We are not tourists.
Every principal at this firm has held an operating role. We have made the calls, not just advised on them. That distinction matters more than any credential, and it shapes everything about how we work.
How the practice came together
Mosaic Consulting was built out of frustration with the standard consulting model: the one where senior partners win the work and analysts deliver it, where recommendations arrive in a binder and the hard part of implementation is quietly left to the client. We watched too many good strategies die on contact with organizational reality, not because the ideas were wrong, but because nobody with real authority stayed around to see them through.
The practice is structured around a different bet: that a small number of highly experienced people, working closely with a leadership team on a specific problem, produce better outcomes than a large team producing comprehensive frameworks. Our engagements are scoped deliberately. We do not staff to fill hours. We staff to solve problems.
Fully remote and deliberately lean. Our principals work across time zones, and the French market specialization reflects where the majority of our client relationships have developed. We know how French organizations actually work: the governance structures, the stakeholder dynamics, the cultural patterns that determine whether a strategy gets implemented or quietly shelved.
The practice grows through results, not through business development. Most new engagements come from people we have worked with before who have moved organizations, been promoted into a harder role, or encountered a problem they recognize from previous experience. That model demands performance on every engagement. It also means the firm is genuinely selective about the work it takes on.
Where we came from
Mosaic's principals spent the formative part of their careers inside organizations rather than advising them. Finance, operations, strategy, and general management roles across multiple sectors. The problems we now help clients with are problems we once had ourselves.
The move into advisory work was deliberate and gradual. Client relationships developed through referrals from prior colleagues, typically people who had moved into new roles and faced challenges they recognized from previous experience. The practice grew around specific problems, not around a service offering.
A significant concentration of early client relationships developed in the French market. Over time, this became a genuine specialization: not just familiarity with the language and regulatory environment, but a working understanding of French organizational dynamics, governance culture, and the specific patterns that determine whether strategic advice gets implemented or quietly shelved.
Mosaic Consulting operates as a fully remote practice by design, not because remote became fashionable, but because the model produces better outcomes. Senior people working directly with clients, without the overhead of offices and the organizational layers that accumulate around them, produce better advice more efficiently. Most new work comes through people the firm has worked with before.
The people doing the work
No bait-and-switch. The people you speak with at the outset are the people on the engagement.
Liene Balabka
Principal, Mosaic Consulting
Liene works with executive leadership teams on strategy, organizational design, and large-scale transformation. Her background combines operating experience in commercial and general management roles with a decade of advisory work across financial services, technology, and professional services sectors.
She has worked extensively with French market clients on strategic repositioning, post-acquisition integration, and leadership transitions. She understands the unwritten rules of French corporate governance, the dynamics of executive committees, and the specific conditions that determine whether externally-developed strategies get genuinely adopted or politely archived.
She is direct, fast-moving, and consistently allergic to solutions that present well in meetings but collapse on contact with the organization that is supposed to implement them. Clients describe her work as rigorous without being academic, and challenging without being adversarial.
LinkedIn profileOn associates
We engage experienced independent associates on specific engagements where additional capability is required. These are senior professionals with operating backgrounds, not junior staff deployed to manage workload. We are selective about who we bring in and maintain the same standards for associates that we apply to principals.
We do not use the term "partner network" because it overstates the structural relationship. We bring in specific people when the engagement requires a capability that is well-defined and where we know the right person for it. Clients meet any associates before they become part of the engagement.
On the French market
Our French market specialization is substantive rather than geographic. It means we understand how strategy work actually gets done inside French organizations: the relationship between board and executive committee, the influence of institutional shareholders, the role of comités de direction, the patterns of internal communication that determine whether decisions land.
We work in both English and French without switching registers, and we have developed the cultural fluency that distinguishes genuinely useful advice from advice that is technically correct but organizationally tone-deaf.
What we actually believe
Intellectual Honesty
We say what we find.
The value of outside advice is the absence of political constraints. The moment we start shaping findings to protect the relationship, we have become useless. We have ended engagements rather than deliver work we did not believe in. We have also delivered findings that made clients unhappy and strengthened the relationship as a result. That is the dynamic we are aiming for.
Discretion
What happens in the engagement stays in the engagement.
We work inside sensitive strategic situations: merger deliberations, executive performance issues, boardroom disagreements, competitive intelligence. We handle that access with absolute care. We do not discuss client work in general terms, do not use client names as credentials, and do not share information across client relationships. Confidentiality is not a contractual formality; it is how we operate.
Rigor
Analysis before opinion. Always.
We form views quickly, but not before the evidence warrants it. Every recommendation is grounded in analysis we can defend, not in pattern-matching from previous engagements, and not in frameworks that get applied regardless of context. We pursue depth of understanding in the specific situation before we reach for general principles.
Accountability
We share the outcome.
A consulting engagement that produces a good presentation and a bad outcome is a failed engagement. We structure our work around what needs to be true six months after we leave, and we track whether it is. When we get things wrong, and we do, we say so and figure out why. That is the only way the practice gets better.
What makes this practice different
We are not a large firm that can cover every problem, and we do not pretend to be. What we offer is a specific kind of advisory relationship: senior people, directly engaged, on problems where operating experience matters more than analytical frameworks. If the situation calls for a large team of analysts producing a comprehensive study of an industry, we are probably not the right choice. If it calls for experienced judgment applied quickly to a specific organizational or strategic problem, we likely are.
The fully remote structure is part of this. It keeps overhead low, which keeps the model efficient. More importantly, it reflects a deliberate choice about what kind of work we do: work that requires deep engagement with a specific client situation, not the presence of people in an office. The work travels. The office does not add anything to it.
We are also genuinely selective about the work we take on. Not all problems are good fits. Engagements where the organizational conditions for change are absent, where the client wants validation rather than honest analysis, or where the scope is too vague to produce a result we can stand behind, those are engagements we decline. This is not about being difficult. It is about not wasting anyone's time and resources on work that will not produce what it is supposed to produce.
How we choose who to work with
We are selective, and not because selectivity sounds good. Engagements where the fit is wrong, where the client wants something different from what we do well, or where the organizational conditions make genuine progress unlikely, end badly for everyone. We have learned to decline these, even when the economics are attractive.
The clients we work best with share a few characteristics: they want an honest outside view, not validation; they are willing to hear findings that are uncomfortable; they have enough authority to act on what we find; and they are prepared to stay engaged through implementation, not just through diagnosis. If these conditions are present, we can usually do useful work. If they are not, we will say so directly.
Most of our new work comes through referrals. A client moves to a new organization, faces a new problem, and calls. Or they refer a colleague who is in a similar situation. We do not run a business development function. The practice grows through results, which is both the most sustainable model and the most demanding one.