HMG is owned by Andrea Hill. Andrea has over 35 years professional experience as the CEO and president of start-up through mid-sized companies, and she has demonstrated serial success in leading companies through rapid and profitable growth.
She launched Hill Management Group in 2007, which serves small businesses in many produc industries with deep knowledge in the international jewelry and accessory, lifestyle, luxury, and home goods verticals. The company is known primarily through its brands: StrategyWerx, WerxMarketing, and MentorWerx. Andrea also plays a key role in the management and marketing of the Chicago Responsible Jewelry Conference, which has become a gathering of the worldwide community working to create mine-to-market responsible supply chains in metals and gem materials.
Prior to launching HMG in 2007, her experience spanned multiple industries as the CEO of Rio Grande Jewelry Supply, the president of international clothing manufacturer and direct marketer Fulcrum Direct/After the Stork, president of marketing services firm Anthill Marketing, a founding senior executive of Playboy’s direct marketing catalog operations in music and video, and senior executive of Video King, an 18-store video chain ultimately sold to Trans World Music Company.
Andrea’s particular expertise is in preparing companies for growth – whether they seek to improve cash-flow for organic growth, or acquire angel or institutional investors. She uses proprietary processes for strategic planning, branding, digital marketing, and operations and manufacturing improvement and management – all areas which must be perfected in order to improve the bottom line or approach serious investors. She has worked extensively around the world in leadership and leadership development roles.
In addition to consulting across the business spectrum (everything but legal and accounting), Andrea has deep knowledge of marketing in all its forms. Her earliest jobs were with with major national advertising agencies, where she built a foundation of great copy, graphics, and promotion skills. From there, she moved on to direct marketing, where she learned merchandising, list segmentation and database marketing from one of the best in the world – Hank Johnson of Spiegel. An avid programmer since the early 1980s, Andrea was also an early internet adopter, and was busy creating websites and exploring what the web would become before most people discovered AOL. If you ask her what she can help you with, she’ll say business. If you ask her what she thinks she’s best at, she’ll say marketing.
Andrea is also very well known for her ability to explain business concepts in clear, accessible, easy-to-implement terms, and is a much sought-after speaker and teacher.
In 2007 Andrea formed HMG, providing strategy consulting, business education, branding, and marketing services to small and mid-sized businesses. HMG began as StrategyWerx, a strategy consultancy serving the jewelry, arts, craft and lifestyle-brand industries.
However, it quickly became apparent that HMG accounts were unable to act on much of the marketing advice that was given, because they lacked internal marketing staff to do so. When Andrea tried to build a database of marketing companies that were suitable to serve these businesses, she hit a brick wall. She didn’t want to offer a patchwork of freelance graphic designers, copy-writers, and social media marketers to her clients. Even if this type of arrangement had been manageable, Andrea found very few freelancers who understood marketing sufficiently to execute a strategic marketing program. So in 2008, Andrea formed WerxMarketing (originally named SupportWerx) to serve as a specialty marketing agency to small business owners.
In 2013 Andrea formed a third brand, MentorWerx. This fulfilled her long-term goal her of offering business education in affordable increments to creative-based business owners who need to address business knowledge gaps in order to become stronger managers and leaders.
In 2021, Andrea was nominated to participate in the Goldman Sachs 10,000 Small Businesses Program, a highly selective initiative created to help promising small businesses scale. Once accepted into the program, she completed 100 hours of rigorous coursework delivered by the nation’s #1 business school for entrepreneurship, Babson College, developed in collaboration with the Goldman Sachs foundation. One outcome of that program — which required the creation of a scaleable growth plan as a condition of graduation — is the launch of a new brand, ProsperWerx, which will deliver online consulting services to busy business owners who need answers and solutions fast.
