Winning starts with a solid business strategy that builds a sustainable competitive advantage. Without clarity on your overall direction that matches your capabilities, it is hard to accomplish your growth aspirations.
When launching a new product or entering a new market, you need a growth strategy that supports your overall business goals. Your target market, value proposition, and commercial activities must be 100% aligned.
As an entrepreneur, you must excel as a leader and as a manager. To deliver results, you must create a mission, define a strategy, and lead a team. Most importantly, you must build trust with your team and collaborators.
Holistic Approach to Business Growth
Sustainable venture creation and scaling requires a holistic approach. Your mission, growth aspirations, strategy, tactics, people, systems, and leadership must be in alignment to reach your destination.
You are the true expert in your domain and business. We will work together to augment your knowledge with our lessons learned over decades in high-tech environments to help you see how each element of your business model fit into the big picture.
We partner with founders and leadership teams to provide insight and support along your entrepreneurial journey.
Big-picture Strategy
Strategy is about choice. A successful strategy ensures that your chosen customer segment, value proposition, core capabilities, enabling systems, and leadership approach are all in sync and add up to a competitive advantage that will realize your mission.
We can help evaluate your current strategy and craft new ones by using proven frameworks and tools that align with your situation and lifecycle stage.
Our mission is not just to help formulate strategy for your company; it is to make sure you build internal strategic capability for sustainable success over time.
We can help with:​
- Business Diagnosis & Strategy Review
- Business Strategy Formulation & Implementation
- Business Model Assessment & Improvement
- Internal Strategy Capability & Process Development
Focused Growth
In complex B2B, you need to focus your growth initiatives on what matters most to your customers and end users and solve for customer value at multiple levels.
Your marketing and bizdev activities must be appropriate for your growth phase and type of market -- introducing an improved product to existing customers is radically different from launching a new product in a new market.
We will partner with you to formulate and implement winning GTM strategies that align with your overall big-picture goals.
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We can help with:​
- Early Stage Customer Development
- Market Segmentation & Value Proposition Design
- GTM and Growth Strategy
- New Market Development & US Market Entry
Entrepreneurial Leadership
Company strategy can't be disconnected from leadership. Why? Because business is conducted by people -- and leadership is the ability to guide and influence a group of people towards achieving a common goal.
Leadership is about setting a vision, motivating team members, making decisions, and fostering collaboration. Leading people effectively is needed for creating and implementing your strategy and growth initiatives.
The foundation for successful leadership is TRUST. We have been there ourselves and are happy to advise, support, and encourage you in 1:1 coaching partnership and team engagements to grow both you and your venture.
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We can help with:
- 1:1 Coaching & Mentoring: Trust, Leadership & Management
- Team Leadership Development
- Founder Toolbox: Fundraising & Running Your Company
- Start-up Journey: Search -- Build -- Grow Transition
Based in Seattle, WA, I spent my early career in the automotive industry (SAAB) and consulting, followed by sales & marketing, operations, and general management positions in VR/AR, Medical Simulation, and Medical Robotics. Over the years, I have developed a strong passion for entrepreneurship, strategy, business models, commercial operations, and partnership building.
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I enjoy working in entrepreneurial, diverse, and collaborative environments. Rauk Strategy was formed to help bring big-picture strategic thinking, combined with effective leadership, to small and entrepreneurial companies.
I have a M.Sc. in Industrial Design Engineering from Luleå Technical University in Sweden and an MBA (Technology Management) from the University of Washington.
Background & Experience
At Surgical Science, I led day-to-day operations at the industry-leading medical simulation company's $50M, 50+ people US subsidiary. As a trusted business development executive, I partnered with companies like Johnson & Johnson, Verb Surgical (Google/Ethicon owned), Medtronic, and Kawasaki Robotics on joint development of customized simulation and training solutions.
At Rauk Strategy, I advised LN Robotics, an early-stage vascular robotics company based in South Korea. While consulting in Sweden, I worked with early-stage companies in encryption platforms, medical simulation, and autonomous drones for mapping of underground mines.
Entrepreneurial Journey
After working for one of the biggest companies in the world (GM/SAAB) and as a consultant in government growth policy, I have spent most of my career in start-ups and growth-stage companies. At EON Reality, we created one of the first commercial VR platforms, and at ReachIn Technologies, we pioneered a co-located haptic and graphic "workbench" that I sold to early adopters, including NASA and Chevron.
At Mimic Technologies, as employee #4 and a member of the management team, I conceptualized and helped bring to market the first robotic surgery skills simulator, the dV Trainer, creating a new category in medical simulation. I forged partnerships with medical universities, hospitals, and medical device companies to bring this innovation to market. We partnered with Intuitive Surgical to ideate and develop the da Vinci Skills Simulator, now the worldwide standard for training in robot-assisted surgery.
We grew Mimic to 40+ people and $10M+ in revenue. I was responsible for setting up our distributors in Europe, Asia, and Latin America, then transitioning into operations and finance as COO. Mimic was acquired by Surgical Science in 2021.
How we work together
We don’t try to sell you on a new strategy system or marketing framework. We utilize proven frameworks and tools that are well-documented, allowing you to develop your own strategic and marketing capabilities along the way.
We offer a flexible engagement model that includes shorter and longer term projects, retainers, and fractional services (CEO, COO, CMO, CSO, CRO) tailored to your specific needs.
A great way to get started is with a short-duration gap analysis to uncover the problems and opportunities that should be addressed to decrease the gap between where you are today and where you want to be in the future -- your winning aspiration.
Let's chat!
Do you have a particular challenge you’re trying to deal with? Contact us today to explore how we can work together on your big-picture business challenge!
- Holistic Strategy
- Focused Growth
- Entrepreneurial Leadership
Please send an email to jan@raukstrategy.com or use form below. Let's collaborate!