About

Grace has passion for success and shares this desire with her clients. Many leaders credit her for being a transformative change maker. Her 30 years of work experience spans from consulting at Bain & Company to working inside brand leaders General Mills and Clorox to contributing to five technology ventures that had exits through public offering or acquisition.

While at MIT, Grace was recognized as one of Glamour’s Top 10 College Women. She earned her MBA from Harvard Business School. She has served on adjunct faculty teaching entrepreneurial marketing at UNC Kenan-Flagler Business School and at MIT Sloan School’s joint venture with Fudan, Shanghai’s leading university.

We carefully staff each engagement to best meet client needs. Grace, along with Savvy’s principals, associates, and business partners, bring an unmatched depth of experience and passion to maximize value addition.

Grace serves on the board of International Women’s Forum Carolinas, Harvard Alumni Association of Research Triangle and is an advisor to Martin Trust Center for MIT Entrepreneurship. Read recent interview with MIT Sloan School of Management.

Viewed as a role model to many, Grace was named Top 8 Asian-American Women of Influence by Audrey magazine. She adds her voice to My call to action: Make board diversity a priority. Following the tenth anniversary of a life changing cycling accident, Grace started writing Project Peak on climbing the mountains of life – business and beyond, sharing a framework of 7 themes based on her years of positive psychology studies, which serves as the foundation of her coaching practice.

Grace writes a weekly column on Happiness & Leadership and studies classical piano to honor the memory of her mom, her first teacher.

Richard Chleboski, Managing Director, is a senior business executive with three decades of experience growing large and small high technology firms. Throughout his career, Rich has combined technical, financial, strategic, operations and business development skills to solve complex problems. He cofounded Evergreen Solar and as its CFO led the start-up through four rounds of VC funding, an IPO, several post IPO financings and ultimately to a market capitalization of over $1 billion and over $300 million in revenues. He has formed international strategic alliances including manufacturing, technology and supplier partnerships with multiple European and Asian firms. Rich has held senior management positions at companies ranging in size from start-up to over $3 billion of revenues. He has raised in excess of $350 million from both public and private sources in his career.

Prior to joining Savvy, Rich served as Chief Financial Officer of two Boston area technology companies. At 24M Technologies, Inc., a lithium-ion battery start-up in Cambridge, MA, he led all finance, strategy and business development activities and managed its $20 million Series D financing. While at TeraDiode, Inc., an MIT technology spinout commercializing a direct diode industrial laser technology, he led multiple financings and, along with the CEO, led all aspects of the Company’s $100 million sale to Panasonic Corporation.

In addition to his work at 24M and TeraDiode, Rich has held senior management positions at leading cleantech companies including Managing Director of Canadian Solar, CEO of Bandgap Engineering, and Cofounder, Chief Strategy Officer, Chief Financial Officer and a Director of Evergreen Solar.

Rich is an active advisor and mentor for the clean tech and startup community in Boston. He serves on the board of ENTOUCH, the pioneer in smart building technology headquartered in Dallas. He earned an SB in Electrical Engineering from MIT and an MBA from Boston College.