Mary Pat Blake
Blake Strategic Consulting Founder and President
Mary Pat Blake is a veteran senior executive with 30 years of experience in the broadband, emerging technologies / technologies, telecommunications, and consumer products industries who founded St. Louis-based Blake Strategic Consulting in 2002, with offices in Minneapolis, Milwaukee and Cincinnati.
Prior to forming the company, Ms. Blake was a member of the executive team of Charter Communications, the fourth largest broadband company in the United States, until 2001. She served on the Executive Committee and as Senior Vice President of Marketing, Programming, and Advertising Sales. Ms. Blake helped build the firm from a start-up to a Top 10 company in four years. When Charter was sold in 1998 to Paul Allen, co-founder of Microsoft for $4.5 Billion, she helped mastermind and manage the dramatic growth of Charter to the fourth largest broadband company in the United States. Charter was an industry leader in customer growth (4 times the industry pace) and financial performance during her tenure. This also marked the period of the company’s successful IPO and expansion into new services including high speed Internet, digital TV, video on demand and interactive TV. In her duties on the Executive Committee, she and the senior management group steered all strategies and policies of the company.
Ms. Blake has extensive experience in strategy development, product development, marketing, advertising, brand building, public relations, sales, operations, finance and new business startups. She has held other senior management positions with companies including General Mills, The Taco Bell Division of PepsiCo, Brown Group, The West Coast Group – Strategic Marketing Consulting, and Automatic Data Processing.
She is an experienced entrepreneur also having founded, managed and sold a retail business named Dakota Coffee & Bakery Company in St. Louis, in addition to co-founding a start-up national service company named Home Boulevard. In 2002, she was the Marketing Advisor for CTAM (Cable and Telecommunications Association for Marketing), the professional marketing association for these industries.
Ms. Blake is a nationally known business lecturer and keynote speaker on the topics of business ethics in the 21st Century, marketing strategies, and entrepreneurial ventures. She has been recognized with industry awards and honors including “Cable’s Most Powerful Women” by Cablevision Magazine, and St. Louis’ “Most Influential Business Women” by the St. Louis Business Journal.
She graduated from Harvard Business School with a Master of Business Administration, and she completed her undergraduate degree in business from the Carlson School of Management at the University of Minnesota where she graduated Phi Beta Kappa and summa cum laude.
Ms. Blake is active in her community serving on the board directors with Enterprise Bank & Trust and the University of Minnesota Carlson School of Management.