I kept getting pulled into rooms where the lane didn’t exist yet — where the problems were tangled, the stakes were high, and no one could quite figure out who was supposed to handle it.
Early in my career I worked inside banking and finance, where I quickly learned I had no interest in pushing packaged solutions onto people who didn’t actually need them. Later I moved into nonprofit leadership, where I learned a very different skill: how to build real organizations with limited resources, messy realities, and very human teams.
You learn very quickly in lean environments that culture isn’t a slogan and leadership isn’t theoretical. If the structure doesn’t work, people feel it immediately.
Over time my work expanded across a wide range of organizations — from professional service firms navigating growth to companies managing complex multi-state employment realities, and everything in between.
I was sitting outside my Airbnb staring out at the ocean, in the middle of my own transition. My son was about to leave for college. My career was shifting again. Several things in my life that once felt stable suddenly weren’t.
Everything felt uncertain at once. And somewhere in that moment a realization surfaced that I couldn’t shake:
Every meaningful transition has a messy middle.
It’s the stage where what used to work doesn’t anymore, but what comes next hasn’t fully taken shape yet. I had spent years helping companies navigate that exact moment — founders stepping into bigger roles, teams stretching faster than their structure allowed, organizations evolving in ways their systems weren’t designed for.
You'll probably find me on a kayak, wandering through a fisherman's village somewhere in Europe, or doing something fashion-related that has absolutely nothing to do with organizational architecture.