As a member of leadership teams at industry pioneers in long-distance telecommunications, cellular telephony, and Internet consulting, Nikki Fisher has learned through hands-on experience what it means to be at the center of the high-tech/high-growth whirlwind. As a result, she brings to the High-Growth CEO a unique ability to provide practical insight and support to CEOs striving to build not only fast-growing but also sustainable and profitable enterprises.
For the past eight years, Fisher has been president of The Fisher Group Consulting, LLC, where she specializes in helping high-tech companies grow profitably by improving the customer focus and integration of their sales, marketing, and service functions. Strategic projects include helping a global technology company develop the vision and plans to transform itself from a product to a services/solutions business; helping a software start-up use deep customer research to determine its next breakout product; and coaching a CEO and his team to successfully bring a 30-year-old direct-marketing company online.
Fisher began her career as employee #379 at an upstart company called MCI where, after writing the company’s first annual reports, Congressional testimony, and marketing materials, she led the in-house litigation support group for MCI’s antitrust suit against AT&T. After the initial suit was won, she was asked to lead the interdisciplinary team that created MCI’s first cellular applications to the FCC, then became the company’s first female VP, heading marketing, customer service, procurement, human resources, and IT for MCI’s newly formed paging and cellular subsidiary.
After nearly ten years at MCI — during which time the company grew from $6 million in revenue to $3.6 billion — Fisher was recruited to become a member of the leadership team at Sprint’s startup cellular venture. There, after turning around an ailing sales organization, she was tapped by the CEO to lead all customer service and operations support.
After three years in the cellular subsidiary, Fisher joined Sprint’s $6 billion business-to-business, long-distance division where, as a vice president in corporate marketing, she implemented industry-leading processes and systems in sales compensation and database marketing. In 1995, at the height of the “long-distance wars,” Fisher was named president of a skunkworks start-up that established Sprint’s first non-branded reseller of long-distance services to small businesses.
In 1996, Fisher joined another startup — IT services pioneer Sapient. Over the next three years, as the company grew from $49 million to $276 million in revenue, she established the first marketing, strategic planning, and alliance functions. As chief marketing officer, she was also a critical player in the company’s highly successful efforts to rebrand itself as a full-service Internet consulting firm.
Fisher graduated cum laude with a BA in English from the University of Missouri and has completed executive education courses at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania and the Darden School at the University of Virginia. Although she has lived in a number of cities including Washington, DC, Minneapolis, San Francisco, Kansas City, Pittsburgh and Boston, she recently returned to her Midwestern roots, settling happily in a house near Lake Michigan in Racine, Wisconsin.
Close