When we founded Lodestone Advisory Group in 2013, business leaders were tired of a management consulting industry that was a stiff, black box offering one-size-fits-all “solutions,” with little accountability on end results. Lodestone, named after the naturally occurring magnetic powder that gave early merchants and tradesmen the ability to navigate the globe and open up a world of opportunity, set out to do what clients actually needed: not handing them a presentation telling them how to do their own jobs better, but instead partnering with them on strategy and execution to deliver tangible and measurable results.
Amr El-Husseini, Founder & Chief Executive Officer
Our story is not conventional, nor is it linear. Our team’s backgrounds intersected at the crossroads of investment, entrepreneurship, innovation, law, and economic development / government. We came together to create and offer something different that we thought the market was craving based on our own research and experiences. At our core, we focused on being hands-on problem. solvers.
Patrick Baird, Engagement Manager
We directed our initial efforts toward what we knew best: helping clients grow. As simple as it might sound, growth comes in different shapes and scales, and so do clients. International expansion, innovation, business transformation, strategy, fundraising, and capital events are all engines of growth. Equally, start-ups, small- and medium-size enterprises, large corporations, NGOs, research institutions, and government agencies are all constantly searching for opportunities to successfully capitalize on such growth engines. Our focus since day one has been on helping clients unlock these opportunities. Our approach, which safely assumes that business leaders know their industries as well as anyone in the space, prioritizes helping clients maximize impact by building, activating, and launching their future growth engines using a disciplined decision-making approach.
Along this journey, we have learned many important lessons. For example, when the private sector evolves, so should governments and regulators; however, this is not always the case in reality. Our team studied for more than a decade how many city and state governments retained, despite a substantial need for change, a traditional economic development model – spending enormous subsidies and forgoing future tax revenues to incentivize legacy industries to relocate operations – something that has left major parts of America’s urban, suburban, and rural communities decimated. The Fourth Industrial Revolution has rendered this model obsolete, and communities are scrambling for modern approaches to address the void left by empty factories and warehouses that once teemed with solid, well-paying jobs.
In response, we launched Lodestone Growth Labs, which turns the traditional economic development model on its head. Growth Labs equips local governments, communities, and economic development organizations with the tools to transform their economies and achieve sustainable growth from the ground up by creating ecosystems of innovators, small businesses, inspiring local entrepreneurs, and recruiting foreign direct investment from multinational companies and equity investors. We successfully refined this effort across global markets, and brought it back right here to Tennessee, where the majority of our state’s counties are suburban or rural.
Separately, our Lodestone Ventures story began in 2015, when we combined our growth strategies with internationalization to support the launch of an innovative technology startup accelerator concept across multiple global markets. The participating companies outperformed their peers focusing on their immediate domestic markets, raising over $60 million, and creating over 2,000 jobs, with over half of the companies that completed the program successfully scaling internationally. At the same time, we began investing in and advising startups and are now introducing a first-of-its-kind venture capital concept that will invest in Seed and Series A stage ventures at the intersection of emerging technologies and industry. Our VC platform will support the growth of portfolio companies through a proprietary program, Lodestone Growth Labs for Startups, which equips company founders and leaders to adopt new venture best practices and capitalize on global business opportunities.
We believe Nashville has the potential to be a world class economy. What it needs to realize its potential are sound economic strategies, an authentic and functional innovation infrastructure that is positively disruptive, and a true entrepreneurial ecosystem that embraces and creates access to opportunity for people from all walks of life. As we continue to expand our management consulting and venture capital offerings, we are looking forward to being a part of the change taking place here in Nashville, in Tennessee, and across the Southeast as these economies continue to diversify and scale.
