In an Interview with Insights Success, Christine Nielsen, Founder and CEO of Contrast Consulting shares the inspiring journey of the organization and its valuable contribution in the management consulting industry.
Below are the highlights of the interview between Christine Nielsen and Insights Success.
Give a brief overview of your company and its solutions?
We are a boutique coaching and consulting firm. We work with our clients to identify the issues preventing their growth, profitability and results. We help individuals and companies create powerful and sustainable visions to become purpose-driven. Show us a business problem and we will show you a people problem. Because it’s people – not logistics, sales, marketing or operations – that solve problems and craft solutions.
Describe the ways in which Contrast Consulting Co.’s solutions are focused on being customer/client centric.
At CC, we practice the following: Is the vision of the company compelling for both the employees and the client? We create powerful organizational cultures that have every person understand their purpose for why they do what they do every day. It’s compelling and it drives unpredictable results.
Understand Needs- Enquire, understand and respond to our clients, showing that they are being listened to.
Integrity – At the bare minimum do what you said you would do. We make commitments to our clients that we can deliver on, reliably.
Radical Candor- Straight talk or Radical Candor is how we help our clients communicate. All issues can be resolved in communication and it’s easy to produce breakthrough results when you have transparent honest dialogue at all levels of the organization.
Engage your people- Employees deliver the heartbeat of your organization’s vision. Our job is to unlock the gold and capabilities of each leader and employee to create robust client centric results.
Describe the experiences, achievements or lessons that have shaped the journey of your company.
Propelled by my determination to be successful, I used some of the most challenging times of my life to excel. After being the first in my family to graduate from one of the best Universities in the country, I had a very successful and lucrative career as a pharmaceutical representative. It was in this industry where I discovered the vocation of Coaching and immediately began to train in what would become my life-long passion of making a difference and being paid to do so.
I was the youngest seminar leader for a public company by the time I was 24 years old. I then left the pharmaceutical industry to go into to the field of business coaching. I travelled internationally working with clients all over the world in a variety of industries. I try to bring this knowledge and passion to help businesses achieve breakthrough level results everywhere I go. After taking some time out of the market to have her 3rd child, I was again prompted to reinvent myself and my passion and thus Contrast Consulting as it stands today was born.
What are the evident challenges in the Executive Coaching and Consulting industry and what are your company’s strategies to tackle these challenges?
We use a coach based approach to all of our consulting. We stand firm in the belief that the keys and answers to the challenges all companies face are locked inside the people. Our job is to engage them in a way that unlocks what is best for the company and help them create strategies to build a sustainable business.
As a female-led company, we are aware of the obstacles, potential limitations and both conscious and unconscious expectations we have for ourselves and the category. To work through this, we are continuously educating ourselves and partnering with other experts to best serve and deliver results to our clients. The biggest challenge faced in the marketplace today is adaptation and speed of implementation. We work through the same challenges our clients do. This allows us to quickly see the core issues and help them move through their challenges.
What according to you is technology’s role in shaping the Executive Coaching and Consulting industry?
One of our expert partners is with a technology platform. We use this platform to leverage real time data in understanding how companies are working from the inside out. This gives us insight into uncovering the real issues which are often not the issues being addressed. Meaning what’s wrong is not what’s being fixed. With MindSuite, we are able to quickly and accurately get the company’s temperature and then focus on fixing what really requires attention.
Where does Contrast Consulting Co. see itself in the long run and/or what are its future goals?
Expanding our team to meet the demands of our clients, building the business and ensuring we are delivering the highest quality coaching and consulting services possible.
About the Leader
Christine is a master coach; she has an uncanny ability to cut to the heart of the matter in any situation. She sees the under workings of a situation and reveals what is holding people and the business back in a swift and meaningful way.
Christine has trained and studied with some of the top business leaders of her time. She uses all of her experiences and knowledge to bring her client’s and businesses to new levels of performance. Christine will be the first to tell you that the minute you have “The answer” you’ve stopped engaging in the question and your business will be limited to your thinking.
Christine is fiery and authentic. She is sometimes more committed to the success of our clients than the clients themselves. She is able to turn people around who may be struggling or stopped by their own selfimposed limitations. This is the underpinning of Contrast. Being more interested in the success of our clients than anything else.