* Photograph by Shane Van Boxtel / Image Studios
New Sage Strategies
After seeing several of her clients recognized with the Women of Influence in the New North Region award, Vicki Updike says it’s especially gratifying to be recognized as a mentor among the 2025 honorees, eight years after starting her consulting business New Sage Strategies with the goal of helping business leaders, especially women leaders, become their best.
In many ways, she’s paying it forward. Stan Krangle, who was Updike’s boss at Silver Star Brands when she was serving as the company’s vice president of marketing and merchandising, made it clear upon announcing his retirement that he wanted Updike to succeed him as president and set her up for success.
“Not many women get that in their career,” Updike says. “So for me to have someone like that, [I wanted] to turn around and say, ‘whom can I give that to?’”
Today, as president/owner of New Sage Strategies, founder/executive director of both the Women’s Leadership Conference and High School Girls Leadership Conference, and founder/executive director of SHE LEADS, Updike specializes in setting other women leaders up for success.
What she loved most about her corporate career was developing people, Updike says, so taking the entrepreneurial leap was for her all about devoting all her time and energy to that important work. She leads women’s resource groups, provides one-on-one coaching and advises businesses.
“My effort was really about elevating women, and actually what was super frustrating is that the challenges I had 20 years ago are still there,” Updike says. “I had seen the same roadblocks people were seeing, so to be able to coach and advise around those roadblocks was where I found a lot of those lightbulb moments.”
Some of those roadblocks include women’s voices not being heard, men taking credit for women’s ideas, women being talked over and the nagging inner critic, she says.
In 2019, Updike seized the opportunity to broaden her impact when she founded the Women’s Leadership Conference to provide a space for Northeast Wisconsin women from all walks of life and levels of leadership to come together, network and lean into one another. The event drew 250 attendees its first year and has grown annually ever since — reaching a record 800 participants last year.
Resonant topics from the conference have included confidence and time management, Updike says. In 2024, she created the High School Girls Leadership Conference to reach women with these important messages at an even earlier age. She also serves that youth population with in-school workshops.
Updike says she firmly believes that “if you take care of women, you take care of the community, because women take care of the community.”
“Research has shown over and over again that diversity at the executive level and diversity in leadership teams drives stronger results,” she says. “So it’s not a ‘nice to have.’ It’s an important business issue.”
A Green Bay native, Updike says she has always considered Northeast Wisconsin home and is proud to be doing her work in the community where she raised her own children. She says her mentorship goal is for the women of our region to “see how smart and strong they really are.”
“So often we minimize our impact, we minimize our technical ability, and we do that to ourselves,” she says. “And if I can put the mirror up for these women and show them how awesome they really are, I’m doing my job.”
