We produce optimal outcomes for agencies.
Lodestar partners with agency leadership teams to focus, simplify, and scale their firm’s business model to improve their financial performance and organizational health. We do this through positioning strategy, productization, and operating model design. Our clients achieve stronger new business success, scalable revenue, and sustainable growth.
Driven by 20+ year agency leader Brian Kessman, we give you the compass, plan, and tools to reinvent your agency in today’s rapidly-evolving business world. Based in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, we partner with clients globally.
why we do this work
Did you know that most agencies still rely on organizational strategies, structures, and management philosophies that date back to 1911?!
During the 2nd Industrial Revolution, Fredrick Winslow Taylor published The Principles of Scientific Management. His work was cutting edge at the time. Filled with efficiency-driven practices, most companies still unknowingly apply his thinking today to scale their businesses simply because “it’s always been done this way.” But his practices were designed for manufacturing during a stable, slow-moving, predictable world - not for creative service businesses in a world with disruptive technology, social media, and unpredictable consumer behaviors.
You, as agencies that support your client's brands, need to be able to make fast decisions and respond quickly to market opportunities or crisis. And with technology, it’s much easier to share information and collaborate in real-time, so the traditional ways of working are not as valuable as they once were. It's just the opposite, if they're too slow they work against you.
Brian experienced these challenges firsthand over 20+ years working for brand strategy, interactive, product, and full-service agencies across the United States. In 2016, he founded Lodestar to help agencies reinvent themselves.
I did everything from manage large-scale digital projects from inception to completion to building and scaling digital teams and services as a growth-focused executive leader. Across my career, I’ve helped agencies steer away from 100+ year-old controlling hierarchies and slow inward-focused silos to instead navigate toward strategies, structures, and management practices that promote cross-functional collaboration for greater integrated thinking and faster delivery of work to clients.
That’s why I founded Lodestar: to prepare you for a future that won’t get stuck in the past.
It’s why I’m always studying the future of work and refining our Agency Wayfinder™ approach to bring clarity, speed, adaptability, and profitability across your agency’s entire operating model. With this holistic, flexible approach, you can rethink, reimagine, and redesign. You can finally uncover hidden blind spots, solve elusive blocks, become more adaptable as a business, and lift your agency and its people to an entirely new level of growth.
Because what got you here won’t get you to the horizon you’re heading for. It’s tough to know where to start introducing change when everyone’s been doing the same thing for over a century. So, we’ll help you leave “business as usual” in the past where it belongs.
If you need to find your best “next” practices and an expert strategic guide to help you put them into action, we’ve got you covered.
Brian Kessman | Founder + Principal Consultant
Meet with Brian
Get to know
brian kessman
As the founder + principal consultant behind Lodestar Agency Consulting, Brian Kessman believes your best work is on the horizon, but it will take new strategies and nimble ways of working to get there.
Brian developed our innovative Agency Wayfinder™ approach over 20+ years as a leader at brand strategy, interactive, product, and full-service agencies across the United States. He is a sought-after speaker for major industry associations and conferences including the 4As, AMIN Worldwide, TAAN Worldwide, Worldwide Partners, MAGNET Global, Mirren Live, the Bureau of Digital. Brian is also a past judge of the Favorite Website Awards (the FWA).
Brian currently lives in Chapel Hill, NC with his wife, 3 kids, and 3 dogs.