Gary Adamson

Gary Adamson has devoted his entire career to expanding the boundaries of what’s possible. He began his career in 1978 as Vice-President of Swedish Health Systems in Denver, where he started the nation’s first and most comprehensive hospital-based wellness program and consulted with hundreds of hospitals on how to build healthier communities.

In 1983, he began a new business venture, Unison Marketing and Communications. Over the next sixteen years, Gary worked in every part of the country with health systems, hospitals, foundations, medical groups, health plans, healthcare associations and a wide-variety of businesses to develop unified innovations in strategy, operations, and communications. In 1993, he merged Unison with Medimetirx, a managed care consulting company and the combined company was an INC 500 Fastest Growing Privately Held Company two years in a row.

Through this work, he consistently found a detrimental gap between the brand promise that organizations made and the brand experience. Given this, he set out to find the most innovative thinking and best people to help solve this complex business challenge. From this, Starizon Studio was born. In 1999, he co-founded Starizon Studio with the purpose of helping organizations intentionally design the experiences that would significantly transform them and strengthen their brand success. To that end, he created the proprietary 6-I’s Experience® Process, which is critical to the exploration and discovery employed with Starizon Studio members. Starizon Studio has helped transform businesses in a wide variety of industries and it too has been recognized as an INC 500 company.

In 2010, he set out not to improve the salon and spa experience, but to transform it. He cofounded Quattra Via and partnered with Aveda, an international salon and spa company, to apply the 6-I’s Experience® Process to the design of an elemental beauty gallery that caters to both inner and outer beauty.

He is a highly rated speaker at regional, national, and international conferences. He is also co-author of The Complete* Guide to Transforming the Patient Experience (HCPro, 2009) and a wide variety of journal articles on the subjects of customer and staff experiences. Gary received his Masters Degree in Health Administration from the University of Colorado to which he attributes much of his forward thinking skills to the time he spent there with noted healthcare futurist Lee Kaiser. His undergraduate degree is from the University of Notre Dame, to which he attributes his occasional mood swings during the fall football season.