About Us

Most companies do not have a growth problem. They have an organization that cannot carry the growth they already have.

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That is the gap we exist to close.

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Management Essentials brings the strategic thinking, organizational development, and leadership expertise that Fortune 100 companies pay top dollar for to the businesses, municipalities, and nonprofits that need it just as badly and have never been able to reach it. We assess how your organization actually works, develop the leaders who run it, and then build the marketing and communications that carry it to the world. In that order, because execution without direction is just expense.

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Founded by John Lucas, a former Detective turned global business leader. It is a background that turns out to be exactly right for this work. Organizational assessment is the practice of figuring out what is really going on underneath what everyone tells you is going on. He has been doing that for thirty years.

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The work behind the firm is not theoretical. It was earned across a career built on two things: fixing what was broken and growing what was working. From law enforcement to revenue leadership at the Cincinnati Zoo and Botanical Garden to a global consulting practice with IBM, the rooms kept getting bigger and the problems kept getting harder. That work took a homegrown analytics model to professional sports franchises, cultural institutions, and city governments around the world, earned recognition as an IBM Business Analytics Champion four years running, and was featured on CNBC and in Forbes and the Wall Street Journal.
 

Today that experience is a team. Strategists, an organizational psychologist, culture and change expertise, brand and content creators, video and production talent, and fractional executive and financial support, assembled around what your organization actually needs.

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We have never run an ad or made a cold call. Every client we have ever served came to us by referral, which is the only marketing a firm needs when the work is good enough that people insist on telling others about it.

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If you want honest guidance, senior talent without the Fortune 100 price tag, and a partner who stays in the work long after the deliverables are done, you are in the right place.

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