About Disruptive Strategy Co.

The firm

Nunzio Bruno founded Disruptive Strategy Co. in Western Massachusetts in 2009 as a business strategy firm. It has since grown into a management consulting and business advisory firm for owner-led companies in New England and across the country. Our clients have ranged from LEGO and Health New England to an independent soap maker we helped onto Whole Foods shelves. Today most of them own trades, professional services and specialty businesses, and most work with us on a monthly retainer.

How the firm is built

Strategy firms used to need floors of analysts to do this kind of work. We run on a senior principal, a documented operating system and AI tools built around our own method, which means every client conversation is captured in writing and every decision and commitment is logged, so nothing depends on anyone's memory. Nunzio produces the models, benchmarks and memos himself using that tooling, so a growing private company gets the depth of work a large corporation would buy from a strategy house, focused on one business and priced for an owner. We tell clients this up front because they should know how the work gets done.

Nunzio Bruno, Founder and Principal

I started this firm after seeing up close what happens to a business with no plan, no reliable numbers and no real sense of what it’s worth, and I didn’t want other owners running their companies that way. Seventeen years later the work is more focused (fractional CFO engagements, pricing and customer strategy, and the major decisions an owner only faces a handful of times). That being said, the goal hasn’t changed. We find out what’s true about the business, decide what to do about it and make sure it actually gets done.

Teaching is the other half of my career. I’ve taught managerial finance, economics and strategy to graduate and undergraduate students for more than fifteen years, and I develop curriculum for graduate business and data analytics programs. The classroom makes me better at the client work (behavioral economics is what our pricing practice is built on, and years of teaching have shown me how to explain a pricing or job costing model so it actually sticks). A lot of engagements end up as classroom cases, with the names removed.

Credentials and recognition

  • Education: MS in Financial Planning from the McCallum Graduate School of Business at Bentley University, and a BS in Business from Bentley University

  • Recognition: BusinessWest 40 Under Forty, Class of 2016, and a graduate of the Leadership Pioneer Valley LEAP program

  • Certifications: Lean, Six Sigma and Agile Scrum facilitation

  • Teaching: Adjunct faculty in finance, economics and strategy at American International College, Bay Path University, Springfield College and Elms College

  • Curriculum development: Curriculum developer for graduate business and data analytics programs, including more than 20 graduate courses in business analytics, data science and data management for American Public University System

  • Publications: Weekly business columnist for The Boston Globe, contributor to Executive Forum Magazine, Personal Branding Magazine, Wealth Pilgrim and Financial Samurai, and host of the Minimum Viable Business podcast

Community

The firm is based in Western Massachusetts and we’re active in the business community here. Nunzio serves as treasurer of the Forest Park Zoo board of directors and sits on the finance subcommittee of the Connecticut River Valley Consortium. He speaks at regional business events and academic conferences on succession planning, strategic management, behavioral economics and financial leadership for smaller companies. He also instructs at Raven Wilderness School, which has nothing to do with finance but does have a lot to do with making good decisions on incomplete information.

How we think about the work

There are three things we believe that shape every engagement. First, the numbers have to be right before anything else can be decided, which is why we always start with a baseline. Second, a plan is only worth something if people actually follow it, so follow-through is part of the job from day one. Lastly, no owner should be dependent on a single advisor (including us), so everything we build gets documented and handed over. Start a conversation