I built a leadership framework from 20 years of operating experience —
not a whiteboard. The actual work.

About
Monika

AT&T was where I first understood what scale actually demands of a leader. Managing capital forecasting and analytics for $1.5B+ in annual spend across 60,000+ projects — with a team of six and a forecasting methodology I built that the company adopted nationally — that's where I learned what rigor looks like at scale, and what it costs when a system breaks under $4B in capital.

From there I moved to Mycom, where I inherited a finance operation losing $1M a month and rebuilt the operating model across five lines of business — creating visibility where there had been none and getting the bleeding under control. When the business had to make cuts, I put my hand up. A team member of mine had a baby on the way and had just relocated his family across several states for this role. I wasn't going to let him carry that. I'd built everything — the systems, the processes, the reporting — and could continue supporting the business at a senior level as a contractor while he kept the day-to-day running. So I volunteered to go. Choosing people over convenience isn't a principle I talk about. It's a decision I've made.

What came next was Ringer Consulting Group — a boutique SaaS and consulting firm I built alongside its founder, who was also my husband. I led a team of 12, managing upward to the CEO and across every function from finance to client delivery. That experience taught me what it means to own an entire business, not just a function, and to lead people who trust you completely.

From there I moved into larger operating environments. At Landis+Gyr I brought discipline to complex 8–12 month enterprise RFP cycles, building the contract lifecycle infrastructure from the ground up.

At BeyondTrust I built the deals desk from zero — starting with three people and growing it to a team of 14, then taking over revenue operations for a combined org of 25. I didn't step into someone else's playbook. I wrote it. I rationalized 1,500+ SKUs down to 350, reduced PO holds from 40% to 12%, and redesigned Salesforce as the enterprise operating backbone including full CPQ architecture.

At Stratix I came in as VP of Commercial & Sales Success to bring structure to a business that had outgrown its operating model. I built out their SKU purchasing guide to create pricing clarity across a complex product mix, and overhauled the forecasting process from the ground up — introducing a confidence-based model that gave leadership a real read on where revenue was headed. Getting sellers to forecast differently is never just a systems problem. It's a communication and change management problem. I built the process, brought the sellers along, and gave the business visibility it hadn't had before.

What I'm most proud of isn't the metrics. It's the people. One analyst I brought onto my team had been written off by others — passed over, underestimated, left without a real path forward. I saw something different. I hired him on passion and invested in his growth. He became one of the strongest members of the team, and went on to build a leadership career of his own. That's what this framework is built on. Not just output. Growth that outlasts you.

Twenty years of building commercial engines across PE-backed companies taught me that the systems and the people are the same problem. You can't build infrastructure that holds without building leaders who hold it. That's why I built the Authentic Leadership Engine — a framework for exactly that: human-centered leadership with measurable results, built from the work, not from a whiteboard.