Hi, I’m Katie.
I've been working with business leaders for 15 years — the last five spent as a fractional COO, in the room, making the hard calls. I've built the ops, restructured the teams, implemented the systems, and sat in more leadership meetings than I can count.
Along the way, I noticed a pattern. When a business is small, the founder does every job, and many never stop. They're still the visionary, the top salesperson and the final approver years later, and the business can only move as fast as they can.
An engineer's eye for logic and risk
I'm an engineer by training. That background taught me how to think: logic, problem-solving, and, above all, risk management. Find the risks that actually matter, and deal with those first.
It's how I help owners hand off a role. You don't need certainty. You need to know what could go wrong, what you're willing to accept, and what to watch. It also made me constitutionally incapable of accepting "that's just how it's always been done" as an answer.
Why I stopped doing everything else
I’ve come to realize that the part of my work I love isn’t the implementation. It’s the conversation. Sitting across from a founder, hearing about the real problem underneath the surface problem, and helping them think through it until the answer becomes obvious.
After years of working alongside leadership teams, I’ve realized the root problem is often that the business relies too heavily on the owner, making the owner the bottleneck.
So I stopped doing everything else. No more fractional COO work. No more implementation projects and playbooks. Just the part that matters most: being the thinking partner that helps overloaded owners define their role and hand off the rest.
Wondering how a thinking partner is different from a coach or a consultant? I wrote a guide to help you decide.
Outside the advisory room
I live in Vancouver, BC with my husband and two kids. When I’m not advising business leaders, I’m making art, strumming my ukulele (badly but enthusiastically), playing in the mountains and ocean, and practicing what I preach — designing my life first and letting the business serve it.
Curious to know more about my philosophy? Check out my newsletter.
If you're still doing every job in the business you built, I'd love to hear what's on your mind.