Steven Riznyk’s rich and diverse background has proven to be a very valuable asset to the companies he consults. As an author, a high-level negotiator, crisis strategist, business lawyer, filmmaker, and SEO/e-commerce analyst, he brings fresh and unique insights to troubling issues. Steven studied Strategic Management at Harvard and was a Fortune 500 consultant in Business Process Reengineering (BPR), an area he feels every company should visit twice a year for peak effectiveness.

The best single word to describe Steven would be ‘strategist’. Whether it be protecting a client’s reputation, or determining how to position a company for executing its exit, Steven is all about foresight and strategy, which makes him a very a sought-after consultant and personal advisor to a company’s CEO or founder.

An entrepreneur since the age of 13, business runs through his veins. As a business lawyer involved in immigration of business investors, he has consulted clients on hundreds of problems with their companies, focusing on the BPR of the firm’s core competence, as well as the customer experience, his areas of interest. Having been trained in BPR by Jim McCauley, who worked with Jim Champy and the late Mike Hammer, Steven has a solid understanding of what the principles are, and how to rapidly and effectively execute change without wasting time or disrupting staff.

‍Successful Business Background‍

Having worked with domestic and foreign businesspersons for 25 years, Steven has guided a number of companies to success in the United States and abroad.  Having lived in Italy for a year (2010) and commuted to London for 4 ½ years, he has first-hand knowledge of challenges faced by companies conducting business internationally. An entrepreneur himself, at this time he runs four companies and understands intimately the challenges faced by the companies he consults as he had to run his companies from 6,000 miles away, even before the Internet.

Steven managed a successful business/litigation/employment, and immigration law firm, exposing him to a number of unique challenges faced by a broad group of companies. This unique experience allows him the opportunity of gaining yet another perspective not only into the problems, but the many secrets a consultant is not privy to, yet affect the outcome.  Luckily for his clients, privilege is retained and all of those hidden corners remain unknown by outsiders, but are cleaned up when he leaves the assignment.

‍High-Level Negotiator

‍Steven has resolved international kidnappings, extortion, blackmail (with money never changing hands in these first three categories), career destruction, relationship issues, and a host of company issues such as:

• Turnaround
• Succession
• Mergers
• Acquisition
• Separations & Dissolutions

His skills as a high-level negotiator has enabled his clients to benefit in situations they often thought impossible to resolve. In every negotiation there is one non-negotiable and the game is less about knowing law or some other area, than it is about knowing human nature, an area where Steven excels, as he finds it infinitely interesting.

As an offshoot of his background in negotiation and film is Steven’s authorship and production of Relationships901, a 5.5-hour film demonstrating how to solve complex relationship problems using his own conflict resolution model. The film is slated for international distribution later this year.

‍Filmmaker

‍Steven has always had a passion for film. Having produced and directed a film he debuted at the Cannes Film Festival, he has learned much about what is believable and can persuade on film. This information has proven useful to his skills as a negotiator. Additionally, whether it be spin control, or reputation management, understanding how to create an effective film is a talent any corporation can benefit from, whether the film is used to issue press releases or train new recruits.

Steven went on to write, produce and direct two educational films of over 5 hours’ length that are being distributed globally. He has also created an infomercial, and is producing several shorter films for SEO and company training purposes. His capability of simplifying the complex served him well in creating the first DVD series that explains US immigration to the world in simple English; the work has been translated to Spanish and Japanese and is currently distributed globally.

‍SEO

‍Having hired a number of SEO providers that had taken advantage of his companies, he invested over $75,000 in learning it himself. His organic rankings have allowed his companies to deal with clients in 54 countries as a result of the exposure his SEO strategies have created. This investment has saved him over six figures in what he would have spent with Adwords for the same exposure.

Steven’s SEO background has helped significantly when clients were trying to create a public relations spin on their press releases and wanted to be found on Google.

‍Reputation Management

‍Steven’s skills in SEO, combined with his skills as a negotiator have led to work in the area of reputation management for his clients. Sometimes, the client gets him or herself in trouble by being involved with junior staff and other times it may be a simple case of blackmail with Internet-related issues. In each case, there are human, legal, employment law, and Internet issues that have to be resolved. Steven’s global understanding of the issues enables him to provide effective results for both people and companies in trouble by cleaning up all aspects of the mess these issues create.

‍International Speaker

‍Steven’s firm was the first to travel globally on a regular basis, explaining US immigration to the foreign investors and members of the public. He has conducted hundreds of seminars worldwide, as well as at Oxford and Duke universities. Steven’s style has been praised as one that can take a very complex and multi-faceted topic and explain it in a way that is comprehendible by all, yet entertaining.