing services firm Anthill Marketing, and a founding senior executive of Playboy’s direct marketing catalog operations in music and video.  

Subscribe to Andrea's Business Blog

The Bell Group (where Andrea was CEO) set extremely high standards of excellence and accountability- and creative contribution!-for all levels of the company. Through Andrea's stewardship, every individual from the shop floor to the executive boardroom took ownership and great pride in their lives at The Bell Group. My experience with Andrea Hill transformed my understanding how senior management could and should function.

Michael Gold, Ph.D.

Our History

  • Am image of a young woman diving into a lake

    Taking the Plunge

    July 3, 2007

    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.

  • A picture of a hallway in a shared office space building. You can see office furniture behind glass walls.

    Chicago Location

    July 2008

    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.

  • Hill Management Group Logo

    Hill Management Group

    July 5, 2007

    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.

  • StrategyWerx Logo

    StrategyWerx Officially Launched

    October 2007

    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.

  • Werx.Marketing Logo

    We Launch Our 2nd Brand

    May 2008

    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.

  • An image of a Wisconsin lake surrounded by woods in autumn. The colors include a blue stream, green ground-cover and aquatic plant life, and orange, yellow, green and gold foliage on the trees.

    Moving Across the Country

    July 3, 2008

    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.

  • An image of a computer monitor with many faces showing on a Zoom call

    Work-from-Home Begins

    November 2008

    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.

  • MentorWerx logo

    MentorWerx 1.0

    January 2009

    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.

  • Image of an airplane coming in for a landing over a grassy landing strip with mountains in the background

    The Consulting Years

    2011-2019

    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.

  • Image of movie theater marquee that says "The World is Temporarily Closed."

    Pandemic and Reassessment

    March 2020

    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?

  • An image of a woman watching a laptop screen on which Andrea Hill is making a presentation

    Being of Service

    March - December, 2020

    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!

  • An image of a person looking through a magnification lens at a mountain in the distance

    A New Strategy is Defined

    January 2021

    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.

  • A screen shot of the StrategyWerx website home page with the headline "Ready to Grow?"

    New Branding

    March 2021

    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.

  • An image of Keap CRM logo and screen shots

    First Software Partnership

    April 2021

    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.

  • An image of a "We are hiring" sign in a business window

    Laying the Track Before the Train

    May 2021

    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!

  • Image of the Goldman Sachs 10,000 Small Businesses logo superimposed on a from-the-ground-up photo looking up through NYC skyscrapers

    Building Our Knowledge Base

    June 2021

    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.

  • A Goldman Sachs 10,000 Small Businesses alumni badge

    A New, Powerful Growth Network

    December, 2021

    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.

  • An image of the ProsperWerx logo, a phoenix rising from a green circle

    One More Brand (and we're done!)

    April 2022

    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.

  • HubSpot Partner Badge

    More Software Partnerships

    May - December, 2022

    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.

  • MentorWerx logo

    MentorWerx 2.0

    December 2022

    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.

  • HubSpot Platinum Partner Badge

    Rapid Progress on Software Partnership Front

    June 2023

    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.