My favorite childhood story, naturally, was about turn-of-the-century efficiency experts

I loved Cheaper by the Dozen — not because I wanted more siblings, but because the parents optimized everything. While the book described children mortified by their father's efficiency methods, I was in my bedroom trying to replicate them.

That instinct made me excellent at my job. I spent 20 years running customer, marketing, and go-to-market teams and sitting on the executive teams above them, scaling teams to 70+ people, managing hundreds of millions in ARR, and leading teams through mergers while retaining 100% of my people when everyone else fled. I was the person to whom companies handed something nebulous and asked to deliver. I redesigned workflows, implemented change management strategies, and built the infrastructure that made chaos manageable for both customers and teams.

It also made me the default fixer everywhere else. At home, I'm a stepmother navigating blended family dynamics and extended family politics. I'm the holiday organizer, the unaccredited therapist, the project manager of situations that were never mine to begin with. The person everyone turns to when they don’t know where to go or what to do.

Smart, capable people aren’t short on discipline. They’re under-infrastructured (not a word, but it should be). They're managing complexity across multiple domains — work, family, health, relationships — with systems designed for people who only have one job.

After two decades of fixing other people's organizational chaos, I realized I didn't want another VP role where I'd build systems that broke after I left. I wanted to help people build their own.

Now, as an advisor, I help executives design Life Architecture for their actual lives — custom infrastructure that accounts for your reality: managing inputs, developing rhythms, and adjusting for the season of life you're in. Systems that still work on the day you're exhausted and three things are on fire.

My approach is the Life Architecture Framework:

• Get Clear → Direction + Inputs (What are you trying to do, and what's coming at you?)

• Get Sorted → Filters + Containers (What stays, what goes, and where does it live?)

• Get Going → Rhythms + Seasons (How do you move forward sustainably?)

I bring 20 years of executive operations expertise, ICF coaching certification, a professional inability to pretend a bad plan is fine, and humor. Because if you can't find some humor in being everyone’s problem-solver, you'll drown.

What I believe:

The people who "step in" aren't martyrs; we're pragmatists who see what needs to happen and know no one else will do it. But we still deserve systems that make our lives manageable.

That's what I build. For myself. For my clients. And through my writing, for anyone who's ever been told "you've got this" when you've got it, but you don't necessarily want it.

If you're managing everything and infrastructured for nothing, let's talk.

If you want a sense of how I think — and how I live the complexity I'm describing — I write about it in Stepping In It on Substack. Essays every Tuesday about blended families, workplace dysfunction, and the absurdity of being everyone's default problem-solver. It's where the unpolished version lives.

Also, if you haven’t read “Cheaper by the Dozen,” and are not familiar with Lillian Moller Gilbreth, at least read her Wikipedia page. Not enough people are talking about this absolutely legendary scientist who was breaking gender barriers early and often.