Marc Bertaud is founder & president of Sherpa Strategic.  He concentrates on designing programs and leading service teams engaged in strategic planning and organizational transformation; defining opportunity spaces and product platforms; focused application of qualitative, quantitative and anthropological research tools; concept verification & validation; and business case development.

He has played leading roles in moving initiatives from concept to implementation; managing communications with Wall Street and the institutional investing community; and merger & acquisition activities, including valuation and operational integration.

While with Abbott Laboratories, he was recognized twice with the annual Chairman’s Award for “extraordinary contributions to the company’s success.”

Marc has served as a P&L executive in a start-up that reached $680 million in annual revenue in three years, advisory staff to a Fortune 100 executive team, creative director, and partner-level consultant leading research, design thinking and facilitation service teams.

His experience enables him to connect the dots across a broad range of industries: health care, highly engineered industrial systems, defense & aerospace, enterprise-scale technologies, business-to-business services, several retail formats, packaged goods, consumer durables and trade/consumer media.

Marc holds a BA from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in rhetoric and marketing, and an MBA with concentrations in finance, marketing and accounting from the Booth School of Business at the University of Chicago, where he led teams conducting funded new product research for Baxter International and Clorox as a full-time student. He is a SynecticsTM-certified master facilitator and coach, and is adept at applying a wide range of facilitation and strategic planning tools.

Marc has guest lectured on topics including research, creativity and innovation practices for graduate programs at the University of Chicago, Harvard University, The Richard Ivey School and the Institute of Design. He is a member of the Marketing Executives Networking Group, the Product Development and Management Association, Ethnographic Praxis in Industry, and the Industrial Designers Society of America.

His philanthropic activities include the Hyde Park Community Arts Center, Public Action to Deliver Shelter (PADS), indigent care for AIDS patients, The United Way, and U.S. Savings Bond drives.

Marc is fluent in French, picks up accents a bit too quickly, and is fond of trying to get by in the local dialect when travelling.