The founder and CEO of VPRG Consulting on finding the deal others miss, bringing unlikely partners together, and building revenue that lasts.
Christina Lindley, founder and CEO of VPRG Consulting, once approached a prospective customer on behalf of a company and was told no. The buyer needed greater scale and breadth than the initial offering could provide. Christina saw a way to meet that need by bringing competing businesses together.
She proposed that they collaborate on an offering for larger customers and led the work to make it happen. She structured and managed the combined offering of more than ten companies, then pitched and sold it to large clients. The result was multiple six-figure recurring annual contracts, secured collectively for the participating businesses.
“The buyer’s initial rejection told me exactly what we needed to solve,” she says.
That is the kind of work she now does for clients of her own. VPRG Consulting, her Las Vegas firm, helps companies, brands and individuals grow revenue through strategic partnerships, new business development and expansion of existing relationships. As she puts it in her profile, VPRG “helps companies find new revenue in the places they are already overlooking.”
For companies, the starting point might be an audience they have not fully monetized, an opportunity to enter a new market or an existing partnership with room to grow. Christina develops the commercial approach and pursues the deal, from identifying the right partner through the pitch, negotiation and ongoing relationship.
Reading the other side is a skill she sharpened at a poker table.
What Poker Taught Her About Decisions
Christina is a former professional poker player who won roughly $2 million in live and online poker during her career. She reached a televised World Poker Tour final table in Paris and was selected as a WPT Season XII “One to Watch.”
She’s clear about which came first. “I was drawn to poker because I was already good at reading people,” she says. “Playing professionally sharpened that skill dramatically.” It also gave her a place to do things she says she naturally enjoys: spot opportunities other people miss, solve puzzles, and think creatively about strategy.
A lot of that, she says, comes down to asking the right questions. “At the table, I’m asking myself: What is my opponent trying to accomplish? What am I assuming? What could I be missing? I bring that same curiosity into business.”
The same goes for risk. Christina is willing to pursue an unconventional opportunity after examining why it could work, what she could be missing, and what happens if she is wrong. Bringing competitors into the same offering is one example. The approach may be unexpected. The commercial reasoning still has to hold up.
One lesson she thinks people underestimate is how a decision gets judged afterward. She wants results, and she wants to know whether the reasoning and execution behind them are worth repeating.
“Good decisions can produce bad outcomes, and bad decisions can produce good ones. I want to understand whether my reasoning was sound, whether I used the information available, and how well I executed. Otherwise, you can mistake luck for a strategy worth repeating.”
Christina Lindley, Founder & CEO, VPRG Consulting
For Christina, that discipline is part of a larger pattern. “That’s the throughline across my career,” she says: “understanding people and combining strategic discipline with creative problem-solving.”
Revenue Leadership and Board Service
Her career has taken her through professional poker, executive revenue roles, nonprofit boards, and, in her words, “even the entertainment industry as an actress.” That chapter included film and television work as a SAG-AFTRA actor, with credits and appearances including The Marine, Entourage, Curb Your Enthusiasm, Nick Cannon Presents: Wild ’N Out, and The Capture of the Green River Killer. Her broader entertainment and modeling career also included 35 magazine covers and a role as a national spokesmodel for Bodybuilding.com.
At College Loan Corporation, she served as Director of Business Development and later Vice President of Business Development. She led strategy and execution for business development and sales, built and managed the national sales and business development team, and achieved a 360% increase in new business for a product line she led during her tenure.
As VP of Revenue & Partnerships at Bold.org, she led revenue and partnership initiatives spanning retail, beauty, health, fitness, education, finance and market research. She also closed celebrity scholarship partnerships.
The nonprofit work ran alongside. Christina now serves as President of the Board of Jazz Empowers, a role she has held since January 2025. Earlier, as chair of its Corporate Sponsorship Committee and a member of its Board of Advisors, she increased corporate sponsorships by 200% in six months. She also served on the board of The Exceptional Sidekick, which provides trained psychiatric service dogs to teens and young adults, where she drove corporate sponsorship partnerships and managed grant applications.
She founded VPRG Consulting in 2024. The firm draws on more than 20 years of her experience in sales, business development, strategic partnerships, and revenue generation. Its work spans education and EdTech, financial services and FinTech, retail and consumer brands, gaming, loyalty and rewards, media and entertainment, market research, and nonprofits. It also works with individual athletes and personalities on sponsorships and commercial partnerships.
No Two Partnerships Are Alike
A list of industries only tells Christina so much about the work ahead. “No two partnerships are ever exactly alike, even within the same industry,” she says. “Knowing the vertical doesn’t tell you everything you need to know about the deal.”
The consistent part, she says, is understanding the people involved: what each person needs, what problems they’re facing and what a successful outcome would look like for them. Then comes the structure, which she describes as “a win-win-win, where everyone involved has a reason to want it to work.”
“To me, building a partnership is a creative process. Each one is almost a work of art. You can bring experience and judgment from previous deals, but you still have to understand the people and solve the problem in front of you.”
Christina Lindley, Founder & CEO, VPRG Consulting
One of the questions she says VPRG analyzes with clients shows how that works in practice: “What do you already have that customers value, and is there another way to monetize or distribute it that you haven’t considered yet?”
She applied that question when The Food Institute asked her to comment on movie theaters delivering concessions. Theaters already have the infrastructure, recognizable products and a snack people specifically crave. In her commentary, she suggested a possible next step: order concessions tonight, get a credit toward a movie next weekend. A delivery order could become a reason to come back to the theater.
“Sometimes the answer is popcorn,” she wrote.
What She Changed Her Mind About
Asked what she once believed about growth and no longer does, Christina doesn’t disown the appetite. “I still love growth, and I still love making money. I’m just much more deliberate about making sure the business can handle what we’re bringing in.” For her clients, that means looking at what it will take to turn a promising deal into business they can deliver.
When new users, customers and partners arrive, she says, the operations need to be ready. Her questions are specific. Where is the revenue going? What needs to be funded next? Can the systems support the volume? Who is responsible for making sure the business delivers?
“I want those questions answered before we’re trying to figure them out in the middle of a big expansion,” she says. “A major partnership should be something the business is equipped to take full advantage of.”
She brings the same questioning to the negotiation itself.
Who Really Has the Upper Hand
If a founder came to her convinced they held the stronger position in a deal, Christina says she would start with a question: “What makes you think you have the upper hand?” What does the other side actually need? What alternatives do they have? “I’d want to separate what we know from what we’re assuming,” she says.
Then she would ask what the relationship could be worth over time.
“You can get the maximum payout on one deal and still leave a lot of money on the table. If the other side feels taken advantage of, you’ve made it harder to renew, expand, or do anything together again.”
Christina Lindley, Founder & CEO, VPRG Consulting
She is negotiating on her client’s behalf, with their commercial interests in mind. The point of understanding the partner is to negotiate terms that work now and leave room for more business later. A partner with a reason to keep investing in the relationship can be valuable to her client long after the first deal.
For her clients, she says, she is looking for partnerships with the potential to generate recurring revenue over time, with both sides getting real value. “So I’d negotiate with the next deal in mind, too,” she says.
Where Christina Is Now
Christina is now applying that range to companies looking for growth beyond their original markets. Through VPRG, she works with ScholarshipOwl and Besitos / KashKick to develop partnerships and revenue opportunities in new verticals. Her work with ScholarshipOwl has expanded its partnership strategy into market research, consumer rewards, and other buyers outside the traditional education market. For Besitos / KashKick, she has developed opportunities across media, creator marketing, employment platforms, education, and sports.
Her work has also included StudentChoice, where she expanded the partner footprint and strengthened the channel strategy behind its education-finance business. Across these engagements, she identifies where a company’s audience or offering has value to a new buyer, builds the commercial proposition, and pursues the relationship through negotiation and execution.
In September, she spent Groceryshop in Las Vegas at the booth of VPRG client Besitos / KashKick, meeting grocery, retail, CPG and consumer brands about what rewarded gaming could bring to their businesses. Her pitch was short. “Give customers a reason to open your app or visit your site between shopping trips,” she wrote. “A game they enjoy. Rewards they want to earn. Something worth coming back for.” Her invitation to those brands was equally specific: “Bring me the customer behavior you’d like to change, and we can explore whether there’s a fit.”
She sees commercial potential in mobile gaming and rewards, including for brands that would never call themselves gaming companies. That is part of what keeps the work interesting to her: bringing new brands, people, and ideas into conversations they might never have had otherwise.
Her poker life has resurfaced in another way, too. When Greg Mueller and Michael Gagliano, two friends from her professional playing days, both reached the 2026 World Series of Poker Main Event final table, Christina put together a four-part interview series for BroBible and conducted the interviews alongside Brandon Wenerd. It was their first catch-up in about 15 years. She brought access to the players and the questions of someone who knew what it felt like to be on their side of the table.
Her board leadership at Jazz Empowers supports a national nonprofit that starts and sustains jazz programs in underserved schools. The organization reports reaching more than 58,000 students across more than 1,000 schools in 46 states. Christina is also an MBA candidate at the Gies College of Business at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.
Writing is becoming a larger part of that work. Alongside her interviews and published commentary on business and decision-making, she is writing a book.
She works directly with founders, CEOs, and revenue leaders looking to enter a market, build a partnership channel, or expand an existing relationship. She stays involved from finding and qualifying the right partner and making the commercial case through negotiation, legal review with the client’s team, and the work of keeping the relationship productive. The opportunity in an existing relationship matters to her as much as the prospect of a new one.
“I want the other side looking for more ways to work with us when this deal is done.”
Five Lines from Christina’s Diary
- “Don’t scale your workload; scale your judgment and leverage.”
ValiantCEO interview, excerpted in VPRG Insights
- “Having an opinion is not the same thing as having an edge.”
The Almanor
- “A large deal you have no structural reason to win is not an opportunity. It is a distraction wearing a big number.”
Size the Bet to the Read, BBN Times
- “Ads can introduce you. They cannot make an unsupported claim believable.”
TechRound
- “The jobs that will remain most valuable are jobs with consequences.”
Woman Founded
From the Diary of Christina Lindley
Christina Lindley is the Founder and CEO of VPRG Consulting, a writer, and President of the Board of Jazz Empowers. Based in Las Vegas, Nevada, she is a former professional film and television actor and professional poker player. She previously served as VP of Revenue & Partnerships at Bold.org and Vice President of Business Development at College Loan Corporation.
Outside work, Christina enjoys adventuring, hiking, Pilates, travel, art, writing, and a good horror film.
Editor’s Note
Christina Lindley answers a question about poker with a point about how to judge a decision, and a question about negotiating with a question of her own. The competitors deal gives those answers a concrete example: a rejection, read closely, becomes an offering that competing businesses can sell together. She conceived the approach, structured the offering and sold it. Her answers stay close to the work behind the deal.
Executives Diary, Editorial
