Lynn Trepp, Founder/Consultant

Lynn Trepp has a background in creative product design and design thinking in addition to finance and strategy.

Finance + Strategy

Lynn has advised countless startup entrepreneurs and small business owners in starting, operating, and growing their businesses.

Earlier in her career, Lynn served as Small Business Administration (SBA) Region 10, Director, Veterans Business Outreach Center (VBOC) where she advised military veteran entrepreneurs in starting, growing, and financing businesses.

VBOC itself was an entrepreneurial venture, a new SBA Region 10 project.  As Director, Lynn launched and built this new SBA regional business advisory program from the ground up across 4 states and 3 time zones, taking it from 0 to 2,000+ military veteran entrepreneur clients in 4 years, with $250M in client total cumulative revenues.

Lynn is currently Adjunct Faculty, Business and International Business at North Seattle College. In this role, she initiated a special project for international marketing students to develop innovative products to solve real problems in the Sahara region of water access, filtering, transportation and storage (National Science Foundation grant).

Design + Design Thinking

Recently (summer 2024), Lynn was project lead of a 3-person team in a national design competition (BetterBlock.org). Lynn’s team was selected as a top 10 finalist for their design of two urban seating pieces for outdoor public spaces.

Lynn designed and built a product line of contemporary style stone clocks that were distributed wholesale and retail.

For several years, Lynn served as Adjunct Faculty (Online), Design Thinking, NewSchool of Architecture + Design (San Diego) and University of Petroleum + Energy Studies (Dehradun, India), which were partner universities. Lynn equipped 200+ students in India with design thinking tools to tackle individual projects that addressed engineering, design and/or business problems and opportunities.

Earlier, Lynn resided in Beijing, China, where she served as Faculty, 3D Product Design/Industrial Design at Raffles Design Institute. Lynn mentored student teams in collaborative design of sustainable, innovative products. She helped teams understand how to balance or trade off product attributes such as function, features, form, object history, cultural meaning, user interactive experience, context, technology, innovation, manufacturability, sustainability, quality, performance, production cost, value-based pricing, corporate strategy, brand identity.

Education

Lynn Trepp earned an M.B.A. at University of Southern California, Marshall School of Business.

She earned a Certificate, Design Thinking, from MIT Sloan School of Management.

Lynn also studied Corporate Finance at U.C. Berkeley Extension.

Lynn earned a B.F.A., Industrial Design at University of Washington.