About Maestro
The standard behind the firm.
Excellence has a provenance
Maestro Consulting Group was founded in 2017 by James C. Sayno on a straightforward premise: the leaders and organizations best positioned to build lasting excellence are the ones who have studied it from the inside, not from a distance.
James spent two decades doing exactly that. He built the talent strategy behind Team USA's most decorated Olympic performance in history. He designed the people architecture that allowed Augusta National Golf Club to double its permanent workforce while preserving the traditions and culture that define one of the world's most exclusive private institutions. He helped Levi Strauss move 76 global leaders through a cultural transformation from a manufacturing identity to a retail innovation identity. He advised Fortune 500 companies at Deloitte on operating model redesign, technology transformation, and change leadership.
That career is the foundation of every engagement Maestro delivers. Not as a biography line, and not as a credential displayed on a wall. As the raw material from which every program, framework, and advisory relationship is built.
A career built in high-performance environments
James began his consulting career at Deloitte, where he advised clients in financial services and insurance on operating model transformation, organizational change, and technology implementation. The Deloitte training instilled a discipline of structured problem-solving, rigorous analysis, and deliverable-grade thinking that runs through every Maestro engagement today.
From Deloitte he joined the U.S. Olympic & Paralympic Committee, where he spent seven years as Director of Human Capital Talent and Rewards. During that time he served as a leader of the "Team Behind the Team" for three Olympic Games, built the USOPC's corporate university, developed hundreds of leaders across the Olympic and Paralympic movement, and led the talent pillar of the strategic moonshot that targeted 120 medals for Team USA at the 2016 Rio Olympic Games. That delegation returned as the most decorated American Olympic team in history.
At Nike, he was a senior director-level leader focused on total rewards engagement and business planning, building compensation capability for managers across 74,000 global team members and deepening expertise in how world-class consumer brands build and sustain their people systems.
He then joined Augusta National Golf Club as Senior Director of Human Resources, Talent and Inclusion, a role created specifically to build the people strategy and talent function for one of sport's most storied institutions. Over five years he doubled the permanent workforce from 339 to over 600 employees, reduced voluntary turnover by more than 50%, deployed over $15M in compensation programs, created the ANGC Connect Academy delivering over 20,000 development hours annually, directed the executive search process for approximately 20 senior leadership roles, and led the HR response to Hurricane Helene and COVID-19, achieving a 100% employee vaccination rate.
Maestro Consulting Group has operated throughout and alongside that career, growing from a side practice into the firm's primary focus since 2025.
How James works
James describes his primary capability as Experience Architecture: the ability to take a client's organizational context, strategic priorities, leadership framework, or industry environment and build a bespoke experiential leadership program or simulation around it. The Games Mode Simulation, built from seven years inside Olympic operations, is the clearest expression of that capability. So is the "Leading the LS&CO. Way" program built for Levi Strauss, which used IDEO design thinking methodology to move 76 global executives through a strategic cultural pivot in three days.
His facilitation style is inquiry-based rather than lecture-driven. He has been called "The Impact Guy" in the trade press for his ability to generate insight and drive action simultaneously. Participants describe his sessions as intense, introspective, and immediately applicable.
His advisory work is direct, grounded in operational experience, and free of the organizational agendas that often shape inside advice. Senior leaders working through an intense career moment, a strategic decision, or an organizational crisis find in him an advisor who has navigated equivalent situations personally and at scale.
Education and Credentials
James holds a Global MBA from the Thunderbird School of Global Management at Arizona State University, where he graduated with honors and served as President of student government. He completed Executive Development at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University. He holds a Bachelor of Arts in Economics from the University of Colorado Colorado Springs and earned his Global Professional in Human Resources (GPHR) certification from HRCI, a top 1% credential for HR Professionals worldwide.
He is also a Fourth Degree Black Belt in Kempo Karate, a discipline that informs both his personal philosophy and his approach to leadership development.
Augusta, Georgia
James lives in Augusta, Georgia with his spouse, two sons and a sassy Lagotto Romangnolo. The family relocated from Colorado in 2020, trading the Rocky Mountains for the Savannah River. Augusta is where Maestro Consulting Group is headquartered, and where the next chapter of the firm's work is being built.