What's your hunch about your biggest growth opportunity?

Capitalizing on future trends
Streamlining processes
Product innovation
Customer impact
Leader & talent management
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About the Founder

In 2008, Andrea Kates created the Business Genome process to synthesize the insights she acquired during over fifteen years and 250 projects as founding principal with SUMA Partners, a consulting firm specializing in innovative approaches to business growth.

Kates learned that the best ideas for what to do next combined the ability to analyze data from a company's own industry, adjacent industries, as well as future trends and long-tail, emerging market data. She believes that implementation succeeds based on responsiveness, and too much focus on prediction or studying only historic data to find a new business opportunity isn't the best way to adapt to a changing market.

According to Kates, the traditional approach to driving growth hits a wall until you start to explore adjacent opportunities. For example, if a company's currently producing a surfactant for cleaning pipelines and the product becomes a commodity, where would its customers find more value (i.e. handling the entire pipeline maintenance operation)? And, how does the company systematically sift through possibilities to land on the best approach? The evolution of data analysis tools that can sort through information in new ways (search, tags, visual scanning) has allowed for the creation of an approach to business modeling that can generate prototype concepts quickly and can lead to killer results much faster than ever before.

Kates conceptualized the genomic approach to business, based on the understanding that each business has a history, a philosophy, a progressive series of business models, a corporate culture, a market sweet spot, and unique approaches to distribution and product development. This represents the "business genome" of each company. The Business Genome engine makes comparisons across different regions of this "business genome" to find specific gene clusters that are more likely to lead to success.

Kates specializes in data analysis and strategic market research that identifies new possibilities for revenue growth:

• Should you focus on offering the same products and services to the same market or shift to a new approach?
• Where are your untapped market opportunities?
• Which dashboards will tell the story?
• Which trends matter?
• How do you drive implementation?
• What leads to the biggest yield?
• How can you align your core stakeholders and drive toward a high-impact strategy?

Kates has led more than 250 strategic projects since 1989. She collaborated with industry leaders (Royal Dutch Shell, Humana, Audi, KPMG, Hewlett-Packard) and entrepreneurs to produce and present innovative "road shows" with partners like Yankelovich, Fast Company and the Futures Forum that feature rapid prototyping of business strategy. She is on the advisory boards of MagNet, a Los Angeles-based technology company, Phix, a Seattle-based consumer health company, and Soaring Ventures, a Bay Area high tech venture group, and is a member of TED, a global community dedicated to innovation in Technology, Entertainment, and Design.

Partial Commercial Client List
Audi of America (value proposition), Blue Lance (entrepreneurial growth), Brinker International (EatZi's concept development), Houston Texans (NFL franchise), ERGOS (entrepreneurial expansion), Hewlett-Packard (customer responsiveness), Humana (strategic trends), Hyatt Hotels (revenue growth), JPMorgan Chase (product portfolio), Johnson & Johnson (global logistics), KPMG (market expansion), Memorial Hermann Healthcare System (new markets), Royal Dutch Shell (global customer metrics), XO Communications (market expansion and profitability)

Partial Non-Profit Client List
Susan G. Komen Foundation, Greater Houston Partnership, Dallas County, Hispanic Chamber of Commerce, Menil Collection, United Way, Urban Research Center at Rice University