Jess Knox founded Olympico Strategies in July of 2012. Olympico helps companies and organizations create movements, embrace change, and drive innovative processes and solutions. They do this with a system-wide, cross-disciplinary, and relational approach to growth, change and performance. Along with private sector clients, Jess utilizes his diverse background in grassroots community building, government service, legal training and private sector consulting, to build transformational events, initiatives, and programs for public organizations of all kinds.

Since 2013, Jess has assisted Blackstone Accelerates Growth build a movement of intentional communities of innovation across Maine with more than 125 events and more than 6,500 collisions between people, ideas and resources. He also founded Maine’s largest event for innovators and entrepreneurs, Maine Startup & Create Week, that annually brings more than 3000 people from 21 states to Portland, Maine. Beyond helping grow another initiative, StartupPortland, Jess writes a blog for the Bangor Daily News, called Disruptive Growth, focusing on telling the stories of Maine entrepreneurs and innovators.

In 2009, Jess served as a member of the Obama Administration where he was appointed to the Small Business Administration to serve as the Associate Administrator for Field Operations. He managed more than 1000 employees in 119 locations, in every state and US territory, or about half all of the Agency’s employees. During his tenure at the SBA, he also led a ground-breaking effort to re-engineer the Agency’s employee performance system. He built an innovative program that involved and empowered the Agency’s frontline career employees and managers to drive a more informed and sophisticated performance system focused on recruiting, retaining and developing the best employees in the Federal space. By focusing on the end user and the Agency’s ability to deliver tangible on-the-ground value to small business owners, detailed and measurable metrics were developed for the first time in the Agency’s history to properly measure its office’s impact for taxpayers across the country.

Prior to his time in the Federal Government, Jess ran his own grassroots political consulting firm. In that capacity, Jess worked on ballot initiatives and candidate campaigns in more than 30 states.

He has a law degree from the University Maine School of Law. Prior to law school, Jess pursued a Masters Degree in Public Policy and Public Organization Management from the Edmund S. Muskie School of Public Service, and received a Bachelors Degree from Ohio Wesleyan University.