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 Ryan Sievers is an accomplished business strategy maven working at the forefront of applying creative business thinking to real-world challenges. In 2001 Ryan founded Sievers & Company, a business strategy consultancy with a reputation for innovative solutions that consistently improved performance.
The Iowa native has lived in cities on three continents and has worked with a diverse amalgam of clients, across many industries. He taught as an adjunct professor of business and marketing for five years, and spent three pioneering years at Microsoft developing strategic programs to improve the agility of his division.
In the Summer of 2011 Ryan launched into the next great adventure of his career, returning to his Midwest roots to establish Chicago as his home and business epicenter. Ryan received his BA in Anthropology from Iowa State University, and his MBA from the United Business Institutes in Brussels, Belgium.
Ryan earned his undergraduate Bachelor of Arts (BA) degree at Iowa State University, with a major in Anthropology and minors in Design Studies and International Studies. During his undergraduate studies, Ryan also dabbled in the nascent World Wide Web and began hand-coding 1.0 web sites, and blogging (before they were called blogs). He discovered early on that he could market his skills in web site design which helped him to fund some of his college expenses and gain a great deal of experience and understanding for providing business services.
Ryan's undergraduate career also included a number of other institutions he attended in order to expand the scope of his studies and experience. He attended Harvard University for an architecture program; the Japan Center for Michigan Universities to study the Japanese language and culture in Hikone, Japan; and perhaps the most adventuresome college credit Ryan earned was through a joint archaeology program between Iowa State University and the University of Colorado at Boulder, which took him to Managua, Nicaragua for an archaeological dig where he unearthed and documented numerous ancient burial treasures with his team.
Following the award of his BA, Ryan continued on with graduate studies at the United Business Institutes, a small prestigious international college in Brussels, Belgium. There he earned his Master of Business Administration (MBA) degree with an emphasis in International Management. During his graduate studies at UBI Ryan continued to do freelance design work and attracted his first large corporate consulting contracts. Those few companies were the first clients of what would ultimately become his own consultancy, Sievers & Company. These early professional experiences put Ryan on a solid—though not always linear—track as an entrepreneur and creative thinker in the business world.
During his MBA studies Ryan experienced a significant realization that would fuel his passion and the guiding purpose for his consulting firm. His insight centered on the fact that every business has three inextricably connected and driving functions. Most importantly, the successful coordination of those functions has a direct correlation to the success of that business.
The three functions go by many descriptions, but at their core are: Business strategy, marketing communications, and project management. These business functions drive the mechanism of a company’s ability to achieve success. From his first few clients and throughout his career, Ryan has observed that business strategy, marketing communications, and project management frequently go uncoordinated within an organization. This often leads to a cascading series of problems and failures that are detrimental to a company’s performance, both internally and in the market place.
Ryan was wholly confident that his business concept of providing top-tier consulting services that satisfied the needs of clients facing business challenges by coordinating the three areas of business strategy, marketing communications, and project management had come at just the right time. In the Autumn of 2001 Ryan began his new venture in full, and with great success.
In addition to consulting, Ryan also enjoyed presenting his real-world business experience and wisdom to today’s students—who he views as tomorrow’s business managers and leaders. In the Fall semester of 2003 Ryan began teaching a series of business courses as an adjunct professor at the Allegheny Campus of CCAC in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
Ryan's development of dynamic and group-interactive curricula, for the principle subjects of Finance, Management, and Marketing/Advertising, has been regarded as truly innovative and an extremely valuable academic learning tool for college students that provided a bridge from classroom theory to business reality. Ryan first introduced this concept he coined as “theorality” in 2005. With it, he more effectively transferred classroom learning for students to real-world capability.
Ryan's passion for education is deep and a constant driving force whether interacting with students or clients. At the very heart of his professional drive is the belief that the better we understand ourselves and the various environments in which we participate, the more likely we are to successfully navigate the risks, uncertainties, challenges, and ultimately the decisions that come before us in life and in business.
The evolution of his consultancy led Ryan into many different industries and business experiences, the compounded result of which enabled him to not only successfully and deftly navigate the challenges of the business environment for his clients, but also to develop his own innovative business strategy theorems that have kept his work at the forefront of business management thinking and application.
In 2008, armed with nearly a decade of business consulting experience, Ryan was sought out by Microsoft, the world’s leading software maker. At Microsoft Ryan spent three pioneering years directing an internal consulting effort to improve the internal processes, team building, and leadership in his division. While at the software conglomerate, Ryan was able to apply his skills and expertise to hone the agility and performance of various teams and functions in the Microsoft Business Solutions division.
With a plethora of valuable experiences under his belt at Microsoft Ryan took opportunity by the hand and relocated with his partner to his Midwest roots in the Summer 2011. Easily making Chicago home and his new business epicenter, Ryan donned his entrepreneur hat yet again to help launch the premier style and design consulting company, Marc-Ryan & Co.
Ryan is making fast progress on his first book (guiding understanding of the fundamentals of what it means to be in and run a business, of course!), speaking at business events, and continuing his role as business strategy consultant and trusted advisor to clients around the world.
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