LET’S WORK TOGETHER
If you’re a mission-driven organization navigating growth, transition, or cultural realignment and you need someone who can see what’s really happening beneath the surface and build systems that honor your story, let’s talk.
I work with organizations that:
- Have outgrown their current systems but aren’t ready for a full-time COO
- Are experiencing friction between how they say they work and how work actually gets done
- Need strategic and operational leadership integrated, not siloed
- Value culture as much as efficiency
- Are willing to invest in systems even when it feels slow
MY BACKGROUND
The Professional Journey
Tech Entrepreneur & Startup Founder
I’ve worn almost every hat: Chief Technical Officer, Chief Marketing Officer, Chief Operating Officer, Chief Executive Officer. I’ve built companies from scratch, scaled them, and sold them. I know what it’s like to operate with limited resources, pivot under pressure, and make every dollar count.
Nonprofit Executive Director
I founded and led a 5,000-member organization for women in tech, navigating the unique challenges of mission-driven work: stakeholder management, values-led decision-making, board dynamics, and balancing impact with sustainability.
Operational Co-Founder
As operational co-founder of Everpurse (now part of Kate Spade) and technical and operational co-founder of Ellementa, I built the back-end infrastructure that allowed innovative ideas to scale. I know how to take a vision and translate it into systems that work.
Documentary Filmmaker
For two decades, I’ve produced films and conducted hundreds of interviews, learning to ask questions that reveal truth and weave complex stories into coherent narratives. I bring this listening skill to my operational work.
MBA in Organizational Psychology
I have the theoretical foundation to back up the practical experience. But more importantly, I understand that culture eats strategy for breakfast, and no system works if it doesn’t fit how people actually behave.
WHAT I BELIEVE
Guiding Principles
The map is not the territory.
Official org charts, policies, and strategic plans are useful but they’re abstractions. The real work is understanding how your organization actually operates.
Change fails when it doesn’t fit the existing story.
You can’t just overlay new systems on top of old culture. You have to honor the narrative that’s already there while creating space for what comes next.
Small organizations need different operations.
Corporate best practices don’t translate to mission-driven organizations with limited resources. You need systems designed for your reality.
Culture is operational.
The way people actually behave, communicate, and make decisions IS your operational infrastructure. Ignore it at your peril.
Growth doesn’t have to mean losing what makes you special.
You can professionalize without bureaucratizing. You can scale without sacrificing culture. It just requires intentional design.
Systems are stories.
Every process, workflow, and policy tells a story about what you value and how you work. Make sure they’re telling the right one.
WHY I DO THIS WORK
Organizations Are Living Systems
Most operational consultants treat organizations like machines that need fixing. I treat them like ecosystems that need understanding.
I learned this as a documentary filmmaker. You can’t walk into a story with a predetermined narrative and expect to capture truth. You have to listen. You have to observe. You have to understand the terrain before you know what story you’re telling.
The same is true for organizations. The official org chart, the strategic plan, the policy manual? Those are maps. But the map is not the territory. The real story of your organization lives in how decisions actually get made, what language people use, where the bottlenecks are, and what workarounds people have invented.
My work starts with mapping that territory. Only then can we build systems that actually fit.
Based in Chicago, I work with start-ups and mission-driven organizations that need both the narrative and the operations to scale. If this sounds like you, give me a call.