
Laura Richard
Principal
“Companies today are being challenged to deliver value beyond profit to create value for all stakeholders: customers, employees, partners and society. Profiting through purpose requires brands to define their promise to stakeholders, which is where I step in: I help clients embed purpose through their business system in a way that guides every decision made in their organization.”
Professional Bio
Laura Richard is a Principal at Level5 Strategy where she helps clients boost profit by integrating brand purpose across all aspects of their business system.
She accomplishes this by supporting clients in defining their brand purpose and identifying how their assets and competencies can be uniquely leveraged as differentiators. By embedding purpose, she ensures that companies consistently keep their promise to customers, which drives growth and leads to sustainable profit. Through Level5’s transformation practice, Laura helps clients to identify the important moments of truth within stakeholder experiences to orient the organization around its purpose and facilitate decision making through this lens.
Laura recognizes that transformation often requires new assets, capabilities and stakeholder access. She applies deep experience and expertise in partnership design and management to help her clients create partnership ecosystems that leverage mutual value exchange to deliver on broad organizational objectives.
At Level5 Strategy, Laura is responsible for delivering actionable insights that generate favourable outcomes in the following areas:
- Business and strategic planning
- Brand positioning and innovation
- Strategy implementation
- Organization culture
- Executive and team facilitation
- Partnership frameworks, negotiations and management
Laura is dedicated to the betterment of her community. She is a Co-Founder and Member of the Board of Donate Life Canada, a not-for-profit organization that has created a national organ and tissue registry set to launch this year. She also sits on the Board for ParticipACTION, a national charity dedicated to encouraging Canadians to sit less and move more.
In the spirit of wellness, Laura loves spending her free time outdoors. Her lifelong passion is equestrian sport and she has become an avid sailor, often finding her way onto the racecourse with her husband and friends.
Previous Experience
Laura built her expertise in a range of roles that enabled her to empower clients and grow companies she worked for.
Her career highlights include the following:
- As Co-Founder and Managing Partner of boutique consultancy TACK10 Strategy, Laura developed a new area of service within the national food banking system. Delivered in partnership with KPMG, the system resulted in tax benefits of $1 million that were directed to Canadians living below the poverty line.
- As an early employee of Free The Children, she developed the organization’s corporate partnership and institutional fundraising strategy that lead to a 218% increase of portfolio value over a two-year period.
- At Lang Partnerships Network, Laura met Metrolinx’s foundational business objectives through a strategic partnership model that delivered over four times the target revenue.
Education
Laura received her Honours BSc from York University, graduating Summa Cum Laude.