About

Grace Ueng (翁惠芷) is founder & CEO of Savvy Growth, dedicated to helping leaders and their companies maximize success. Founded in 2003 as Savvy Marketing Group, her firm expanded to also offer management consulting and executive coaching services as well as keynote speeches and HappinessWorks™ programs. Grace is a globally recognized expert in marketing strategy and personal branding and consults for clients from emerging growth to Fortune 1000.

Grace has passion for success and shares this desire with her clients. 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.

A graduate of 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 and Elon University’s Love School of Business.

Viewed as a role model to many, Grace was named Top 8 Asian-American Women of Influence by Audrey magazine. 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. Many leaders credit her for being a change maker in their life.

A lifelong learner, Grace is currently studying under Tal Ben Shahar, the creator of Harvard’s famed Positive Psychology course as well as Noa Kageyama, performance psychologist on faculty at The Juilliard School. She recently restarted her piano studies, after a four decade hiatus.  She also cites Arthur Brooks, the author of From Strength to Strength: Finding Success, Happiness and Deep Purpose in the Second Half of Life, who pioneered the Leadership & Happiness course at Harvard Business School, as one of her teachers.

A frequent guest columnist, speaker and podcast guest, she writes a weekly column on Happiness & Leadership.

 

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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 $500 million from both public and private sources in his CFO roles.

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.