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Jared Navarre did not set out to be a consultant. As a serial entrepreneur and multidisciplinary founder, he has focused on launching, scaling, and exiting ventures across the IT, logistics, entertainment, and service industries. But as his reputation as a creative strategist grew, business leaders facing complex challenges began seeking him out.
“I never went out soliciting consulting work because I never planned on being a consultant,” Navarre admits. “Yet I found myself oscillating between building companies and helping other founders because they kept asking for support when everything was going sideways.”
Navarre eventually formalized the consulting work he was doing by founding Keyni Consulting, a company that specializes in creating operational clarity for organizations in flux. The company has completed more than 650 consulting projects for businesses worldwide, including global corporations such as Reebok, Capital One, and HCA Healthcare.
The work Navarre and his team do for organizations revolves around five key differentiators that enable them to go beyond surface-level advice and engineer solutions that build bulletproof businesses. The following explores Keyni Consulting’s differentiators in more detail.
Consulting built on first-hand experience
Not only has Navarre been in the trenches, but he continues to move through them each day. As a business owner operating companies of various sizes across multiple industries, he can provide guidance that is relevant to the challenges and opportunities evolving in the current business landscape.
“Founders seek me out because they know I walk in their shoes every day,” Navarre says. “I don’t just teach frameworks. I preach what I practice on my own dime and with my own payroll and reputation on the line.”
The first-hand and up-to-date experience Navarre and his team bring to their clients is especially valuable in an age when ready access to artificial intelligence is reshaping consulting. Navarre warns business leaders that while AI can provide tons of information, it has zero grasp of human nuance.
“AI can’t account for timing, market dynamics, psychology, unspoken team dynamics, or the unique personalities running the business,” Navarre says. “It can give you the map, but it can’t tell you which cliff is hidden under the trees. A good consultant has to switch between every C-suite hat and then put on the psychologist hat — sometimes in the same meeting. AI isn’t close to that.”
Consulting that provides holistic, multi-disciplinary guidance
Because Navarre continues to serve as a business leader, he’s intimately familiar with the complexity and interconnectedness of modern business operations. Consequently, he knows that effective consulting needs to be cross-functional.
“If you plotted a typical small business on the wall like a murder board, there wouldn’t be enough yarn to show all the interconnected nodes,” Navarre explains. “A marketing problem is usually an operations problem. A revenue problem is often a product problem. A growth problem is usually a team or psychology problem.”
To address the interconnectedness, Navarre and his team look at the whole business — systems, people, and processes — to ensure everything is aligned in a way that drives results. They believe advice that isn’t tailored to the entire ecosystem is often worse than no advice at all.
Consulting that is embedded, not extracted
Navarre asserts that business doesn’t happen on the slide deck. Rather, he believes it is built around the friction and tension that happens in hallways and other quiet places. His consulting happens from the inside out, with his team becoming a temporary extension of the companies they serve so they can have an insider perspective.
“When consultants stay outside the fishbowl, they miss the people, the momentum, the misunderstandings, the hidden inefficiencies, the unpaid invoices tucked behind someone’s monitor,” Navarre shares. “We jump in with the team, get our hands dirty, and see the organism from the inside. That’s how we uncover the real roadblocks and design solutions that actually take hold.”
Consulting that is a perfect fit
While business concepts may be universal, the way in which they must be applied in a company’s specific setting is unique. If solutions are not built to fit the size, stage, and ambition of a company, they can just add to the frustration.
“Business is more art and psychology than people give it credit for,” Navarre says. “There are principles that apply broadly, but real solutions require real interpretation. Your solution has to be unique to your situation, your timing, your team, your customers, and your competition. Templates can’t do that.”
Consulting that is grounded in business goals
The business landscape is evolving at a rapid pace, making it difficult for leaders to see a clear pathway to long-term success. Navarre helps his clients to avoid confusion by keeping them focused on impactful solutions that align with their business goals.
“Trends are just noise dressed as strategy, whereas goals are direction,” Navarre says. “A solution that isn’t aligned with what the owner actually wants — their life, their mission, their version of success — is just a distraction.”
Becoming bulletproof requires more than just information and insights. Business resilience emerges when companies unearth the type of strategies that turn insight into momentum.
“Business leaders who want to thrive need solutions that allow them to weave their people, processes, tools, and goals into something coherent,” Navarre says. “That’s what we give them. We don’t just analyze. We fix, build, and improve.”
Also read: 10 Commandments of Entrepreneurship: A Guide to Building and Running a Successful Company
Image source: Jared Navarre
