Who we are

First River’s partners are James Moss and Tony Taccone. We have for many years been ably supported by Jessica Wagner who is our representative in Europe.

We work in capital intensive industries, like steel, aluminum, pharmaceuticals, and paper. We each have over 20 years of strategy consulting experience. We’ve consulted on some of the most complex restructuring projects in any North American industrial context. In addition, we’ve worked in South America, Europe, and Asia. We are strategy consultants. We help businesses, specifically their senior managers, improve competitive performance by getting them focused around a clear and coherent strategy. If you want to know what this means to us go here. But in a nutshell, we help businesses make and implement better strategies because we believe competitive advantage is the critical factor to achieving profitable growth.

Strategy is the only thing we do. We’re entirely focused on the difficulties of developing and implementing it successfully. Our work covers the whole strategy process, from developing insights into your business and how you could compete more effectively, to helping you work through the organizational changes required to realize it. In practical terms, this means we help you do three things.

First, we help you make sense of all kinds of information to clarify your current strategic situation and to generate options for the future. Most strategy consultants do this. Second, we facilitate the tough group decision-making process required to produce clear and motivating strategies. Many of them leave this part out. Finally, we help you through the initial implementation steps, including ways to keep the strategy current. Most strategy consultants completely ignore this.

Our approach is distinctive. It’s meant to change how you think about strategy and how you act to make it work – immediately. We do so by keeping you, rather than us, at the center of the process and by working the issues that have the most leverage. You’ll notice a few things as soon as we start talking. For instance:

• We’ll take great care to understand exactly the problem you’re trying to solve and how our involvement can help you solve it.
• We’ll insist that you commit senior people to active roles on the project team.
• We’ll focus on changing the way you and others in your organization act today to achieve competitive advantage – instead of producing a dense report that you’re not going to read.
• And finally, we’ll keep you focused on taking strategic actions that you have the resources and capability to implement now – even while you’re building for the future. It’s the tension between where you are and where you want to go that creates the energy to implement the strategy.