Tim Scharf has nearly 15 years of experience supporting and leading upstart strategies ranging broad organizational improvement initiatives, recruitment programs, innovation frameworks, and technology implementations. During his career, he has served in roles at the California Independent System Operator (CAISO) in compliance, risk management, organizational effectiveness, and strategy, and as an organizational change management consultant with Tacoma Power on the Energy Imbalance Market (EIM) initiative, his most recent consulting engagement.  The EIM project at Tacoma Power required high levels of engagement across the utility and led to a strong understanding of the organization’s culture and the development of strong working relationships with its staff; from individual contributors to senior leaders.

Tim’s projects have required extensive facilitation, process development, planning, and communication.  He excels at understanding and communicating strategic context, always striving to bring a strong sense of purpose to any-given strategy.  Most notably, Tim relocated to Shanghai, China for four years to develop a long-term strategy for one of Asia’s leading internal education management companies, Dulwich College Management International, now Education in Motion.  Tim served as the director of Strategic Projects responsible for facilitating and producing the organization’s strategic plan, setting up the implementation framework, and leading several of its initiatives.  These initiatives spanned innovation, customer experience, recruitment, alumni engagement, and strategic partnerships.  Two projects he led was building functional and technical specifications and managing the procurement of two SaaS solutions; one related to Human Resources outreach and recruitment and the other for a customer relationship management platform.

It required the full gamut of strategy development from visioning and the development of guiding principles and a mission statement to translating these guiding statements into strategies.  It required engagement and facilitation across locations in China, South Korea, and Singapore, along with an extensive group-wide marketing and communication plan.  At that point in time, the group had campuses on five geographical locations with 5,000 students enrolled, and it sought double in size pretty rapidly.  It unified under a single vision focused on education innovation and adopted a common brand, and within a few years grew to eight campuses with enrollment of 8,000 students and launched a new strategy in the Chinese domestic education market.  The company now has 12 campuses and more than 10,000 students enrolled across East Asia, is a premium education provider in all of its markets, and formed a new company focused on education innovation and funding new global education initiatives.

Tim transitioned back to the United States in 2015, and continued working on strategy and business development initiatives for clients in East Asia up to 2020 before joining Toba Consulting later that year.  He holds a Master’s Degree in Organizational Development.  Tim has also served his community by serving as a parent representative on local education boards, committee member on regional small-business advancement initiatives, and as a youth athletic coach for baseball, basketball, and American football teams.