"Karen Gerstl is incredibly smart, consistent and warm, with an illuminating personality. She's a professional - insightful and completely anchored in reality. Karen instinctively challenges basic assumptions and embraces the art of change. She uses her talent to direct management toward opportunities for top line growth.
"As a trainer and coach, Karen gets to know the spirit of a person. She believes wholeheartedly in taking charge of life and career - and making the most of it! Laughter is a key ingredient in her inspiring approach."
- Marilyn Williams
Vice President, Sales
Andin International, Inc.
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Principal and Founder
Karen Gerstl
Karen Gerstl brings a passion for performance improvement to every assignment. It's a contagious attitude. Her ability to pass along the excitement and empowerment of creating successful change is just one reason she is able to achieve such dramatic positive results for her clients.
Ms. Gerstl is intelligent, creative and accessible. She's also highly analytical and technically savvy. While her left brain cuts to the core, her right engages others to follow. Her tools and approaches to performance improvement were developed over a 20-year career as a highly successful executive, during which time she turned around departments, divisions and companies. For her, each executive assignment was an opportunity to test and advance her approach to improving individual and organizational performance.
At age twenty-three, Karen launched a successful precious metals design business. Six years later, she was engaged to stabilize a floundering metals casting company. It was there that she gained her first exposure to the design of software logic, program specifications and performance reporting. She orchestrated a reorganization and turnaround of this business, producing a 100% increase in revenue within three years.
Her next executive challenge was the redesign and turnaround of the manufacturing operation of a mass producer of consumer goods. She met the challenge and within 2 years, revenue tripled. Subsequently, Karen held senior management positions including executive vice president of operations, and has served as director of manufacturing, product engineering, planning and quality assurance. Her work, in each, resulted in improved competitive position, growth and increased profit for her employers' businesses.
This experience created the foundation for Karen's approach to improving the performance of organizations through their people, organizational culture, business processes and ability to create successful change. She launched Leap Strategies in 1998 and has helped clients — manufacturing, retail, service and professional organizations — create extraordinary improvements in business performance.
A graduate of The City College of New York, Karen earned a Certificate of Process Mastery from Dr. Michael Hammer, the father of "reengineering" and the "process enterprise." She is a volunteer mentor, business skills trainer and speaker for the non-profit sector and a member of the American Society for Quality, the Project Management Institute, the Institute of Management Consultants, the New York Human Resource Planning Society, the International Furnishings and Design Association and a former national board member of the Women's Jewelry Association. Karen has served as an expert witness in the areas of management, manufacturing and quality assurance. Her articles have appeared in various trade publications.
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