NICK RICHTSMEIER
Polymathic strategist.
Cultural navigator.
Extraction liberator.
Nick has spent the last 25 years mapmaking across the maze of technology, culture, commerce, and community. The hopelessness drowning the 21st century is based on a false premise that the version of economy and society we are offered is the only one available. That there is a permanent war between prosperity and the marketplace. As the creator of Trust-Made Growth®, Nick challenges these false premises and reshapes the conversation about our journey from Extraction to Expansion. He is a transformational teacher, advisor, and ally to people committed to centering relationships, value, and liberation for every leader, venture, and community willing to do the work of rooting in the trust-made way.
“If we do not change course, the primary legacy of my generation will be cynicism. It doesn’t have to be this way. We are free to step away from our devices and our echo chambers and Give a Damn about the world and how its being made.”
THINKING IN SYSTEMS, CREATING WITH INTENTION
Trust-Made Growth®
THE VENTURE ECOSYSTEM
Addressing a 40-year decline in trust, Nick researched, built, and tested a comprehensive framework + method for liberating ventures from extraction, realigning them to the timeless ways humans build, collaborate, and buy.
The Undivided Leader™
THE FORMATION SYSTEM
The leadership conversation misses the demands of a cynicism-drenched, internet-driven economy. Trust-Made ventures need leaders undivided within themselves and across the venues they present themselves.
WORK WITH NICK
CultureCraft®
A STRATEGY HOUSE
Hire Nick and his team to analyze your venture’s exposure to and risk from the trustbroken economy and use the TMG sprints to produce sustainable growth.
CultureCraft delivers proven programs for competitive positioning, M&A strategy and implementation, and strategic alignment to organic growth motions, lowering risk and friction for growing firms.
Trust-Made Guild
COLLEAGUES + PRO DEV
Virtual and in-person community forums for independent professionals and in-house leaders. Find your people and advance your career and your business in trust-made ways.
The Guild provides community and training resources for professionals whose primary job it is to leverage authority with founders and executives—department heads, fractionals, and coaches/consultants. We help you build the tools to grow and maintain authority.
Lexicon Farms
RETREATS AND COMMUNITY DEVELOPMENT
Building locally and bringing leaders together away from the noise of the internet. Experience nature, creativity, and re-embody your work and network.
What People Are Saying about Nick
"Masterfully good at steering the esoteric into the practical.”
— Tim Marple, PhD, Co-Director of Maiden Labs“Too many business strategists achieve their success by virtue of their charisma and personality, and their methodology is simply repackaged practices from leading books, business practices, etc. Nick brings to the table one of the sharpest minds I've ever encountered.”
— Peter Barber, Non-Profit Leader"Our planning sessions often feel like coaching sessions. You [Nick] help me be a better leader."
— Annie McCauley, President, Sequoia Financial
Nick’s growing library of trust-made training videos and deep dive interviews
RESOURCE LIBRARY
Bi-weekly episodes on how brains-on, heart-forward leaders go forward.
Long-form essays on current topics affecting trust-making leaders
Personal essays on media, the unseen, and glory of inefficiency
BIO
Nick laid the foundations of Trust-Made Growth®, a system for human-centered strategy in Denver, Colorado in the early 2000s, where he had his first brief career in the church world, and then as a Strategic Financial Advisor to families and small businesses. He was speaking on platforms of over 2000 people and training people twice my age in consultative work before I was 25. By 32, he was running my own multi-million dollar P&L.
Each season of the past 20 years of economic change produced disruption and cracks of opportunity for non-conventional thinking. He became obsessive about maximizing the gaps so more people could benefit from the progress all around us. Along the way, as he worked with dozens of leaders, trained over 200 consultants in his first draft framework, he found new friction into the consistently present bottlenecks, trust-breaking decisions, and stakeholder misalignment which stalled firm growth time and time again.
In the aftermath of the Great Recession, the value-structure of the American economy remaking itself again, he took leadership of all elements of business development including marketing, vendor relations, financial forecasting, and strategic planning for one of the fastest growing investment advisory firms
in the country, helping it grow from inception to $1 Billion in AUM in less than 36 months. Along the way, he championed client-centric change initiatives that raised the value of the firm to its clients, its employees and its owners.
By 2019, the culmination of this deep work led to the creation of CultureCraft®, a consultancy where Nick applied his breakthrough Trust-Made Growth® ecosystem to dozens in trust-forward industries like financial services, higher education, and technology, proving that the isolation, anxiety, and mental exhaustion endemic to the web's expansion was recognizable everywhere. The rise of AI, while holding potentiality for creative solutions, was being deployed in ways to only make this situation worse. His almost 20 years bringing consultants and founders back to human-first principles and giving them control back over their outcomes is more important than ever.
Now, he shares his Trust-Made Growth® Ecology in his book, The Damn Rules (available fall 2026), through the Trust-Made Growth® Guild, and with the growing lineup of Trust-Made Growth® Strategists. He’s on a mission to free trust-forward ventures from the extraction economy, rooting themselves in the timeless way ventures build, collaborate, and grow.
Nick lives with his wife and three teenage sons on a legacy acreage outside Des Moines, Iowa.