Gina Gardner
Gina Gardner is a highly effective consultative professional with decades of success in all manners of performance improvement, change management and consulting. Comfortable and effective dealing with high-level business issues in the boardroom as well as working at the detail level designing, building, managing and measuring the effectiveness of solutions, she delivers the business results expected by stakeholders.
Prior to joining Sphere PR Group as a Partner, Gina was the Strategic Director of Growth and Development for Flexan Inc./FMI Inc., a family-owned group of manufacturing firms based in Chicago and Souzhou China. Working as a member of the executive team, she was responsible for growth strategy, culture change, training and development, and human capital. During her tenure she led the company in five years from a $10 million valuation to a $100 million sale to private equity.
Prior to her tenure at Flexan/FMI, she was a contract consultant for Time Warner Cable, where she was recruited to be the lead architect, instructional designer and project manager for change management and employee development around customer experience, sales, customer care, and new products. Her work was responsible for 67–125% in measurable revenue increase, and a 2007 ATSD Excellence in Practice Citation.
At Veolia Environment, a $50 billion dollar global environmental services provider, Gina developed their North American Learning Campus, including communications, processes and systems, and training implementation. While there, she developed a program of strategic collaboration for national division presidents, who credited her work with $18 million in shared leads and $7 million in immediate new sales following their first session working with her.
At AchieveGlobal, now part of Korn Ferry, Gina began as a top-rated trainer before becoming a Senior Custom Project Manager, where she handled the most complex and mission-critical projects. For a large insurance client, she managed across-the-board sales process training, working with vendors and a variety of client project managers on a $1.4M project. The client’s Senior VP pronounced it “the best training they ever had.” Gina was responsible for all aspects of training delivery for the Midwest division, including staff selection and supervision, profit/loss responsibility and operations. She led an overhaul of all processes associated with this function, leading to greatly increased customer and employee satisfaction, increased profitability and reduced cycle time.
As a private practice performance improvement consultant, she has worked with clients of all sizes and industries. One exceptional program she developed was an innovative and specialized training for first-time leaders, delivering on-the-job training and real-time results for a consortium of a dozen leading corporations (including Motorola, Owens Corning and Levi Strauss).
Trained as a clinical psychologist at the University of Kansas, Gina left prior to her dissertation to work for the IT Division of United Airlines in training and development.
