Empowering Leaders in Aging, Health Policy and Strategy

Tess Advisors provides expert leadership, research, and technical support to organizations advancing U.S. aging and post-acute care policy.

We help equip senior leaders with the insight, tools, and mentorship needed to win, execute, and deliver high-impact health policy solutions.

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The Challenge

A historic wave of departures in health policy has left organizations facing deep and widening knowledge gaps.

If you work in health and aging policy, you need strong research, analysis and dissemination strategies to improve care and quality of life for aging adults. You also need to position your organization for new growth and emerging funding opportunities. 

But when an organization is stretched thin, that mission starts to feel like a distant second to simply keeping operations afloat. The proactive work — developing senior staff, building a pipeline, strengthening the foundation — keeps getting pushed to later. This is where Tess Advisors can help.

How we help

When the organizations advancing aging policy are strong, more people get to age with dignity and choice.

Tess Advisors works with small federal contractors and health policy organizations to help them grow, deliver, and sustain meaningful work in aging, post-acute care and Medicare/Medicaid policy.

We bring together deep policy expertise and the business development and mentoring know-how that helps organizations win new work, deliver it with excellence, and build the teams to sustain it. The result is a team that’s more capable, a pipeline that’s more visible, and, ultimately, better outcomes for aging Americans.

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What we do

We help organizations win new business, strengthen their teams, and translate aging policy research into action.

Tess Advisors works across business development, staff mentoring, and aging policy expertise — bringing senior-level experience to the areas where small federal contractors and health policy organizations need it most.

We come in to build the capacity that makes our clients less dependent on outside help over time — and more capable of doing their best work long after we’ve stepped back.

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Health Policy Research and Translation

Providing expertise in aging policy, post-acute care quality, Medicare and Medicaid programs, or similar fields.

  • A health services researcher needed help preparing a manuscript for publication. We improved the draft manuscript through narrowing the aging policy focus and clearly linking the research to current age-friendly policy initiatives.

Operational Excellence

Implementing and optimizing business processes, mentoring and training senior staff, fostering a culture of continuous improvement, and enhancing relationships with clients and partners.

  • A not-for-profit organization with a mission to advance health and scientific knowledge for a better world found itself competing for more numerous but smaller federal health contracts than previously. We mentored senior researchers to learn from past proposals, enhance strategic positioning with partners and clients, use new tools and templates, and increase capture and proposal efficiency through more shared ownership between departments.

Business Development and Strategy

Capturing opportunities, conducting color reviews, facilitating strategic planning, competitive analysis, positioning, and developing both short- and long-term opportunity pipelines.

  • A small federal contractor had grown substantially in size and revenue, and needed both a strategic plan to manage growth and a process for developing and maintaining an opportunity pipeline. After our work together, the company doubled its win rate and achieved $20M in new business.

Meet Terry Moore

Three decades in aging policy taught me that the work and the mission are inseparable.

I started Tess Advisors to continue promoting quality care for aging and disabled adults, through health policy translation, research and advocacy. While working in corporate settings doing health services research, I helped shape some of the field’s foundational quality measurement tools, from early nursing home quality indicators to the five-star rating system Medicare uses today. An early career in nursing grounded me in the human side of that work before I ever set foot in a policy research organization.

The name “Tess” comes from a nickname my mother gave me — from Theresa, the Greek word for “to gather” or “harvest.” She lived with Alzheimer’s, and caring for her alongside my family made this mission personal in ways that still shape how I show up for the organizations I work with today.

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  • You have been such a pillar of our growth … Your leadership [has] challenged us to think differently, examine our assumptions, and build excellence into our organization and processes.

  • You are a strong and trusted leader, full of knowledge and wisdom - I learned so much from you!

  • You have been such an inspiration for our work … I’ve learned so much from how you approach projects, your openness to new ideas, and your leadership.

  • You encourage everyone around you to think critically and continuously improve, and I so appreciate that I was able to learn from your example.

Working together

Collaborative by nature, and committed to excellence.

I bring a calm, organized, and deeply experienced presence to every engagement — working side-by-side with project and proposal teams to solve real problems, not handing down recommendations from a distance. I listen carefully, give honest and direct feedback, and push for the level of excellence this work deserves.

Clients often tell me that having someone senior enough to shoulder the leadership burden changes how they show up to the work. I help teams build processes that are replicable long after I’ve stepped back.

My goal is never to make myself indispensable; it’s to leave every organization more capable than I found it.

Get in touch

Let’s talk.

Whether you’re looking to advance aging policy work, grow your federal health business, or strengthen your team, I’d love to learn more about what you’re working on and how I can help.