Crista's Story

Early in my entrepreneurial journey, I felt like I was doing all the right things but no matter how hard I worked, my big goals and vision seemed just out of reach.

I worked around the clock, living on little sleep, loads of caffeine, and a whole lot of hope and determination. I consistently felt overworked and overwhelmed, and found myself wishing there were more hours in the day and more dollars in my bank account.

I was trying to hustle my way to success and after a couple years, all I had to show for it was a whole lot of debt and being on the verge of burnout. 

The thing was - I knew how to scale a business.  I had successfully done it for years as a business coach and consultant working with Fortune 50 businesses.  And I had done it in my own prior businesses.

Something wasn't adding up... so I took some time to really reflect on what was different about this business and why my jewelry business was struggling while the  companies I was coaching and consulting with were thriving. 

I had many realizations and I share them all on the Lean Out Your Business Podcast, but one in particular was the catalyst for starting my business, the Lean Out Method.

The big difference I found?

The businesses experiencing massive success were all lean.  And my jewelry business was far from lean. 

I had scaled it way too quickly, and without having taken the time to lean out the business first, I ended up scaling noise which resulted in making everything more expensive, more difficult to manage, and more difficult to sustain.

From the outside, it looked like the business was wildly successful.  We were at all the major tradeshows, in some of the top retailers in our niche... But it wasn't until I actually leaned out the business that the behind-the-scenes matched the outside illusion of success. 

This brought about the realization that so many big businesses were implementing a lean and agile way of working but so many small businesses had never heard of it. There was a whole world that they weren’t leveraging, and sadly neither was I in my own business before I had this epiphany.

So I created my Lean Scaling Method™, which I designed specifically with the busy entrepreneur in mind to utilize the same principles and practices that large companies had been using for decades to significantly scale beyond their competitors, skyrocket profits, and reduce complexities and overhead.

When I started using these same methods in my own businesses it was a total game changer, just as it has been for all of the small businesses I have consulted with over these past 2+ decades.

I believe that every business has the ability to be wildly successful!

But unfortunately, not every business owner has the right strategies, structure, or team to support turning their beautiful big bold vision into reality.

I'm on a mission to change that!

I created the Strategic Ops Institute to do things:

1. Connect brilliant but overworked CEOs with the right-hand person they need to scale their business in a simple and sustainable way.
   
   
2. Elevate the role of an Ops Leader to be a Strategy + Ops Leader (SOL) who is skilled at leading and scaling a small business, successfully getting the Founder and CEO out of the day to day.

I wanted to create a trusted place for becoming or finding an exceptional, skilled, and certified right-hand leader - which is what the Strategic Ops Institute is.