Melissa Van, Founder
“Building a business is a marathon, not a sprint… but creating the right training and performance strategy can push you to the finish line.”
Melissa Van brings vast experience from over 30 years in learning and development to all of her engagements. She has served in various roles from account leadership, to solution architecture, program development and delivery across a variety of industries including Banking, Oil & Gas, Insurance, Chemical, Life Sciences, Consumer Packaged Goods, Construction and Automotive Manufacturing.
Her strength is developing and leading training and performance solutions that address critical business needs, focused on driving the business forward.
Melissa is a 25-time marathon runner, wife of an entrepreneur, and proud “parent” of her four-legged friend Cleo Van Dog. She resides outside of Chicago in Evanston, Il and can often be glimpsed running through town, or zipping by on her road bike.
“Melissa is a true partner. I never feel like I’m working with a ‘consultant’. Her superpowers are holding the big vision combined with the teeny tiny details, and making the complex simple.”
— Damon Maassen, client“Melissa’s Design Thinking workshop exceeded our expectations and allowed us to pinpoint the direction of our onboarding.”
— Happy Life Sciences client
Our Values
These are the values that guide our work, day in and day out.
Fit-for-You
There’s no cookie-cutter approach here. We combine our experience and insights with your unique business needs and create solutions that meet your specific goals.
Competence & Efficiency
There are a lot of great thinkers, but not everyone is great at execution. We bring strong project and budget management skills to help ensure you get the results you need, when and how you need them.
Imagination
We see a lot of common business challenges, but solutions need to fit your specific challenges. Our Thought Session approach provides a forum to brainstorm out-of-the-box solutions that work for you.
Innovation
Our job is to stay up-to-date on related trends and new technologies that benefit your business. Whether it’s a new approach to customer service training or a technology that enables rapid learning creation, we build these into our solutions as appropriate. Our solutions don’t only solve today’s challenges, but are designed to align your employee performance with where your business is headed in the future.
Integrity
Your success is our success. At SGP we only promise on what we know we can deliver, and always deliver on our promises. We foster a culture of open communication and transparency, to help eliminate surprises or less-than-delightful outcomes.
Respect & Inclusivity
At SGP we solicit and welcome input and ideas from a variety of sources and professionals from all walks of life. This helps us ensure we’re addressing your challenges with a perspective that serves all your employees. Our solutions build on the diversity in your business.
Our Philosophy
Everyone wants to do well.
We believe that most of your team could perform better with the right training, development and support. Together we give them the chance to grow, to shine, to do well — for you and for themselves.
We believe in creating powerful but simple learning solutions that grow with you, and are easy to maintain over time. In doing this you not only have better employee performance, but you attract better talent and keep the good folks around longer.
We geek out on finding the clearest path to solving big business challenges by training and developing your people to solve them for you.
Net-net, you have a stronger business and bottom-line.