ABOUT

We turn complexity into decisions that hold. Prioritized. Executable. Under pressure.

Two women dressed in black suits posing on white cubes in a black-and-white studio photo, one seated and one standing, both with serious expressions.

Wendy Salisko (Left) & Deanna Andersen (Right), Co-Founders of WADE

Most advisory work ends when the advice is delivered. That’s when the hard part starts. 

You commit the capital. Mobilize the team. Walk into the buyer or board conversation. Then reality hits: the category shifts, the customer says no, the portfolio misses plan, or the “sure thing” pilot doesn’t convert.

WADE exists to close that gap. So the decision still holds after the meeting ends. 

We come from decades of operating experience where decisions carried real weight. We’ve owned P&Ls, built and scaled brands inside complex organizations, and made calls where timing, capital, and consumer trust were all on the line.

We’ve worked through retail expansion and contraction, platform shifts, margin pressure, and moments where a single decision shaped years of outcomes. We understand how decisions compound—operationally and financially—because we’ve lived them from the inside, and now help leaders navigate them with more clarity and control.

WENDY SALISKO

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  • Wendy is an operator at heart—calm in ambiguity, sharp on pattern, relentless about what actually works. She has spent two decades owning P&Ls, scaling brands through digital commerce transformation, leading global Amazon acceleration strategy, and managing over $1B in business with the world's largest retailers. She's sat in category reviews, negotiated joint business plans mid-quarter, and learned what breaks when the stakes are real. She is most often pulled into moments when growth, profitability, and retailer expectations are in tension. Her edge is knowing what matters: she's made the call on which SKUs stay, which bets get funded, and how to sequence a go-to-market when every function has a different priority. Wendy brings candor, courage, and challenge to every engagement—telling clients what's real, what's not working, and where to put their money and people next. 

DEANNA ANdERSEN

A black-and-white portrait of a woman with wavy, shoulder-length hair, wearing a dark textured turtleneck sweater, looking directly at the camera with a slight smile.

  • Deanna is an operator-advisor shaped by high-stakes decisions, where ambition is real, information is incomplete, and the cost of being wrong compounds. She built her career in the messy middle, where strategy meets execution and conviction has to survive real systems. Over two decades, she has owned P&Ls, led brand and commercial strategy in Fortune 500 environments, and advised boards and founders across the Big 4. Her edge is translation: she sees across ecosystems, pressure-tests assumptions, and turns narrative into choices that scale. She works at the moments that define trajectory, from capital allocation and inflection points to operating models under strain. Often the “third leg of the stool” between founders and capital, Deanna stabilizes the moment, separates signal from motion, and ensures movement in the right direction. She brings clarity, judgment, and certainty to what actually moves the business forward.

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HOW WE’RE DIFFERENT

Most advisors add frameworks. ¡ removes noise.

We combine earned operator judgment with real-world pressure-testing to surface what’s actually true, make trade-offs explicit, and deliver a sequence you can execute—without months of theatre or generic slideware.

what we believe

Capital accelerates

Capital can look shiny on day one. The pressure shows up right after.

Money is an accelerator, not a plan. Without advisory context, it turns every unclear decision into a deadline and makes small cracks compound fast.

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Operator context stabilizes

Growth gets messy when people are trying hard but pulling in different directions.

Context is simply getting everyone clear on what matters, who decides, what happens first, and what we are not doing right now.

Four black stones floating in water with bubbles around them.

Founders build

Founders care more than anyone because they built this from day one.

The risk is trying to carry it the same way forever. The job is turning that instinct and standards into decisions and execution the company can repeat without the founder in every room.


WADE helps you make the next move without making everything messier.  Clear decisions, clear ownership, and execution that holds when pressure hits.

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Formula: Operator Depth + Market Breadth

Together, WADE brings two capabilities rarely found in the same advisory relationship. Depth from lived operating. Breadth from advising across the Big 4.

Why does this matter? We've worked inside brands, retailers, platforms, and capital partners. We know how decisions actually play out—not just in theory, but in the room where the buyer reacts, where the pilot hits the org chart, where the new op model slows growth, where margin quietly leaks. 

The result: We see what others miss. We know which moves will hold and which ones break when reality hits. Because we’ve lived them.