Onyx Collective
Who We Are
Onyx Collective is a management advisory firm that helps organizations turn complex priorities into clear decisions, coordinated execution, and measurable value.
Onyx reflects strength, depth, and distinction. Collective reflects how we work and how we grow, bringing together the experience, expertise, and perspectives of diverse professionals across disciplines to help organizations solve challenges and achieve meaningful results.
We work with executives, boards, and leadership teams across Transformation and Finance & Governance Advisory, helping organizations align strategy, operations, resources, technology, governance, and performance.
Our work is grounded in a simple idea: meaningful change happens when the pieces of the organization work together.
The Onyx Difference
Onyx Collective approaches complex challenges as connected systems, not isolated problems. We look across strategy, operations, finance, governance, technology, people, and performance to understand how decisions in one area affect the rest of the organization.
We translate that perspective into practical action- clarifying priorities, redesigning work, strengthening decision-making, aligning accountability, and creating the structures leaders need to execute with confidence.
Our work is designed to deliver:
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Clarity around what matters most and where leadership attention is required
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Alignment between strategy, resources, operating decisions, and execution
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Stronger operating discipline through clearer processes, roles, governance, and accountability
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Better decisions supported by meaningful financial, operational, and performance insight
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Adaptability so organizations can respond to changing conditions without losing strategic direction
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Measurable value with a clear connection between investment, action, and outcomes
The result is not simply a recommendation or a plan. It is an organization better equipped to make decisions, execute priorities, and sustain performance.
Leadership
Erika L. Fareed
Founder & Managing Principal
I have spent more than two decades helping organizations solve complex problems, make better decisions, and turn strategy into results. My career has taken me from management consulting at EY, through more than a decade at Pfizer where I worked across internal audit, strategy, operations, customer engagement, service delivery, innovation, process improvement, and transformation, and most recently to senior enterprise transformation leadership at AstraZeneca. Across my career, my work has also spanned finance, governance, AI and digital transformation, and large-scale organizational change. I am a Certified Public Accountant, Certified Six Sigma Black Belt, Certified Scrum Master, and Certified Scrum Product Owner.
My perspective is also shaped by public service. I served as a City Councilmember in Glenarden, Maryland, and I currently serve as a gubernatorial Financial Expert appointee to the Maryland Uninsured Employers’ Fund Board where I am Board Vice Chair and the Finance & Audit Committee Chair. Those roles have given me firsthand experience with the realities of public-sector governance: balancing competing priorities, operating within statutory and budget constraints, exercising oversight, stewarding public resources, and making decisions in an environment where transparency and accountability matter deeply.
Across all of those experiences, I have learned that the hardest business problems are rarely confined to one function. Strategy affects operations. Financial decisions affect capacity and execution. Technology changes the work, the roles, and the governance around it. And even the strongest strategy can stall if the organization is not equipped to deliver it. I have built my career working across those intersections, bringing together the people, information, decisions, and disciplines needed to move an organization forward.
I bring the full breadth of that experience to my work with clients today. I understand the pressure leaders face to produce results, but I also know that the path to those results looks different depending on the organization, its stakeholders, and the environment in which it operates. My approach is practical by design. I work to understand the problem in context, get clear on the outcome, and build a path that can actually work in the real world.
I founded Onyx Collective to bring my experience across strategy, transformation, finance, governance, operations, and technology to organizations that need more than a recommendation. I want my clients to leave our work with greater clarity, stronger ways of working, better decisions, and an organization that is more capable of delivering what comes next.