A expert in transforming companies to authentically serve women, visionary, and business entrepreneur, Julie Gilbert has spent her career building industry changing businesses and creating financial growth from ideation to scale. She is best known for the creation of WOLF Means Business, her progressive company transformation process to reinvent companies to serve the female and ethnic minority consumers which she successfully scaled at Best Buy while a Senior Vice President. She is now launching WOLF Means Business and, with her team, transforms companies in all industries achieve sizeable revenue growth authentically with women, the largest financial growth arena for companies today. While a Senior Vice President at Best Buy, she utilized WOLF processes to reinvented Best Buy, the $40 billion dollar consumer electronics company to increase its female revenue by more than $4.4 billion dollars in less than 5 years along with many other financial wins. WOLF Means Business is an innovative approach directly engaging employees and consumers in innovation to land companies as THE place for women to work and shop.
Gilbert has over 16 years building new businesses and capabilities including over 8 years in retail at Best Buy where she was recently Senior Vice President and 8 years at Deloitte where she developed new businesses in consulting. In addition to the eye-opening revenue creation she created at Best Buy of more than $4.4 billion, she also reduced female employee turnover by more than 5% each year, and increased the number of women at all levels of the company by more than 18%. Gilbert also works to unlock the leader in every single employee as she oversaw the leadership of all of Retail Training for Best Buy’s 150,000 employees and in this role, led the development of an industry changing way for employees and consumers to engage in learning called Learning Lounge.
Previous new businesses include Magnolia Home Theatre, Virgin Mobile’s launch in the U.S., and a very large business she scaled while at Deloitte & Touche earlier in her career.
Julie is a motivator speaker and teacher and does speeches internationally on the topics of innovation, business growth, creating networks of innovation, and reinventing companies to achieve growth. She has been profiled in Business Week, ABC News, USA Today, Global Pulse, and many other media for her WOLF work. Additionally, she has taught classes on these subjects at the New York University and University of Minnesota Carlson School of Business. She has been the recipient of many awards for WOLF Means Business and in 2008, The White House Project honored her with the EPIC “Circle of 10 Award” and Minneapolis/St. Paul Business Journal named her one of Minnesota’s Women to Watch. Recently she was named as the top 10 women in business by PINK Magazine. Gilbert also authors a monthly blog for PINK Magazine and contributes to the Harvard Business School blog. She is on the board of the Harvard Kennedy School Women’s Board and the White House Project Board.
Julie has a Masters in Business in strategy and marketing and undergraduate degree in accounting both from the University of Minnesota. She is a certified public accountant in the state of MN.