About us
Built to give one kind of advice: the kind we'd act on ourselves.
River International was founded on a simple premise — that good strategy advice is rare not because it's hard to find smart people, but because it's hard to find advisors without an agenda of their own.
Leadership
Richard Kaung, Managing Partner
Richard has more than 30 years of strategy consulting and business operating experience, spanning growth strategy, business development, M&A, and product management.
Earlier in his career, he was a senior consultant at a top-tier global strategy firm and led a growth-strategy consulting practice within a marketing services firm. He has also held senior in-house leadership roles — including as an interim chief marketing officer and as a vice president of business development, global market development, and product management — at industrial, technology, and consumer organizations.
Richard holds an MBA from Harvard Business School and a B.S. in Engineering from Northwestern University.
Our approach
Every engagement follows the same discipline, adapted to the problem in front of us.
Understand
We start by learning your business from the inside — the numbers, the history, and the constraints no one puts in a deck.
Diagnose
We identify the two or three decisions that actually determine the outcome, and set the rest aside.
Decide
We build the case for a recommendation clearly enough that your team can stress-test it themselves.
Deliver
We stay through implementation, because a strategy is only as good as its execution.
What we value
Candor over comfort
We tell clients what we find, including when it isn't what they hoped to hear. That's the job.
Evidence over instinct
Opinions are cheap. We build our recommendations on data, interviews, and market evidence.
Small teams, senior people
We'd rather take on fewer engagements and staff each one with people who've done it before.
Plain language
If a recommendation can't be explained simply, it usually isn't ready yet.