Gillikin & Associates launched in the spring of 2018 as a full-service consultancy focused on —
- Data-driven revenue strategy optimized for founders and SMBs,
- Operational effectiveness and quality management, and
- Compliance management and ethical stewardship.
We enjoy experience in a variety of industries, including health care delivery, health insurance, heavy manufacturing, online and bricks-and-mortar retail, book and magazine publishing, direct sales, jewelry, higher education leadership, and association leadership.
Business Services
Gillikin & Associates serves small- and medium-sized businesses. We typically work with senior staff, including C-suite leaders, to hone corporate strategy guidance or to function as a contracted CIO or chief analytics officer. We offer special expertise in program development, program evaluation, and quality-improvement initiatives.
Recent Engagements
Some of the work we’ve executed in recent years includes:
Analytics & Revenue Strategy
- Developed the executive revenue dashboards for a large jewelry company based in the American South. Included participation on weekly C-suite level revenue- and product-strategy conversations.
- Designed and built a complete analytics solution for predictive analytics for a growing U.S.-based online retailer.
- Modeled two complex trip incentives for corporate sales fields, to incentivize revenue growth while ensuring the program earned at least a 10x multiplier on the award investment.
- Serve as the functional equivalent of a chief analytics officer for a Midwestern reseller with roughly $10M in annual sales, building core IT infrastructure (ticketing systems, file servers, email servers, DNS mappings) and co-administering a vendor-developed back-end sales platform.
Operational Effectiveness and Quality Management
- Served on the board of directors of the National Association for Healthcare Quality through mid-2018. Previously served as a director/officer of the Michigan Association for Healthcare Quality.
- Co-architected the course curriculum and content for one of three courses in an undergraduate certificate program in population health analysis, for a university in the American West.
- Participated as an expert technical reviewer for the fourth edition of HQ Solutions: Resource for the Healthcare Quality Professional released in 2018.
- Developed the “MIRACLES model” of complex project management tools for analytics/quality teams embedded within larger (and politically decentralized) enterprises.
Compliance Management and Ethical Stewardship
- Built the technical infrastructure for the corporate compliance program for a direct-sales company with $50M to $100M in annual revenue. Serve as contracted chief compliance officer, overseeing subcontracted compliance auditors as well as the day-to-day success of the program. Participated in complete overhaul of the company’s policy-and-procedure manual for the sales field in early 2023.
- Sat on the technical working group for the 2021 revision of the Ethical Guidelines for Statistical Practice of the American Statistical Association.
- Participated as team co-chair and principal author of the 2018 revision of the Code of Ethics and the Code of Conduct of the National Association for Healthcare Quality.
- Serve on the advisory board of a National Science Foundation grant, “Normalizing Ethical Reasoning in Mathematics as a Foundation for Ethical STEM,” co-led by Piercey, Buell, and Tractenberg.
Our Principal
Jason Gillikin, CPHQ, LSSGB, is the founder and principal consultant of the agency.
Jason earned a B.A. from Western Michigan University, with majors in applied ethics and quantitative political theory and minors in history, Latin, and comparative religion, and then remained at WMU for graduate-level study in professional and applied ethics. He obtained the Certified Professional in Healthcare Quality credential more than 15 years ago, as well as certification as a Lean Six Sigma Green Belt. He has spent more than 20 years with a foot in two different industries.
In the healthcare sector, he worked through a large academic medical hospital system, eventually leading a team of a dozen analysts responsible for systems administration and data analysis for front-end revenue-cycle operations. Simultaneously, he volunteered with the hospital’s Medical Executive for four years to administer the institution’s fledgling biomedical ethics program. He later spent an additional four years managing a team of five-to-eight analysts at a health insurance company; his portfolio included exploratory clinical analytics as well as ROI quantification and sign-off on all the projects within the health plan’s enterprise project-management portfolio. In 2016, he managed the health plan’s annual HEDIS accreditation process and signed off on the accreditation paperwork on behalf of the CEO.
In the publishing sector, he rose through the ranks at a small daily community newspaper, eventually serving a year-long stint as editor-in-chief of a full-color daily broadsheet with eight full-time section editors and more than 60 string writers and photographers. After that, he maintained consulting agreements with several national media corporations to draft, edit, or renovate evergreen content on Top 100 websites. In the mid 2010s he and a group of colleagues launched a small publishing company and quarterly literary journal, which ended with the Coronavirus pandemic, and today he leads a small press and literary non-profit organization, with a semiannual literary journal and a regional literary-awards program.
Jason enjoys backcountry hiking, kayaking, scuba diving, and flying small airplanes. He is a karate instructor, a Wilderness First Responder, an over-equipped but under-performing amateur photographer, and the butler to several cats.
Our Associates
We partner with a select group of fellow consultants based in West Michigan to augment or extend our capability on more complex contracts.