Background
Built inside growth. Not outside it.
My name is Alex Tu. I've spent 20 years inside businesses — not advising from a distance, but carrying the actual weight of decisions that had real consequences.
I started in international procurement at Siemens Mobile, then moved into the photonics industry managing business development with Samsung and LG. From there I moved into brand strategy and product development in the Apple accessories space, before spending nearly a decade as the head of SUNMAI — a craft beverage brand where I led growth from USD 2M to USD 7M, expanded distribution to over 12,000 retail locations, and built partnerships with Five-Star hotels and major supermarket chains across multiple international markets.
60+ global design and brand awards including Red Dot. A full org restructuring. A complete SAP integration. An international market entry that had to work the first time.
I've run teams. Restructured organizations. Made the call when options were unclear and the cost of being wrong was real.
What I've learned from being inside it:
Most problems that surface during growth were designed much earlier — in how decisions got made, how roles were defined, how the business was structured before scale created pressure.
The quality of judgment before acceleration determines whether growth compounds or collapses.
I'm less interested in how fast something can grow than in whether it can grow without breaking what made it work.
Where I work now:
In 2022, I founded iNSPIRE STRATEGY to focus on the work I find most valuable — helping founders and operators make better decisions at inflection points.
Sometimes it's clarifying a market entry strategy. Sometimes it's untangling an org structure that's slowing execution. Increasingly, it's helping businesses figure out where AI and automation genuinely fit — and where they don't.
I'm based in Toronto, Canada, with active client engagements bridging North American and Asian markets. I work in English and Mandarin Chinese — which matters more than it sounds when the real conversations happen across cultures.
I work with a small number of clients at a time.
That's intentional.
