Meet the Team

Nancy Elizabeth Shaw is Founder and Senior Managing Principal of Townsend Group, Strategy Consultants.

  

She specializes in strategies and business plans to help take any organization from good to great. She particularly enjoys building a new business concept into successful operations, helping to professionalize entrepreneurial ventures and conceptualizing innovative business partnerships. As a world-class research analyst, she has a track-record of posing the right questions to help her clients pinpoint the information needed to create decision-support insight - ahead of others in the industry.

Over more than two decades, Ms. Shaw has provided guidance to venture-capital funded companies; created concept-to-operational business plans for new products and services; helped entrepreneurial management teams create long-term operations programs to meet targets required by their funding partners; and facilitated leveraged distribution deals between large multinational corporations. In each case, her work both enhanced customer satisfaction and business results at every level.

She has worked in many verticals, including software; consumer and institutional financial services; manufacturing; agriculture; not-for-profit educational institutions and residential and commercial architectural design. In addition she has planned, budgeted and directly managed multiple luxury hospitality resort renovations, from boutique operations to 90-unit, five-star condominium properties. 

Early in her career, she was assistant to the founder of Staples as he took the company from a business plan under his arm to opening the first store. This experience was formative as she entered the world of business from an academic and not-for-profit background. She then spent 6 years working in financial services, rising from an administrative position to vice president of strategic technology. Her independent strategy consultancy, Townsend Group, was founded in 1995 and frequently performed engagements for previous employers and colleagues, leading internally and externally formed teams. From 1999 to 2001, she served as senior executive vice president of strategy and international business development for a publicly traded company, also holding a seat on the management committee during her tenure. Ms. Shaw served on the residential-owner Board of Directors of the Ritz Carlton Clubs from 2001 through 2011 as head of the finance and refurbishment committees.  

Today, in partnership with her colleagues, Senior Advisor Stephen P. Bradley, PhD, of Harvard Business School and Managing Principal of Marketing and Technology, Gerrit G. Bradley, MBA, Ms. Shaw continues to bring inspirational energy and best-practice decision support to their growing client base.

Ms. Shaw has had a lifelong interest in the connection between food and lifestyle and their effects on personal health and longevity. She has researched many topics regarding personal health and has published white papers with her findings. In 2011, she created The Cancer Alternative Foundation, a charity to provide the results of her personal research into the biochemistry of cancer to those seeking help outside mainstream medical options. Her interest in the Cannabis industry is a direct result of health and cancer research between 2006 and the present. She was invited to a seat on the Board of the medical cannabis company, Champlain Valley Dispensary, in 2014 and functioned as Board President through 2018. In 2019, she was invited to serve on the Board of a newly formed company distributing CBD and other cannabis-based products. Her interest in this burgeoning industry is a focal point of her current work.