Organizational Consulting
From seed round to exit, your startup will change and evolve more than you can imagine. What you need at 10 people is different than at 75, 150, or 350. With 25 years of working with startups at all stages, I can help guide your growth.
I will help you start, scale, and operate while running lean. Utilize the skills and competencies of your people, allowing everyone to do their best work, in order to create products and services that express your vision.
My secret sauce is building cultures that promote an ownership mindset, agency, collaboration, and accountability. I help build companies where people love to work.
“Just Enough” People Stuff
As an early startup or small business, you want to focus your resources on those who build your products and services as much as possible. You may be utilizing outsourced HR or have a single internal person focused on the basics, but what about the rest?
I partner with you to build just enough:
- Advising & mentoring programs to ensure your employees are well-supported and gaining skills quickly
- Career ladders to help your employees understand how they can become more senior in your context
- Incentives that align with the business outcomes you need, rather than work at cross-purposes
- Light-weight processes for performance reviews, goal setting, and managing underperforming people
- Training on giving and receiving feedback, with an emphasis on continuous, daily interactions
- Simple onboarding programs for employees that evolve as your company changes
- Effective interview processes
Conflict & Relationship Coaching
Getting the unicorns to run in the same direction can be tough. Whether it’s founders that don’t see eye to eye, executive teams that don’t engage in healthy conflict, or two engineers that are openly disrespectful with each other, relationship dysfunction can derail your execution fast.
I train and mentor on how to have healthy and productive conflict, so you can build amazing products and services.
Where interpersonal issues are interfering with the execution of your team or organization, I offer relationship coaching to get to the heart of what’s happening, understand how to repair and rebuild the relationship, and learn how to get back on track.
Intentional Culture, Structure, and Process
Build your company with intention.
Starting with the end in mind, together we’ll create the necessary structures, processes, and patterns to ensure that the culture is one that promotes your company values, and encourages your team members to do their best work.
As your startup grows, we’ll partner to tear down the structures and processes that no longer suit, and layer in new ones.
Depending on your needs, we will partner to build out or modify:
- Mission, Vision, Values
- Operating cadence
- Product discovery processes
- Software development lifecycle and associated patterns and practices
- Organizational structure and growth strategies
- Internal communications strategy and practices
Reviews
Molly B., VP of Engineering
“Elise works at all levels of an organization to guide building out the right amount of people and process structure required for effective team execution and team member growth. By enabling a culture of empowerment and agency of the team members, Elise can help a young organization find creative ways to make the best use of all its team members while helping the leadership team fill key gaps through skill development or targeted hiring. This approach enables the organization to get the most out of their engineering and product team investments.”
Chris L., Director of Customer Success
“Elise and her team were instrumental in Qumulo’s early success not only from an engineering perspective, but also for the Customer Success teams which I had the privilege to lead. Elise enabled our teams to achieve industry leading levels of efficiency, product quality and customer focus.”
Dahlia Season Consulting 