- 30+ years as an operator inside founder-led businesses
- Scaled a company from startup to ~$5M in annual revenue
- Rebuilt a 35% churn rate to 6% — a process fix, not a product fix
- Walked away from an acquisition mid-due-diligence as the buyer
- 10 years of bookkeeping — reads financials the way a buyer does
- Led operations across CS, HR, purchasing, finance, and marketing
- Trained life and business coach
- Maximum 2 clients at a time — always
Built From the
Inside Out.
I started at the bottom of a founder-led business in 1992 — customer service, no title, no real framework. Over eight years at Wildfire Pacific, I moved through every function: customer service, bookkeeping, accounts receivable, purchasing, and eventually operations management. I also built the company's marketing department from scratch — there wasn't one, and then there was. I didn't plan to be an operator. I kept seeing what needed to be fixed and fixing it.
At Prepared Response, I spent fourteen years building something I'm still proud of. The company mapped the interiors of public buildings — schools, hospitals, government facilities — so that police and fire departments could navigate them in an emergency. The data had to be consistent, accurate, and readable under pressure. That meant every photo had to be taken the same way, every data point entered to the same standard, every site mapped by the same process regardless of who was doing it. I built those standards. I built the training programs that got teams of up to 35 people executing them the same way every time. It took years to get right. When we did, it was the most well-oiled operation I've ever been part of — so consistent that when something went sideways, it was immediately obvious. That kind of system doesn't happen by accident. And that clarity is exactly what I build for clients preparing to sell.
Later, at InvestorFuse, I inherited a 35% churn rate in the first 30 days of a SaaS product. The instinct is to blame the product. The problem was the onboarding process. I rebuilt it from scratch — kickoff calls, white-glove setup, structured training at the right moments — and brought that rate down to 6%. I also rebuilt operations, overhauled the knowledge base, and built AI-powered automation that freed up a full headcount worth of capacity. The founder eventually sold the business for $2 million. His words: "Rachel is the reason I was able to sell." That's not a product story. It's a systems story. And almost every problem I see in businesses preparing for sale is a systems story too.
"I've also walked away from an acquisition. We were the buyer."
We got deep into due diligence on a business that looked solid on paper — and then found the 1099 issues and the key-person risk. We walked away. The seller lost the deal because of exactly the kind of problems I now fix before a buyer ever shows up.
Most businesses in the $1M–$5M range are built around one person. The owner is the system. The owner is the relationship. The owner is the institutional memory. That's not a flaw — it's how these businesses get built. But it's also why they're hard to sell. The work I do changes that: I come in, get inside the business, and build the infrastructure that makes it genuinely transferable to someone else.
I work with two clients at a time — maximum. The work is hands-on, daily, and built around one outcome: a business that can sell on your terms, at a number that reflects what it's actually worth.
How I'm Wired
My Working Genius is Discernment and Invention — I read situations quickly and accurately, and I build solutions rather than just diagnosing problems. My Kolbe is a Quick Start 7: I don't need 30 days of discovery to know what to do. I come in, I see it, and I move. For a four-month sprint, that's not a style preference — it's how the work actually gets done. I'm also an INFJ, which means I see patterns and long-term implications that aren't always obvious yet. That matters when you're trying to anticipate what a buyer will find six months from now.