Meet Patrick Grau

Managing Director Empowering Stratosphere’s Remote Workforce To Deliver Excellence

Stratosphere’s newly arrived Managing Director understands the challenges remote workers face in obtaining human contact and vital support that comes more easily in a shared workplace. But Patrick Grau also knows, from experience, that a people-first culture can transcend location and empower employees to deliver superior service to their clients.

Before joining Stratosphere in January, Patrick was a senior manager at Ernst & Young, a position he entered in 2019 just as the team transitioned to fully remote work as a pandemic response. Then his wife, Dr. Kara Corps, was diagnosed with breast cancer and began an arduous treatment program.

“I was fully remote and having the most challenging year I could have, both professionally and personally,” Patrick recalls. “I needed the people at EY to put their money where their mouth was on living that people-first culture, and they did. They let me work, let me provide value in the way that worked for me, and gave me the absolute best support anybody could ask for. For the rest of my career, I will be impacted by what EY did for me through those moments.”

Patrick is keen to empower a similar culture at Stratosphere, emphasizing the value of teamwork, group problem-solving, servant leadership and putting people first. The Stratosphere Helps program will create opportunities for team members to live that corporate culture as they support each other and the people in their communities.

A mentor at Michigan State University named Tom Luccock taught Patrick early on that investing in people is a key to business success. He credits that experience with helping him land his first job and setting him on a career path in system architecture and enterprise consulting.

Investing in individuals at Stratosphere will take several forms under Patrick’s leadership. “I get the exquisite opportunity to help Stratosphere enable not just five people but 50, and eventually 100 or more, to make their journeys,” he says. “Whether they deliver value to clients or deliver support to our people for their personal growth, our operational challenge is to provide them with the tools to realize their potential while working in a remote-first organization.”

By putting in place skill sets and processes that help team members work more efficiently, he hopes to ease day-to-day tasks and give people greater freedom to focus on clients, family and communities. He is also excited about hiring talented individuals to experience Stratosphere’s culture and the positive impact it is making for clients.

As Patrick observes, in just eight years Stratosphere has scaled vertically from a two-person startup to a force of 50, providing expert case management and consulting while developing Pega marketplace solutions. Moving forward, Grau is intent on broadening the recruiting pipeline to fuel horizontal expansion, enlarging the team to serve additional clients and helping them grow using a wider range of platforms.

Stratosphere’s lean structure ties team members directly to the organization’s performance, Patrick says, and that formed part of the attraction that drew him to the job. “I wanted to have skin in the game in a way that was elusive in big-company consulting,” says Patrick, whose resume includes project management roles on Pega implementations at Accenture and Bank of America. “I wanted to feel more connected to the success and growth of the company and more personally invested than you ever can be in a 300,000-person behemoth.”

He has found that direct connection at Stratosphere. “We are not a cookie-cutter organization,” he says. “There are no general employees here. Every single person is in a role that matters, either aligned to a client or internally.”

In the coming weeks, Patrick will focus on making connections and developing genuine relationships inside and outside the firm, learning the needs and goals of employees and clients to become a better ally for both. “I want to open up our capabilities to clients in ways they’ve not considered yet,” he says.

Those team members and clients will soon learn that Patrick is a Boston Red Sox fan and is “more Miller Lite than champagne,” he says. They will also discover a true advocate of work-life balance, corporate culture, and excellence in remote work.

At their home in Dublin, Ohio, Pat and his wife share a passion for restoring vintage pinball machines and enjoy sharing their collection by hosting pinball dinner parties. Kara is a professor in the pathology department at Ohio State University. Devoted to the study and cure of cancer, she previously worked at the National Institutes of Health in Washington, D.C.

“She’s my anchor and I’ve followed her about,” he says. “I’ve been lucky to have remote positions that give us the opportunity to be a family wherever she decides to teach.”