About RMC Strategic

Experience matters. Perspective matters more.

RMC Strategic helps industrial companies, technical organizations and associations see what others miss, understand what it means, and decide what to do next.

Founded by Kirk Richardson, RMC brings more than four decades of experience in industrial markets, strategic marketing, competitive and business intelligence, knowledge management, business development and executive communications to organizations facing important decisions.

Kirk's career has taken him from the plant floor and trade-show aisle to executive meetings, international conferences and technical organizations around the world. He has worked extensively across the chemical process industries, materials and corrosion, pulp and paper, mining, manufacturing and other highly technical B2B markets.

That experience provides RMC with something difficult to replicate through research alone: an understanding of how industrial markets actually work—how relationships develop, how buying decisions are made, how competitors behave, where useful intelligence hides, and how technical expertise becomes business value.

Intelligence That Leads Somewhere

RMC's work begins with curiosity.

What's changing in the market? What are competitors doing? What are customers really thinking? What assumptions are driving the strategy? What signals are being overlooked? What does the organization know that isn't being captured?

RMC combines traditional market and competitive research with executive interviews, elicitation, benchmarking, scenario analysis, five forces analyses, SWOTs, competitive wargaming and decades of accumulated industry knowledge.

But the objective isn't simply to produce more information.

It's to answer the question:

So what?

RMC helps turn information into decision-ready intelligence—insight leaders can use to identify opportunities, anticipate threats, challenge assumptions and make better strategic choices.

Strategy Without the Big-Consulting-Firm Machinery

Not every important strategic problem requires a large consulting team, a six-month engagement and a presentation containing 150 slides.

Sometimes leadership needs an experienced outside perspective.

RMC works with organizations on focused questions involving market opportunity, competitive positioning, growth strategy, customer and member insight, market entry, differentiation and strategic decision-making.

Engagements can range from a tightly defined intelligence or strategy project to ongoing executive or fractional advisory support.

The approach is deliberately practical: understand the problem, gather the right intelligence, make sense of it, and help leadership determine what to do next.

Knowledge Is a Strategic Asset

Some of the most valuable intelligence inside an organization resides in people's heads.

Experienced engineers, executives, salespeople, technical specialists and other subject-matter experts accumulate knowledge over decades that may never appear in a database, procedure or report.

When those people retire or leave, that knowledge can disappear with them.

Knowledge management has therefore become an important part of RMC's work. We help organizations identify mission-critical knowledge, work effectively with subject-matter experts, capture tacit and experiential knowledge, learn from failures and successes, and build cultures where valuable knowledge is shared rather than lost.

Speaking, Workshops & Strategic Conversations

Kirk is also an experienced international speaker who genuinely enjoys taking complex ideas and making them useful to an audience.

In recent years, he has presented on knowledge management and technical industrial subjects to audiences in the United States, Canada, China, Japan and Malaysia. His work includes conference presentations, technical programs, facilitated workshops and executive-level discussions.

RMC develops presentations and workshops around subjects including competitive intelligence, ethical elicitation, knowledge management and retention, competitive wargaming, strategic thinking and industrial market dynamics.

The common thread is helping people ask better questions, recognize important signals and think differently about the problems in front of them.

Four Decades. One Simple Philosophy.

After more than 40 years in industrial business, one lesson stands out:

The most important information is rarely sitting neatly in front of you.

It may be buried in a conversation with a customer. A competitor's seemingly insignificant decision. An experienced employee's story. A market trend that hasn't yet become obvious. A failure nobody wants to revisit. Or an assumption everyone has stopped questioning.

Finding those signals—and understanding what they mean—is where RMC does its best work.

See What Others Miss.

RMC Strategic works with leaders who don't necessarily need more data.

They need perspective.

They need someone willing to ask the questions others aren't asking, challenge assumptions, connect seemingly unrelated information and help turn insight into action.

See what others miss.
Understand what it means.
Decide what to do next.

That's RMC Strategic.