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Bringing Customers Together Safely

Do COVID-19 restrictions have you worried about how you will continue to create a collaborative atmosphere with your advisory group? Ask us how we can customize virtualization technologies to help you bring your customers together remotely.

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The Hartsema Group

Our Practice

Financial Services And Intercollegiate Athletics


“I’ve never had a bank that listens like this.”

— Advisory Group Member

“It’s clear that our ideas are fed directly into your products.”

— Advisory Group Member

“We’ve learned far more than we’ve shared.”

— Advisory Group Sponsor

“When we see our ideas turned into action at the bank, we’re motivated to bring more ideas.”

— Advisory Group Member

“We thought ‘functionality first’ but our council said ‘usability first.’ We followed their lead.”

— Advisory Group Sponsor

“Our CEO keeps asking me, “Did you run this by the advisory council?”

— Advisory Group Sponsor

“We can help you build better products.”

— Advisory Group Member

“Our CEO keeps asking me, 'Did you run this by the advisory council?'"

— Advisory Group Sponsor

“The board members are by far our best references.”

— Advisory Group Sponsor

“I feel very heard. I am engaged and willing to help create change.”

— Advisory Group Member

“These meetings are my visit to the armory – I pick up bullets to use.”

— Advisory Group Sponsor

“Our product roadmap has truly been influenced by our board.”

— Advisory Group Sponsor

“The advisory council confirmed for me that I’ve chosen the right bank.”

— Advisory Group Member

“For me it’s been self-serving. There’s a lot we didn’t know. We’ve grown 300-400%. The challenges we faced wouldn’t have been solved as smoothly. The board has given us ideas that have saved us thousands of dollars.”

— Advisory Group Member

“We want genuine customer advice before we make decisions, not after.”

— Advisory Group Sponsor


Hartsema Group Fact

Our Team represents more than 125 years of treasury operations experience.

Financial Services

Our backgrounds are steeped in banking, so our natural first foray into advisory group development and consulting was in banking. In fact, our advisory group leadership predates The Hartsema Group by over 20 years. When Doug was the leader of the treasury services business at Wachovia, he built and led the Wachovia Treasury Services Advisory Board. An advisory group was part of the equation at J.P. Morgan Chase, and again at Huntington.

Today, financial services organizations dominate our practice, and the group has expanded from banks to include payment companies, technology companies, network operators, and banks, large and small.

Our model and our playbook are essentially the same for our bank advisory groups and the payments or technology companies.


Intercollegiate Athletics

We have had the privilege to work with Wake Forest University and The Deacon Club – Wake Forest’s athletic fundraising team – since 2014. Athletic fundraising is a wide departure from banking and payments, but we’ve learned that the process of engaging with and listening to strategic donors is fundamentally the same as listening to strategic customers, and equally rewarding.

Wake Forest actually has more advisory groups and advisory group members than any of our other customers, by far. Connecting to and engaging with their advisory groups – collectively known as The Volunteer Army – has become a top strategy for The Deacon Club and has been instrumental in their record-setting fundraising success.

In April of 2019, we took the Volunteer Army on the road. In partnership with Wake Forest, we shared the components of the Volunteer Army (and the basics of our advisory group practice) with other university athletics fundraising organizations through our Volunteer Army Workshop.