Sam Pettway (sam@boardwalkconsulting.com) is the founding director of BoardWalk Consulting, a firm committed to building strong foundations for nonprofits.®
Since 1977, Sam has advised scores of leadership teams in entities ranging from start-ups to mature multinationals, both for-profit and not-for-profit. Since founding BoardWalk in 2002, he has worked with clients as varied as national foundations, regional associations, and local nonprofits of many kinds. All of his clients share an interest in maximizing their impact through strategy-based insights, services, tools and people.
Before launching BoardWalk, Sam spent 25 years in board recruitment and executive search, the bulk of the time with two global consulting firms: Spencer Stuart, the world leader in board recruitment (1993-2002), and Egon Zehnder International, for which he opened and built the Atlanta office (1981-1993).
Throughout his career, Sam has been actively engaged in numerous nonprofits. He founded and remains vice chair of the board of the Atlanta Police Foundation. He is a trustee of one (private) grantmaking foundation and a member of the grants committee of another (public) grantmaking foundation. In 2010, Sam was asked to join the Council on Foundations' Committee on Inclusiveness, a national group working in partnership with the Council and its members to develop diversity and inclusiveness in philanthropic leadership, programs and services.
Sam is a frequent speaker and facilitator on issues of board governance, executive leadership and management transition. He has written for Harvard Business Review, Boardmember magazine, and Directors & Boards, and his articles have been redistributed widely by both BoardSource and Guidestar.
A Navy veteran, Sam holds a B.A. from the University of Virginia and an M.B.A. from Harvard Business School, which he has also served as a member of the global alumni association's board of trustees. Sam is a member of the Rotary Club of Atlanta and an active alumnus of Leadership Atlanta. Earlier, he was chair of the American Running Association and a board member of Blue Cross/Blue Shield of Virginia.
In 2004, Sam established the annual BoardWalk Governance Fellowships at Harvard Business School to support attendance by nonprofit trustees at executive education courses for board members. To date, BoardWalk has awarded 34 such trustee fellowships to Harvard. Earlier, while president of the Harvard Business School Club of Atlanta, Sam established a scholarship fund which now generates tens of thousands of dollars each year for scholarships for nonprofit executives to attend various executive courses at HBS.
Sam is a late-blooming athlete who completed the first of a dozen marathons shortly before his 50th birthday (he recently started training for #13--again). His wife, Barbara VanLandingham Pettway (an executive communications consultant), and his two sons, Cooper and Andrew (one a Washington-based consultant for the TSA and the other Atlanta's newest talent scout and drummer extraordinaire), are his most vigorous cheerleaders at his races--and often the only ones still there when he crosses the finish line!
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