Cain Partners helps businesses, non-profits, and schools work constructively and effectively towards shared goals by designing and facilitating strategic and business planning processes and workshops, coaching leaders, and helping improve communications—skills, stories, strategies, even resumes.
Our years of experience also allow us to draw upon wonderful relationships with talented designers, web developers, writers, and additional strategists to deliver the best possible solutions.
Roadmaps for communications
“I’m just not sure we are motivating our audiences. Are we effectively telling our story?”
“Am I focusing my team on the right goals? Do they understand the Why beyond the work?”
It’s important to regularly take stock of your messaging to ensure that your best ideas are coming alive through compelling, motivating communications—both internal and external. Great communication starts with your leadership team, and a communications audit is a powerful first step. We review your positioning and messaging, put it into your competitive context, and help you create a communications road map with clear purpose and utility. We work with you to shape the messaging and modes of communications that will resonate with your audiences.
Strategy and planning
“Luck favors the prepared” is one of our favorite sayings. Whether you lead a non-profit organization, school, or business, you will face unexpected challenges. Your team will work better and smarter armed with a strategic road map—one that makes sense at every level of the organization, one that is communicated well and widely. We will work with you to design a process to get to a right-sized, actionable strategic plan. First, we gather the information and data that ground the work. Then we help you get the right people in the room and facilitate the conversation and the collaborative work that will help your team articulate what matters most. Finally, together, we’ll clarify, distill, and operationalize how you will go from ideas to outcomes—your personalized strategic road map.
Leadership coaching and consulting
“Wait, there’s another way to do this?”
“I wish someone had told me that years ago!”
Not everyone is lucky enough to find a mentor who can help them navigate the maze that leads to successful leadership. And once you are a leader—or if you are trying to change roles—it can feel lonely, maybe even risky to share your concerns. Our coaching approach means mentoring, thought partnership, and problem solving on your terms—when and how you need it. Our time is spent responding to your circumstances, helping you solve problems and strengthen your leadership skills. No politics. All authenticity. Together, we stay focused on where you are, where you want to go, and we will develop multiple ways to get you there.
“I engaged Catherine to design and facilitate a 1.5 day in-person workshop for my remote finance team and highly recommend her. Her bespoke design—effective, time-efficient, and creative—fully delivered on our goals of 1) co-creating a work plan and priorities and 2) developing the ‘collaboration muscles’ and seeding leadership skills that will help our managers build cohesion across a team of new and legacy employees.
She listened acutely and then created an interactive experience that jump-started my team’s communication skills and connection to shared goals. They, and I, would welcome working with her again.”
– Merri Chandler, CFO, Coalfire cybersecurity service
What others have to say:
“Working with Catherine Braendel and Alison Carnduff was heads and shoulders better than other strategic planning experiences. They do not try to slot an organization into “their process” nor do they hand off clients to junior colleagues. These two high level thinkers really listen and are with you the whole way. They heard what we were saying and where we wanted to go and designed a customized process that delivered. For example, critical to our vision was giving our community a voice both in the beginning and at checkpoints along the way, their project design made sure that happened. It was also important for us to keep this project moving (any head of school knows how hard that can be.) At times I am sure it felt like herding cats, and yet Alison and Catherine kept us on track with compassion and understanding. I highly recommend them as thought partners and problem solvers to any school or business leader. ”
– Audrey Perrott, Head of School, Beacon Academy, Chicago, IL
Co-chair, Strategic Planning Task Force, Independent Schools Association of the Central States (ISACS)
“Catherine did an outstanding job designing and running our leadership retreat—and I have LOTS of experience attending facilitated meetings! Her ability to quickly understand our team and grasp our challenges was truly impressive. The agenda she crafted hit our priority issues with smart approaches and created a space for incredibly productive discussions—especially valuable for our new team members. We look forward to working with her again."
- Tim Brown, CEO, Tradewater
“Having completed a year-long strategic planning engagement with Catherine Braendel and Alison Carnduff, I am already thinking of ways ISACS and some of our 250 member schools might work with them in the future.
They helped us to think strategically, both challenging and clarifying our thinking, bringing out angles we might not have anticipated or thought through. They are excellent writers and thinkers who quickly caught on to our tone and represented us—both in writing and in person interfacing with our constituents—in a way that felt true. The arc of our work came together just as we had hoped—gold stars for project management and the kind and generous ownership they took, even when we flagged.”
– Mary Menacho, Executive Director, Independent School Association of the Central States (ISACS)
“We hired [Catherine Braendel and Alison Carnduff who together are] Cain Barrett Strategies to help us develop a strategic business plan and become a more cohesive and customer service-oriented team. With insight and an operational focus, Alison and Catherine quickly grasped our unique challenges. Their scope, which included a survey, workshops, and executive coaching, was shaped to meet our needs, schedule, and budget. They connected well with the team and broke through people's preconceptions using fresh approaches and a light touch. They delivered above and beyond their contract and were a pleasure to work with. As a result, our team built more trust and learned how they each have a role in changing the culture.”
– CFO, East Coast university
“Organizational planning, leading, communicating—they ultimately boil down to advancing shared purpose and vision. When committed to that, the work should be fun, meaningful, and increasingly clear. Catherine brings all of these traits to the table! Her insights translate into straightforward actions (ask her about #3SmartThings) that your organization will not only understand but embrace in service of shared goals. Her coaching-based approach makes strategy and knotty problem solving about more than Xs and Os—it's about your responsibilities, your mission, and your people.”
—G. Christopher Jones, head of school, Cannon School
“A rapid, incisive thinker, Catherine brings focus, clarity and deep expertise to communications challenges and knows how to shape and deliver compelling client stories. (Bonus: she’s a delight to work with: warm, engaging, whip-smart.)”
—Janice Clark, graphic designer and author
“Catherine facilitated a workshop for the communications team of our nonprofit, helping us with prioritization and strategies to meet our goals, defining organizational messaging, and other topics. She has a way of getting to the heart of the matter, simplifying complex topics, and then articulating these in ways that even a multicultural team like ours (for some of whom English is not their first language) could understand and then turn into actionable steps. We left with a clear, shared vision. We hope to work with Catherine again in the future.”
—Beth Duncan, director of communications, Rainforest Foundation
“When we started our engagement, I was really in a mental knot about next steps in my career and Catherine helped me frame my thoughts in such a way that I became hopeful and energized about the search itself and able to speak effectively about my credentials. I was thrilled with her coaching and the benefits will remain with me into the future. Thank you!”
-Sheila Cawley, Chief Philanthropy Officer, The Chicago Community Trust
"I just finished a program of coaching with Catherine Braendel and want to give a major shout out and recommendation. Catherine was incredible in helping me rebrand my decades of experience into a much improved LinkedIn profile and executive CV. She’s also kind, patient and a wonderful coach in terms of how I should be describing my years of experience and my diverse skill sets."
—Karen Raghavan, Chief Commercial Officer, Luna Daily
“A lot of consultants and facilitators don’t customize their work for our specific industry—this is what impressed me about Catherine! Her approach included personalized pre-work (with me and 20 managers) that clarified our needs and sharpened the goals for our work with her. Then she designed a workshop to help us improve communication and leadership skills—this included highly collaborative exercises around specific business challenges and strategy.
Our time together was more effective because she'd already established credibility with the entire team. I had better feedback from my managers about this session than any other facilitator. It was impressive—a really successful day and we have taken the work forward.”
–Julie Stevlingson, Senior Vice President | Director of Management Services, Draper and Kramer
Meet Catherine Braendel, spirited solution-finder
I love a tough problem, a clean, lean solution, and seeing other people succeed. It's how I get my groove and why I love consulting.
Working in education taught me this: never underestimate the knowledge that others bring to the table—whether that table is in a classroom or a board room. My years in the corporate world taught me to rely on data and to value smart processes and best practices that are understood and embraced across the organization.
Using logic, data, and a keen insight into business issues and people management, I help clarify business objectives and map a pathway to meet your goals and objectives. I bring humility to my client partnerships, which helps me listen more acutely and problem-solve more creatively. While I approach issues from a higher-order strategic perspective, just as importantly, I know how to get stuff done!
I have a passion for ideas, boundless curiosity, and an intuitive and empathetic approach to people and issues that help clients solve complex problems, focus on what matters, map clear paths to success, outline communications approaches, and expand and sharpen their leadership skills.
Catherine has advised numerous leaders, businesses, educational institutions, nonprofits, and associations as a consultant, board member, and volunteer. Her nearly 25+ year career has included leading strategy and communication for the University of Chicago Laboratory Schools, one of the nation’s largest and most prominent independent N-12 schools, the Illinois Institute of Technology, and Chicago’s public television station. She began her career in advertising, quickly rising to senior partner at a global agency, where she led marketing and advertising activities for international consumer goods and service clients. She earned her Master of Liberal Arts at the University of Chicago and her BA, cum laude, from Brown University. She is an avid world traveler and reader who never met a museum she didn’t like.
