What Makes Us Different: Success Beyond Milestones
- Sarah-Mae, MBA | CEO & Editor-in-Chief
- Jan 29
- 13 min read
By: Sarah-Mae Amde, MBA
Award-Winning CEO | Business Advisor & Executive Coach | Top Selling Author | Change Leader & Keynote Speaker. Turning Strategy into Results, Team Potential into Profit, and Vision into Victory.
Why Your Strategy Needs a Behavioural Architect
In today’s saturated consulting landscape, firms often promise transformation — yet many deliver little more than dressed-up project management.
Buzzwords like “change enablement” and “cultural alignment” are tossed into presentations as placeholders rather than pillars. The truth? Most strategies fall short not because the plan was poorly scoped or the budget mismanaged, but because the people inside the organization were never fully equipped — or rewired — to sustain the change.
That’s where Paragon steps in.
We’re not traditional consultants. We are Behavioural Architects.
We're the world’s only, globally-recognized, award-winning Behavioural & Business Architecture design company (BBA). We specialize in creating strategies that rewire how people think, act, and lead — so that real change not only happens, actually sustains.
The Fatal Flaw:
Why Traditional Change Consulting Doesn’t Stick
If you’ve ever watched a strategic plan fizzle after the consultants left, you’re not alone. Most firms approach change with a mechanical mindset — design a new process, map it to milestones, train the team, launch.
What’s missing is the design for a real person, operating in the system.
Traditional consulting models treat people as rational, programmable entities.
They rely on outdated frameworks that ignore the subconscious resistance to change.
“Change Management” is often reduced to a series of communication tactics and training sessions — after the solution has been decided.
But real change isn’t about getting people to adopt something new. It’s about enabling them to let go of what no longer serves them, rewire how they see themselves in the system, and rebuild new neural pathways that make the new way of working feel natural.
The Paragon Approach: BBA Design =
Business Strategy + Behavioural NeuroPsychology
We fuse cognitive science, behavioural psychology, and neuropsychology with rigorous business architecture principles. That intersection is where true, sustainable change happens.
When I talk to many professionals, managers, executives or entrepreneurs I always get the same question: "Ok, Mae, so tell me what does this really mean?"
Let's start at the beginning: Who is Paragon, Anyway?
Paragon is the world's only globally recognized, award-winning
Behavioural & Business Architectural (BBA) design company.
We're known our ability to enable business success through our proprietary systematic approach to architecting and designing strategies that accelerates business growth, increases profit, drives team performance, streamlines process efficiencies, cultivating high employee engagement and productivity.
What makes us different.
if you peruse any of the traditional management consulting firms, they look at people and culture rudimentary: as an extension or a stream of managing a project. This largely comes from their deep expertise in auditing, taxation management, and even brokering M&A deals (for which they are quite exceptional!) yet they often promote and manage impacts to people the same as technology, through basic communication activities, thinly veiled as change management, and completely overlook the levers that drive human behaviour.
However, how we enable our clients to affect and effect change comes from a deep understanding of how the mind works, how our actions are governed by our thoughts, and how we can enable people to rewire themselves to achieve whatever they want.
In short, we specialize in creating business strategies that rewire how people think, act, and lead — so that real change not only happens, actually sustains. Here's an overview of what makes our model distinct:
We map behaviours, not just workflows.
We architect change by rewiring identities, not just processes.
We align your technology, operations, and people by understanding the behavioural, cognitive, and cultural wiring that either enables or hinders success.
Let's Revisit What You Believe About Changing
Yourself, Your Business, or Your Teams
What Behavioural Change is NOT
Before I jump into talking about how we alleviate pains for our clients, I want to be clear: This is not about motivational posters, baseless positive affirmations, or bombarding people with messages, in hopes they'll adopt the change. It's also not about checklists about ineffective engagement activities, trying to fit people into a one-size fits all category of messaging, or avoiding saying anything because of the burden to your leaders and teams. You can breathe easy.
Many people, hesitate to lean into change, because they thought it would make them, as leaders, become their team's therapists, hand-out-hugs, or enable excuses for poor job performance.
We Help You Reimagining How to Think
A simple way to understand what makes Paragon unique: from people struggling with their weight, seeking to lose 50+ lbs and keep it off, to career-minded Professionals who want to rise to the C-Suite, to Project Managers delivering massive changes to an organization, to CEOs acquiring companies and want to integrate diverse corporate cultures, to Entrepreneurs learning how to evolve into Executives to scale their business to new heights, our framework ensures they can change and that the changes are sustained. We ensure that our clients can traverse from their Vision to seeing the results of their Victory. Allow me to share some of the pains we've alleviated for our clients:
For IT, HR and Project Leaders:
How many times have you initiated great projects that would greatly benefit the business, your customers and employees only to get sidelined by teams that you're serving? Even in the last few years, there's dozens of companies who made the news for filing for Chapter 11 protection because they couldn't effect change in their organizations, and the market wasn't waiting.
In contrast, imagine you could have all impacted leaders understand the fear-pain loops and decision fatigue that happens when you're looking to implement at new change. Imagine how much faster you could replace outdated technologies, the pace you could change direction to meet customer needs or sentiment in the market. Imagine how much more productive, happy and engaged your employees would be.
Welcome to our client's reality.
We have steward hundreds of projects and programs that impacted internal stakeholders from groups as small as 25 to as large at 175k, and worked with local governments and municipalities to support positive impacts in community for over 3.2M constituents.
For CEOs, Investment Firms, and Senior Executives Acquiring New Businesses:
How many times have you read about a new merger or acquisition fail to deliver ROI to the shareholders because there were challenges integrating disparate companies? In less than 5-minutes, most business leaders can name a number of mergers or acquisitions that failed during the crucial Post-Merger Integration stage. How about the exuberant costs associated with attrition of top talent, the low customer retention, the disparate systems, processes and data uncategorized or organized?
Now, imagine that you have designed a corporate culture that truly reflects the essence of your brand, the customer's expectations, and the way your teams do their work seamlessly? Imagine how it would feel to walk in on Monday morning, with your end of week reports already sent and your quarterly earnings look good, your teams have self-identified an issue and are proactively resolving it before customers notice, your newly integrated department leads are cross-collaborating on ways to enact the next phase of your vision, and have laid the plain that an deliver ahead of schedule and optimize processes to save you costs on licensing.
Delivering Post-Merger Integrations Successfully
From supporting Executives to purchase their first company, to helping seasoned M&A Leaders integrate several acquired brands, to PE Firms heavily invested in the transition going well, we have enabled companies to integrate their cultures, processes, data and technologies. After we're done, your teams will create momentum before a mandate, so they internalize the shift — before it’s enforced externally.
Proof in Action:
Real Change, Real Clients, Real Results
What follows are examples of the impacts we've inspired, to real clients in our advisory, delivery and coaching cohorts. ** Please note: with any testimonial, white-paper or case study, we have procured permission to talk about our client's experience, the size of the organization and fiscal impacts, while ensuring that we have anonymized all identifying details for confidentiality and privacy (e.g., we actively exclude information pertaining to their location, industry, etc.)
Enterprise-Wide ERP Transformation: From Stalled Systems to A Scalable Success
The Challenge: A $2.3B Company, Stuck in Transition
Our client had started their digital transformation, a global ERP rollout by engaging a traditional consulting firm to define requirements, build the system, and deliver basic training; however, the transformation never truly took hold. Five years after kicking off the project, several false-starts, the company only had 10% of it's user base onboarded and adopting the new system. For many, they were still dependent on outdated process and several end-of-life legacy tools that were no longer supported; the project was not just behind schedule, it was bleeding resources.
The Board actively noted the financial implications that were stacking up:
Monthly penalties for delays passing the original transition date.
Dual licensing costs for two ERPs, where neither was doing what they needed.
Mounting internal frustration with employees and leaders in teams across 8 countries, and 5 languages, and 3 continents.
What began as a "simple" change of technology had stalled into a digital and financial burden where the Board was bolding asserting that the leadership team needed to do something - and quick.
Why They Came to Us: The Need for a New Approach
Leadership had realized this wasn’t just a systems issue — it was a people and performance issue. The technology was built without consideration to the nuances of the business and needed enhancing, the project team was burning out, frustrated at the overtime they endured with no end in sight, and the employees lacked the belief that the system would ever be able to do what was needed to sustain daily operations.
When they asked how we’d approach it, our answer was simple:
We do things differently.
We don’t just implement systems.
We enable the behaviours that drive adoption.
We knew the behaviours, beliefs, and buy-in required to get this project reinitiated and over the finish line were missing. they didn’t need more status updates or communications about the ERP — nor did they need endless PowerPoint presentation slides of theoretical strategies that treat the behavioural changes of this digital transformation, they wanted us to quickly assess what was happening and define a plan to get back on track; they needed behavioural traction, cultural alignment, and performance ownership across the project and every business team.
How We Architected Adoption from the Inside Out
Before diving into system updates or launch timelines, we started where most firms don’t: with the human layer of transformation. We engaged with leadership and cross-functional teams to uncover not just what wasn’t working, but why.
We examined departmental dynamics and behavioural patterns that had been quietly resisting change.
We decoded resistance anchors — the micro-decisions, language cues, and mental models that were derailing momentum.
We co-designed routines with local teams and leaders to reinforce the new workflows, long before the system was ready for them to use it, instead of prescribing one-way training.
We made the desired mindsets visible, repeatable, and scalable.
This enabled us to engineer the necessary enhancements to the ERP, reducing the volume of customizations, while managing the project activities to keep all teams aligned. From the beginning, we knew this wasn’t about pushing adoption. It was about creating the conditions where adoption could thrive — across cultures, languages, and leadership styles.
The Results? Momentum, Measurable Impact, and Market Agility
Engagement rates soared over 94% with each and every team, including ones who were known for not responding to corporate initiatives.
Adoption rates surged to 89% across all departments and teams, globally.
Cultural resistance dropped by over 50%, creating a more agile and collaborative work environment
ERP rollout was fully completed in 14-months — where we deployed the ERP in waves regionally.
Most notably, the business reported a 50% increase in EBIT during the implementation phase itself — a sign that operational capacity and system alignment had finally clicked into place.
This wasn’t just a successful deployment. It was a full-scale enablement of people, process, and performance that proved true transformation happens when technology meets behavioural insights.
Entrepreneurial Burnout While Trying to Build a Legacy
The Founder’s Dilemma: Burnout in the Pursuit of Purpose
Like many founders, our client launched her business with purpose and drive. She had a clear mission to build a company rooted in her values—one that served her community and created meaningful impact. For nearly a decade, she carried the weight of the business herself, and by many external measures, she had succeeded: the company was profitable, well-regarded, and had a loyal customer base.
But beneath the surface, she was exhausted.
Her success came at a cost.
The business had plateaued — not due to lack of opportunity, but because she had reached the limits of what her founder’s mindset could achieve. She was still operating like a scrappy bootstrapped founder — managing every detail, wearing every hat, reacting to every crisis, and chasing every revenue spike, and running herself into the ground. Despite having a small team, she was still the central engine of the company, and every time the business expanded, it demanded more of her time, energy, and mental bandwidth. She quickly became the bottleneck of the business, the roadblock that hindered her own progress.
Instead of excelling with a successful business, she struggled with the same challenges year-over-year:
Instability in cash flow, driven by inconsistent demand and lack of forecasting discipline
Feast-or-famine growth cycles, with no reliable operational rhythm
Delayed hiring decisions, leading to role overlap and burnout
Inability to take time off, without the business stalling in her absence
Why She Came to Us: The Need for a New Mindset
She applied and joined the Mission-Driven Leaders Club, a coaching program designed for established small business owners making the leap from a reactive, Startup Founder or Entrepreneur to a calm, collected and focused, Mission-Driven CEO. When she called, it was apparent that she was at odds with her husband and family, who were pressing her to consider closing the business and going back to being an employee. I recall the day we spoke, like it was yesterday; she said:
"I’ve taken the business as far as I can — but I don’t know how to lead it beyond this point without burning out or breaking it. Building this business was my dream, my legacy but now it feels more like a burden than a blessing."
When You Know You're Ready for More
The reality is, at some point, every entrepreneur hits the same critical inflection point: a rite of passage that separates hustle from leadership, and survival from scale. It’s the moment we all realize that what once worked — relentless effort, personal sacrifice, and doing it all — no longer delivers sustainable results. The business has grown, but the founder is still operating with the same mindset, habits, and systems that launched it.
This is where many stall out or burn out. But for those willing to evolve — to shift from founder to CEO, from operator to strategist — this moment becomes the gateway to true growth.
It’s not optional. It’s the price of admission. For Entrepreneurs seeking to build a legacy, this is the turning point that will define if you will scale the business sustainably, without losing your soul — or yourself. Understandably, without a cohort of peers, she was starting to believe that her business was broken, because she finally hit the wall, and admitted she was running out of capacity to take the business to where she once dreamt it could be.
This mental gap — between the identity of the founder and the responsibility of the CEO — is where businesses either stall, regress, or transform. She chose the latter.
The Work We Did: Clarifying Vision and Reclaiming Capacity
Her growth didn’t begin with business strategy — it began with her. Before she could scale the company, she had to scale herself. Arguably, this is one of the hardest things for a Founder / Entrepreneur to do without real guidance and support through the process.
This meant stepping back from the chaos of day-to-day execution and finally facing the quiet discomfort of asking deeper questions:
What kind of lifestyle do I desire truly?
What type of leader do I want to be?
What’s getting in the way of me becoming?
What will it truly take to grow without burning out?
What trade-offs am I willing to make?
And, most importantly, do I have circle of support?
We invited her to join the CEO Roundtable, to hear and share candid conversations from other successful business owners; together, we identified where she was bottlenecking the business, delaying key decisions, and holding too tightly to responsibilities that needed to be delegated. We took a deep look at how her time, energy, and attention were being used, revealing patterns of over-functioning and reactive decision-making that were limiting both growth and sustainability.
Focusing on creating the behavioural changes from being reactive to strategic:
1. We Assessed Her Current State with Clarity
Audited her weekly energy expenditure and task focus
Mapped her decision-making style and emotional triggers
Identified where she was holding on instead of delegating up
2. Rewire Her Executive Identity
Shifted her self-concept from "founder as doer" to "CEO as strategist"
Reframed her value from execution to vision, leadership, and influence
Replaced reactive decision loops with proactive heuristics for growth, team, and finance
3. Build a Scalable Operating Rhythm
Aligned her business model with her personal leadership capacity
Introduced systems for cash flow stabilization and performance forecasting
Created space for deep work, team development, and strategic thinking — not just day-to-day survival
We enabled her to make the desired mindset visible, repeatable, and scalable.
We introduced planning and prioritization models that stabilized cash flow, designed delegation structures that empowered her team, and carved out space for strategic thinking and long-term visioning.
She began to lead the business with intention, clarity, and confidence.
Her transformation was rooted in learning to trust the business to grow without her doing everything — and that required deep mindset work, not just tactical tweaks.
The Results? Multiplying Growth Without Burning Out
Within 12 months of completing the program:
Her business tripled its revenue without a corresponding increase in personal workload
She hired two key team members who now own daily operations
Her stress levels dropped significantly — no more guilt for taking time off
She began planning a second revenue stream with strategic partners
Most importantly: she rediscovered joy in running her business
AND she wasn’t the only one.
In her CEO Roundtable cohort:
87% of participants increased profitability within 9–12 months
72% reported a measurable increase in decision-making confidence
All cohort members cited improved executive presence and clarity of direction as key takeaways
This entrepreneur became an example of what’s possible when founders stop trying to do more — and start learning how to lead differently. Her story is proof that you don’t need to sacrifice your well-being to scale a company. You just need to stop thinking like a founder — and start thinking like a CEO.
The Takeaway: You Don’t Need Another Plan — You Just Need a Behavioural Architect
If your strategies don’t account for how people really think, feel and adapt — it will fail. Full stop. At Paragon, we help clients move beyond tactical execution to behaviourally architected design and engineered growth.
We go beyond the milestone to embed success in the wiring of your team, your culture, and your leadership, because true change doesn’t come from telling people what to do: it comes from designing who they get to become.
Coming Up Next..
We’ll dig deeper into why popular frameworks like ADKAR and Kotter fail to deliver consistent, measurable change — and introduce the behavioural blind spots they consistently miss.
About the Editor
Sarah-Mae Amde, MBA, is a celebrated business strategist and transformational advisor. She's a five-time CEO of the Year and Top-selling author, Speaker and Executive Coach. Sarah-Mae is known for her very distinct and stylistic fingerprint, as she has a her preference for depth over brevity, outcomes over noise, integrity over hype, and clarity over cleverness. As CEO of Paragon, she leads with vision, compassion, and a commitment to excellence, enabling her clients to increase profitability, scale sustainably, lead confidently, and expand their capacity.
“True leadership transcends titles. It’s measured by your impact, your integrity, and your intention."
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