To be perfectly honest, the story of OnwardU’s success is really the story of “The Happy Accident.”
You see, many years ago, the firm’s founder and owner of our sister company, Ward, a leading communications consultancy, began to question how she could deliver more value to clients undertaking significant initiatives like branding and crisis preparedness, and help them overcome and weak communication skills that were undermining their goals – and eroding her own joy on the job.
As a result, she began training to become a professional facilitator with the intent to embark on a second career. But with a healthy, well-established and respected firm robust with client contracts and walls of awards, she instead found herself applying her meeting facilitation skills to address client issues, with exceptional results.
Seeing the consistent impact on clients’ businesses, she and her team began to design facilitated sessions to address the most common but onerous issues for which clients turned to the firm:
The result? Systematic, proven processes that cause organizations to achieve results in a fraction of the time and cost they’d spent with internal task forces or long-term, expensive management consulting firms.
Before long, the facilitated sessions and communications skills workshops were an integral part of most client engagements. Yet, prospects often had a difficult time hearing the message from a communications firm they related to as what they knew from their past experiences of PR and marketing firms. Thus, OnwardU was born….with its own P&L, brand story and systems and processes to ensure its independently sustainable success.
Today the two wholly-owned sister companies work hand-in-hand to effect meaningful results internally and externally for client organizations, reinforcing the work of one another for a holistic program that brings the unique skillsets of each company to bear for the client’s benefit.