Terebinth Consulting  ·  Bend, Oregon

Clear strategy. Teams that can carry it out.

I help Central Oregon businesses decide where they are going, then build the leadership teams that get them there.

Schedule a conversation See how I work

Why owners call

Most companies do not have a strategy problem. They have a decision problem.

We wrote a plan. Nobody has looked at it since.

Plans die when they are written to satisfy a board meeting instead of settling an argument. If your plan avoided the real disagreement, your team already knows it, and that is why they stopped reading.

Everyone agrees in the room, then nothing moves.

Agreement in a meeting is often just conflict postponed. When roles, authority, and tradeoffs are left vague, people leave with different pictures of what was decided and no way to discover the gap until it costs you.

We grew, and now nothing works the way it used to.

The habits that got you to twenty employees will not carry you to eighty. Founders usually feel this a year before they can name it, and the fix is structural rather than motivational.

Services

Three ways I work with organizations.

Strategic planning and facilitation

We work out where the organization is actually going and what it will stop doing to get there. You end with a short, specific plan your team wrote, argued over, and will use.

6 to 10 weeks
3 to 5 working sessions
On site in Central Oregon

Leadership and founding teams

Roles, decision rights, and the disagreement nobody wants to name. I have spent twenty years studying why capable teams stall, and most of the time the cause is fixable and unglamorous.

Half day or full day offsite
Confidential interviews first
Follow up across 60 days

Growth and new venture decisions

A new market, a new line, an acquisition, a bet the company cannot easily reverse. I bring structure and outside judgment to the analysis so the decision rests on something firmer than optimism.

3 to 4 weeks
Focused analysis and options
Written recommendation

How an engagement runs

You should know what buying this feels like.

01   Listen

Confidential interviews

I talk with you and with your people separately. What leadership believes is happening and what the floor believes is happening are rarely the same story.

02   Name it

I tell you what I heard

Including the part nobody says out loud. This is the meeting clients find uncomfortable and later describe as the moment things changed.

03   Decide

Facilitated working sessions

Real tradeoffs, made by your team, with me keeping the conversation honest and on the clock. I do not decide for you and I will not let the group avoid the hard item.

04   Hand off

A plan you own

Short, written, with named owners and dates. I check back at 30 and 90 days because plans fail in month two, not month one.

Selected engagements

Where I have done this before.

Western Energy Alliance

Developed organizational vision and a multiyear strategic plan for a regional trade association.

2020 – 2022

Salem Area Trail Alliance

Strategic planning for a volunteer led nonprofit, including mission and vision development.

2018

Genentech

Mixed methods survey analysis and recommendations for a multibillion dollar workplace and innovation initiative at the South San Francisco campus.

2015 – 2016

Willamette University Angel Fund

Executive Director of a student run investment fund, evaluating and advising early stage Oregon ventures.

2019 – 2023

Who you would be working with

Before I studied organizations, I ran them.

I spent a decade as an Air Force officer doing work that punishes wishful thinking. I managed a twenty two person team and an eleven million dollar budget building mobile command centers for NORAD, led an eleven person finance operation responsible for budgets over one hundred million dollars, and built a two billion dollar cost estimate for the Air Force's most advanced family of radars.

Then I went to the University of Virginia for a doctorate and spent twenty years asking a narrower question: why do capable people, with good information and real commitment, still make bad organizational decisions together? I have studied founding partnerships that dissolve, leadership teams that mistake confidence for competence, and how organizations decide anything at all when nobody has enough information.

I live in Bend. I work with businesses and nonprofits across Central Oregon and the Northwest, usually with owners and executive directors who already suspect what the problem is and want an outsider willing to say it plainly.

Bill Forster, founder of Terebinth Consulting
Bill Forster Founder  ·  Bend, Oregon
  • Ph.D., Business AdministrationUniversity of Virginia, Darden School of Business
  • Associate Professor of Entrepreneurship and StrategyOregon State University, Bend
  • Editor, Journal of Business VenturingPsychology and Entrepreneurship
  • M.B.A. and M.S., Cost AnalysisUniversity of Colorado; Air Force Institute of Technology
  • B.S., ManagementUnited States Air Force Academy
  • Meritorious Service MedalUnited States Air Force

Start here

A conversation costs you an hour.

Tell me what is stuck. If I am the right person for it, I will tell you how I would approach it and what it would cost. If I am not, I will usually know someone who is.

bill@terebinthconsulting.com LinkedIn