Julie is a Partner at McKinsey & Company as a CEO-in-residence in the global Leap by McKinsey business building practice partnering with top firm client’s CEO’s and C-suite teams to architect highly disruptive businesses and then rapid-fire greenfield stand them up in market for fast scale (technology, commercial, operations, and talent). She is also a Certified Technology Partner, firm marketing and transformation expert, and leads globally all DEI for business building. She is an experienced Fortune 50 Senior Executive P&L Owner (startup to $17.5B revenue (female)) & Entrepreneur.

She brings over twenty years as CEO/founder and organizational transformation expert with deep technology expertise including SaaS tech business founder-scale: & leading the creation/scale of highly disruptive overall company strategy; 19 businesses (4 unicorn businesses including Magnolia Home Theatre (first store within store concept); first wholly owned high-end services business; Virgin Mobile (joint venture with Sir Richard Branson); enterprise transformation to the female consumer (“Wolf”) focused on luxury to mass consumer, products & services, digital, specific expertise around the female consumer).

 She has been the Fortune 50 and 500 SVP Growth Officer at Best Buy & Chief Growth Officer at Polaris. She led direct to consumer digital transformations for global companies in 5 continents & built 5 Fortune 50 Best Buy enterprise capabilities: (strategic alliances/M&A deal structures; Learning Lounge tech-enabled sales training, Retail Leadership Forum, Best Buy transformation engaging front-line & female consumers via “WOLF pack": US & 26 countries) completely changing leadership perspectives and delivering $4.4 billion in female revenue in less than 5 years. Post Best Buy, she built Wolf Means Business, a consulting company engaging global companies to create businesses and lead digital transformations to serve the female customer. She also mobilized more than 7 million women globally through her Wolf Means Business organization. She also founded and scaled the first of its kind global encrypted communication company PreciousStatus, scaling this to 178 countries with 12 million updates a day with a data monetization back-end.  

She has been profiled by Harvard Business Review, IMD, Switzerland (case study) FastCompany, Bloomberg, Business Week, and many other books and periodicals for her transformational leadership and outcomes. She began at Big 4 firm, Deloitte, creating her first software program in the M&A tax asset classification (at 22 years old) and scaling new businesses while working on the Office of the Chairman accounts.

Honored to be an Aspen Institute Henry Crown Fellow, she is also a frequent TED keynote speaker and highly sought-after global keynote speaker by Fortune 500 and global organizations. She serves as Vice Chair of the Asbury Communities Board, is a board Trustee for the University of Minnesota board, Chair of the UMN Carlson School of Management Women’s Global Network, board member and Finance and Development Chair of the global Child Neurology Foundation, and has served on bank and other boards, Private Equity Boards, and is a Governance Fellow with National Association of Corporate Directors. She is a mother to an amazing son, an audiophile, nature-lover, nutrition connoisseur, & competitive athlete. She was a former competitive ballroom dancer and now enjoys competing as a novice.