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Julie Gilbert is the CEO of Full Throttle Growth & Capital leveraging her 25-year plus global proven CEO and Fortune 50 business growth senior executive as a successful global serial technology entrepreneur currently partnering with Fortune 500, select private equity and family office, and start-ups globally to design and execute accelerated growth and operational efficiencies to exit, stock accretion, and/or IPO in each portfolio company including full AI reviews and also C-suite talent and board composition.
She most recently served at McKinsey & Company as a Partner and CEO-in-residence designing, building and scaling new disruptive growth businesses in heritage clients. She was the most distinguished and experienced CEO-in-residence also shaping and building their business building capability globally.
She previously was at Best Buy as the Senior Vice President of Growth, Julie’s impact was immediate and remains impactful to the organization. She was instrumental in leading the design and build of Magnolia Home Theater, transforming it into a flagship offering, scaling it to 365 stores along with the creation of the first company-owned higher-end design, installation, and delivery service business. These both significantly enhanced Best Buy’s market position and remain so. Her efforts keenly contributed to Best Buy’s revenue growth—from $15 billion to $45 billion— during her tenure. Julie also spearheaded the creation of Virgin Mobile, marking both the industry’s first prepaid phone ("burner phone") and Best Buy’s first joint venture which soon after inception launched on NASDAQ. She also built the first strategic alliance capability for the Best Buy organization. She played a pivotal role in transforming the company’s approach to target the female demographic leading the company transformation to the female customer with the innovative creation and global execution of WOLF, leading to an incremental revenue of $4.4 billion as well as many powerful positive cultural changes. Furthermore, Julie led a comprehensive reinvention of the company-wide sales training and digital ecommerce marketing with a customer-human-focused approach. This included the creation and launch of the “Learning Lounge” Technology Learning Platform, which boosted engagement by 18% as well as her leading the company-wide retail leadership forum career development capability.
From there, Julie then founded two impactful businesses independently, Wolf Means Business and PreciouStatus.AI. Wolf was a global strategy and business building and growth consulting firm; it served a diverse client base globally ranging from private start-ups to Fortune 50 companies building significant growth top-line and bottom. It excelled in driving business expansion into new segments, regional territories globally and facilitating turnaround growth for heritage brands, significantly enhancing stock valuations and overall business performance across five continents.
PreciouStatus.AI, a ‘first of it’s kind’ new technology company, was Julie’s vision she designed, founded, and led, a venture that quickly set a new standard for global SaaS companies. Julie’s leadership developed B2B2C business models within the consumer and healthcare sectors, introducing two distinct encrypted software platforms and apps. These platforms, equipped with large data lakes, AI-driven back-end monetization engines, and applications for a variety of use-cases and sectors, catered to users in 178 countries, enabling private provider-to-consumer communication. PreciouStatus, recognized for its award-winning, AI-enabled, mobile encrypted technology, achieved a successful exit, marking another milestone in Julie’s career.
She has been selected and presented numerous global awards for her leadership and growth outcomes including the Top 100 People to Know, Top Woman in Tech, Huffington Posts Entrepreneur Award, Top Innovator of the year award, top employee leadership awards, winner of the MN CUP business and technology competition and also had the privilege of being presented Best Buy's Chairman's Award as the Top Leader in the organization personally by the company founder, former CEO, and Chairman of Best Buy, Dick Schulze.
She is repeatedly tapped to architect and lead growth turnarounds, agile reinventions, and enterprise digital business growth transformations with a strong direct to consumer business model and cultural inclusion expansions for Fortune 500 B2C and B2B organizations and start-ups. She has led company strategy and transformations in technology, healthcare, retail, financial services, entertainment, health and wellness, consumer products, financial services and banking, education, services, distribution, and agriculture. In each, she leverages technology for speed, scale, connection, and intelligence and am an expert in direct to consumer and artificial intelligence.
She began her professional career at the Big 4 firm, Deloitte in the corporate tax department and soon creating her first software program in the M&A and tax classification area (at 22 years old). In addition to serving Office of the Chairman accounts in corporate tax matters, she also innovated and collaborated to scale a tax reclassification business, and working on the Office of the Chairman accounts.
Honored to be an Aspen Institute Henry Crown Fellow, she is also a frequent TED keynote speaker and highly sought-after global keynote speaker by Fortune 500 and global organizations.
Board service has been a key part of Julie's leadership as serves as Vice Chairman of the Asbury Communities board also serving as the Strategy Committee leader and past service as the Governance and Compliance Committee leader, and Audit committee. She serves on the board of Hypathia Capital and is an advisor for Amateras Capital. She is board Trustee for the University of Minnesota. . She previously served for 6 years on the St. Thomas University School of Business Schulze School of Entrepreneurship board, private equity boards, Harvard Business Kennedy Women's Board, Child Neurology Foundation, and others.
Julie is a Governance Fellow with National Association of Corporate Directors.
She is a mother to wonderful son, she is a passionate music and audiophile, nature-lover, nutrition/food connoisseur, & competitive athlete and former competitive ballroom dancer.
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