Strategic clarity for leadership facing complexity, disruption, and uncertainty
Strategy breaks down when leadership teams cannot say what is actually true.
Customized Strategies
Every business is unique, and so are our strategies—tailored to align deeply with your long-term goals and values.
Proactive Exit Planning
We anticipate market trends and prepare your business for a lucrative and timely exit, ensuring you leave on your terms.
Legacy and Succession Planning
From identifying successors to guiding a process that yields the desired outcomes, we ensure your vision endures and thrives.
What strategic advisory looked like inside one of North America's largest staffing companies
What brutal honesty made possible for a leadership team under pressure
Comprehensive Business Services
At First Generation Advisors, we advise CEOs and leadership teams in complex organizations facing pressure, disruption, and high-consequence decisions. We help clarify strategic direction, strengthen the candor and alignment needed to face reality together, and translate strategy into disciplined execution. Our work is especially valuable when growth, change, or market pressure has exposed barriers that can no longer be managed through planning alone. While we also support select lower middle market and family organizations with exit planning, succession, and M&A advisory, our core focus is helping leadership teams build the clarity, trust, and discipline required to move forward with confidence and create long-term value.
Trusted by Leading Companies
How We Work
Real progress happens through a disciplined cycle of clarity, alignment, action, and results.
Surface the real issues, pressures, and strategic choices facing the business
Assess progress, challenge assumptions, and adapt as conditions change.
Clarify
Results
Align
Commit
Build the candor, trust, and shared understanding leadership needs to move forward together.
Translate direction into clear priorities, decisions, and ownership.
Strategy & Leadership Intensives
A focused setting for leadership teams to step back, assess the state of the organization, and gain needed clarity and alignment. We’ll create the space for honest dialogue, sharpen priorities, and surface the insights required to move forward with confidence.
Exit Planning?
Download our free self-assessment on whether your business is ready for exit.
OUR CLIENT STORIES
Stoller Wine Group
Rick was brought in to add guidance and a seasoned perspective in addressing the required leadership and cultural reset in the organization.
Cascade Engineering
Dirk needed a thinking partner to grapple with the larger issues the success of his company was creating. “It was getting beyond my ability to manage all of the complexities; to see the forest through the trees,” Ellis said. “That’s a big part of what I was looking for; someone who could help me keep the big picture in sight.”
Lenity Architecture
Lenity seemed to be stabilized and even growing, however, they felt that outside expertise was needed to provide guidance to ensure their key decisions on how to scale the business were sound. Having never hired outside consulting before, they soon found out how challenging it can be to find the right resource.
LifeLast
Whether it had to do with their motives, cost, or incompatibility, he was not finding the right consultant to help further the business. He wanted an advisor who was “interested in learning who we were — without an agenda.” After witnessing some of Rick’s work first-hand with another organization, Buratto decided to engage Rick Thomas to assist LifeLast.
Provenance Chain Network
Provenance Chain Network (PCN) was landing federal deals with its leading-edge technology and brilliant team. However, as a fully remote company, the lack of proximity led to fractured emotional investment and a breakdown of trust between key executives. Internal friction was costing them the speed they couldn't afford to lose, requiring them to seek outside expertise to re-anchor their culture.
Express Employment Professionals
Express Employment Professionals is one of the largest staffing firms in North America. When Bob Funk Jr. stepped into the CEO role, he faced a labor market evolving faster than the company's strategic planning could keep up. He brought in Rick Thomas to challenge legacy assumptions, facilitate leadership alignment, and hold the executive team accountable to a longer-term vision. The results reshaped how Express thinks about strategy.
TESTIMONIALS
Kind words from great business owners
“Rick has been our sounding board through each phase of the transition, and he has a rich historical context for how we got to that next stage. I don’t think that you can underestimate the value of that.”
- Gary Mortensen, President, Stoller Wine Group
“Choose Rick if you’re willing to look critically at yourself, your team, and your company... you’ll be able to move forward with a clear, actionable plan to accomplish your goals.”
- Jeff Buratto, CEO of Life Last, Inc
“Rick quickly builds trust and easily works within all report levels of our organization. His experience and third party insights bring focus to our discussions, energy to our initiatives, and accountability to our performance.”
- Anne Donovan, President, XeniumHR
