Clarity. Capacity. Execution. — A partner-led team helping organizations navigate consequential turning points and move forward with confidence.
Elevate Alliance serves organizations at consequential turning points — providing the strategic judgment, organizational capacity, and execution discipline needed to navigate change and move forward with clarity.
Privately held businesses and institutional nonprofit partners face growth, shifting markets, leadership transitions, and major opportunities that rarely affect just one part of an organization. We identify the connections that matter, clarify the decisions ahead, and bring the capabilities needed to act.
The challenge isn't vision. Organizations today are being asked to do more with less certainty, less margin, and more complexity than ever before. The challenge is execution.
The decisions your organization faces today have consequences that extend beyond a single department or season. Elevate Alliance helps you see the full picture — and act on it.
Prepare for ownership or leadership transitions, respond to market pressures, and address vulnerabilities before they narrow your options. Don't let avoidable gaps become irreversible ones.
Turn growth, new contracts, strategic partnerships, or major funding into opportunities your organization can actually deliver on — not just win.
Translate important decisions into priorities, responsibilities, and coordinated execution — without overloading your existing team or losing momentum.
A business owner may see a succession problem. A closer look may reveal customer concentration, limited management depth, contractual obligations, and operations dependent on the founder. Those connections affect the choices available and what needs attention first.
A foundation may see an opportunity to expand a nonprofit program. Success may also depend on the grantee's leadership capacity, staffing, reporting systems, partnerships, and ability to sustain the work long after the grant period ends.
Elevate Alliance builds frameworks, plans, and operating rhythms your team can use immediately — turning strategy into something your organization can actually run.
Four integrated phases that take you from constraint to momentum — no matter where you start.
Define the real constraint — not the symptom
Partner-led core team, right expertise, right scale
Frameworks, plans, and operating rhythms
Clarity holds, capacity strengthens, execution stabilizes
The most important discipline at the start of any engagement is distinguishing surface friction from the underlying decision. What looks like a communications problem may be a positioning problem. What looks like a staffing problem may be a structure problem.
We begin by defining the actual constraint — the friction point that, if addressed, unlocks everything else.
How the organization is understood externally
Whether the team can execute at the required level
Translating strategy into coordinated action
Decisions that compress time and raise the cost of error
Elevate Alliance assembles a partner-led core team and expands with vetted specialists precisely when the work demands it. You never get junior staff handed a senior brief.
Senior principals remain directly involved at every stage — integrating the work and guiding agreed execution, not delegating it.
When additional depth is required, we bring in specialists matched to the specific challenge — vetted and coordinated through our principals.
You gain an integrated team working toward shared objectives — not disconnected recommendations from separate advisors.
We build frameworks, plans, and operating rhythms — not slide decks that sit in a folder. Everything we produce is designed to be handed off and run by your team from day one.
Strategic positioning and decision frameworks remain useful even as context evolves — because they were built on underlying logic, not assumptions.
Organizational structures, systems, and team capabilities built during the engagement continue to compound value over time.
Operating rhythms, accountability structures, and coordinated workflows keep the organization moving — even when leadership attention shifts.
Organizations engage Elevate Alliance when the stakes are high, the path is unclear, or the internal team needs a partner — not just a vendor. If any of the following resonate, it's worth a conversation.
Your market, audience, or competitive landscape has shifted and your positioning hasn't kept pace.
Identity, visual presence, and narrative need to align with where the organization is going — not where it has been.
The organization has grown faster than its systems, and the seams are starting to show.
Ownership, executive, or board transitions that require continuity planning and strategic clarity.
Multiple stakeholders with different priorities need a shared framework for decision-making.
A major announcement, funding decision, partnership, or public moment that compresses time and raises the cost of error.
Owners and leadership teams confronting growth, changing markets, leadership and ownership transitions, succession readiness, and significant strategic decisions. We work with organizations where the decisions are real, the stakes are personal, and the options are not always obvious.
Institutions addressing their own strategic priorities — or sponsoring organizational strengthening for the nonprofit grantees and members they serve. We understand both the funder perspective and the operational realities of mission-driven organizations.
Elevate Alliance is led by principals who bring different professional backgrounds and a shared ability to recognize patterns across business, organizational, and stakeholder considerations. That judgment guides the strategy.
DeRondal is the founder and managing director of RubyRose Strategies, a boutique strategic advisory and communications firm that works at the intersection of narrative, leadership, and influence. For over two decades, he has helped executives, civic institutions, and mission-driven organizations navigate complexity, clarify their message, and lead through high-stakes transitions. A Chicagoland native, he earned a Bachelor of Business Administration in Economics from Western Michigan University.
His work spans corporate, philanthropic, nonprofit, and public sectors, offering clients a rare blend of strategic acuity, cultural fluency, and communications mastery. DeRondal is known for stepping into moments that matter: launching bold initiatives, managing crisis and reputation risk, and repositioning brands and leaders for long-term relevance.
Through Projekt Next, his leadership coaching studio, DeRondal works with leaders at inflection points: stepping into new roles, preparing for public life, transitioning out of legacy positions, or recalibrating after periods of burnout or transformation. His practice blends executive performance coaching with somatic insight, mindset architecture, and narrative reconstruction, helping clients build a next-generation leadership operating system that aligns vision, presence, and execution. Clients describe his coaching as both grounding and catalytic.
DeRondal has worked in a professional or volunteer capacity with organizations including Bright Promises Foundation, Cara Chicago, Education Pioneers, Illinois Children's Healthcare Foundation, Leadership Greater Chicago, Navy Pier, Northwestern Memorial Hospital, and Social Venture Partners Chicago. He is a Leadership Greater Chicago Fellow, a member of the Economic Club of Chicago, and serves on civic and nonprofit boards including the Small Business Advocacy Council, the Community Connections Fund, and Loyola Medicine. At his core, he believes leadership is narrative, and that the best leaders know how to shape it, live it, and evolve it.
DeRondal aligns strategy, message, and leadership presence so leaders and organizations can say the right thing at the right time, especially when the stakes are high.
From bold launches to crisis and reputation risk to leadership transitions, he steps into the moments that matter and helps leaders act with precision and confidence.
Through coaching, he helps leaders align vision, presence, and execution, so clarity is sharpened, blind spots are illuminated, and next steps become inevitable.
Emilio brings a systems-driven business perspective to Elevate Alliance, shaped by corporate advisory work, client negotiation, small business ownership, brand positioning, and visual strategy. His academic background spans mathematics, finance, and fine art, including an M.A. in Mathematics, a B.S. in Finance, and an M.F.A. from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
He helps organizations understand how they are being read by the stakeholders who matter most: funders, boards, partners, clients, buyers, lenders, successors, employees, and communities. His work focuses on clarifying the signal, reducing noise, and strengthening the practical assets, systems, and communications that make an organization more credible and ready for its next stage.
Before building his photography and brand advisory practice, Emilio served as Senior Vice President for a niche wholesale brokerage firm, where he managed client relationships and negotiated sophisticated custom insurance contracts across medical malpractice, lawyers professional liability, construction, and products liability. That background gives him a strong understanding of risk, stakeholder confidence, business development, and how complex services are evaluated.
As a business owner, Emilio also understands the constraints leaders face when strategy has to survive limited time, limited margin, client pressure, and daily execution. At Elevate Alliance, he works across nonprofit capacity, enterprise readiness, leadership presence, communications infrastructure, and exit-planning preparation. He helps leaders see the whole field, connect disparate dots, and translate strategy into materials, rhythms, and signals that move stakeholders from uncertainty to confidence.
Emilio connects strategy, stakeholder perception, business risk, visual credibility, and execution. He helps leaders understand what outside audiences are really seeing and where the signal is breaking down.
His work strengthens the materials, messages, systems, and visual presence that make organizations easier to understand, trust, fund, buy from, partner with, or evaluate.
From nonprofit capacity to enterprise readiness and exit-planning preparation, Emilio helps translate complex priorities into clear assets, operating rhythm, and market-facing credibility.
Elevate Alliance doesn't deliver recommendations and walk away. We build the positioning, capacity, and execution systems that allow your organization to run what we build together.
How your organization is understood — internally and externally
Systems, staffing, and structures that support the work ahead
Operating rhythms and accountability that keep strategy in motion
Elevate Alliance helps organizations shift from reactive cycles toward durable, self-reinforcing momentum. The trajectory is consistent — regardless of where an organization starts.
Moving from crisis response to stable, repeatable operations
Translating strategic intent into accountable, coordinated action
Building the capacity to hold and compound the gains from growth
Tell us what has changed, what decision lies ahead, and what is at stake. We start with a focused conversation — no commitment required, no broad intake process.
If there is a fit, we propose a defined engagement with clear objectives, scope, deliverables, timing, and fees. Some situations call for a strategic assessment; others require support carrying decisions into action. We match the structure of the engagement to what the situation actually requires.
Strategy that cannot be understood cannot be executed. We work until the path forward is clear enough for your team to own and run — not just for us to describe.
Growth that outpaces organizational capacity creates fragility. We build the structures, systems, and team depth needed to hold the gains from every opportunity.
Impact is not a product of good intentions or even good strategy. It is a product of coordinated, disciplined execution — week after week, decision after decision.
Clarity makes strategy usable. Capacity makes growth durable. Execution makes impact possible. Start with a discovery conversation — no obligation, no broad intake process. Just a focused discussion about the decision in front of you.
Elevate Alliance