Who We Are
Meet the Founder
Andreas Gebhard founded Forward Momentum out of a simple conviction: great ideas deserve a real shot at winning. He built his career at the intersection of media, technology, and global markets (including time at Getty Images), which gave him both a wide-angle view of industries in transition and a healthy impatience for incremental thinking. He works at inflection points with founders and division leaders, and the investors behind them, helping them see and claim the market category that's already theirs to own. His approach is rooted in what he calls Optimistic Capitalism — a deliberate counter to the "squeeze more out of what exists" school of consulting. Originally from Berlin, Andreas has called New York home for the past 18 years.
That work has occasionally happened outside of client engagements. In 2020 he co-initiated the TCN Coalition, merging a scattered set of volunteer projects into a single privacy-preserving exposure notification standard — the TCN Protocol, one of the two Apple and Google built their Exposure Notification system on. The coalition later merged into Linux Foundation Public Health. Read how that came together.
“Andreas is a skilled and empathetic business leader, coach, and coalition builder. His global experience was instrumental in guiding a large international team of volunteers creating unprecedented technology toward delivering innovative real-world results on impossibly tight timelines to fight the Covid-19 pandemic.”
Our North Star
Here's how we talk about our own.
Read the transcript
At Forward Momentum, we work across industries with companies who have one thing in common: the burning desire to be extraordinary. You see, all innovators challenge the status quo, but some do it better than others. The companies who truly capture people’s imagination don’t just fine-tune products that already exist. Companies like Nike, Apple, or IKEA. For them, a little better isn’t good enough. They go their own way, create something new, and then lead us all on a journey to discover what they already see so clearly. These are the people who change the way we live, work, or play. What they imagine and create addresses the problems of our times, and they all share a common trait: the drive to be extraordinary.
But the drive alone is not enough. We all know people who have boundless energy and ambitions, and yet they either chase their tails or produce chaos and mayhem as this energy explodes into all directions. It’s how you channel it that matters. A controlled release of energy produces a directional force: momentum. Momentum towards your north star is forward momentum. So, to become an extraordinary company, you need this kind of forward momentum.
We are management and brand consultants. We work across industries with companies of all shapes and sizes, as long as they have the burning desire to be extraordinary. And if that’s not you, that’s totally fine. We call our approach North Star Momentum to help you articulate where your “forward” is, and more importantly, to help you actually get there.
North Star Momentum is our signature program that blends the best of proven business strategies (like category design, narrative building, product, and founder-focused management techniques) with the right emotional and linguistic subtleties appropriate for you, your world, region, and your future market category. These consulting engagements are customizable to give you a mix of strategic guidance and active push and execution. They are flexible to fit your needs and resources.
When people think of extraordinary companies, they often think of huge global brands, but your size and reach do not make you extraordinary. Being extraordinary is what expands your reach, supercharges growth, and gets you there because you’ll have fans, not just customers.
Ordinary companies follow. Extraordinary companies lead and become the envy of their competitors. That should be you, don’t you think? And you know what’s your unfair advantage over all the others out there? You know how to reach us. So, let’s talk.
How we work
Principal-led, by design
Forward Momentum is a principal-led practice. Andreas does the work: the interviews, the analysis, the room where the findings land. There is no partner who sells the engagement and an associate who delivers it three weeks later.
It's a deliberate choice, not a constraint. We find that category work fails when it gets handed off. The value is in the pattern recognition of someone who sat through the customer interviews and listened to the sales calls, and that doesn't survive a transfer to a delivery team.
For larger engagements, Forward Momentum builds a senior team around the work: specialists in brand, design, research, and go-to-market. They are brought in because they fit your problem and have the track record to prove it, not because someone on staff needed more billable hours. On Impact, our full-service engagement, that includes 9elements, a product and design studio we have worked alongside for years, covering visual identity and launch.
You will always know who is in the room before they are in it.
Being extraordinary isn't a size. It's a choice.
If that's the way you'd like to work:
Let’s talk →