Diane Wolff

President, The Blue Sage Group

Diane is the founder of The Blue Sage Group. She is a senior financial executive with a proven track record of increasing profitability by creating the tools and processes that allow senior management to quickly gage the financial impact of operational initiatives and actions.  In addition, she has created infrastructures in small company start-ups, that enable them to handle explosive growth and restructured mature companies into streamlined, low cost operations.

As Vice President of Finance for Genuity, a leading provider of managed Internet services, she grew revenue from $150 Million to $750 Million in three years, while improving gross margins by 100% in that three-year period.  When she joined the company, although a large corporation, it was in reality a conglomerate of separate and unique start-up operations with antiquated systems and processes.  She worked with cross-functional teams to create the systems and processes that revolutionized the business by utilizing linked data to reduce the order processing cycle and improve the quality of customer service.

At ODI, an international management consulting firm and leader of the TQM movement, as Chief Financial Officer and Director of Operations, she was confronted with many independent subsidiaries with separate or a non-existent infrastructure.  She streamlined Order Management yielding a 30% productivity improvement, and streamlined IT reducing costs by 50% by overhauling the network, updating equipment, and establishing a state-of-the-art website, and utilizing Internet-based tools and systems.  At Ziff Communications, owner of Ziff Publishing, she developed and implemented economic models and pricing tools for their Internet-based and web hosting products.  She also managed the integration of the multi-company accounting and fixed asset systems.

Diane was also integral to a number of corporate transactions during her career.  For example, at Genuity, it was not unusual for Diane to be involved in an acquisition while evaluating multiple partnerships and complex contracts at any given point in time.  Such transactions involved a strategic customer contract that yielded over 50% customer revenue growth, a partnership with another high tech firm valued at more than $200 Million which also reduced the cost of that firm’s product launch by 20%, and several partnership agreements estimated to produce in excess of $1 Billion in revenue for both companies.  She assisted in the separation of Genuity from GTE as part of the Bell Atlantic/GTE merger which created Verizon Communications. She also assisted in the successful completion of Genuity’s $1.2 Billion IPO.  At ODI, she completed the divestiture of European entities, sale of 50% of ODI’s equity, and restructured $4 Million in debt with European and US banks.

Diane graduated Summa Cum Laude from Emerson College with a Bachelor of Science degree in Business Communications.  She completed graduate courses for an MBA in Finance at Harvard’s Extension Division.