A decade in the COO seat.
Priya spent a decade as COO across three owner-operated firms at three different stages of growth — a specialty manufacturer in the Northeast, a design studio in Los Angeles, and a regional logistics company in Texas. Different industries, different owners, different scale. The same recurring trap. Owners would describe a hire as a person (“someone who can just get things done”) and then post a job ad written in that register. Three to six months later, the role was still slipping. She watched it happen across three companies and started writing things down — scorecards before resumes, problems before job ads, 30-60-90s measured against the owner’s reclaimed calendar. Eventually she stopped operating and started coaching the upstream half full time.
What Priya coaches now.
Priya leads the hiring pillar. Most of the owners she works with arrive with a role they have rewritten three times and not yet posted, or with a hire that did great at thirty days and faded by sixty. The work is upstream — writing the problem the role is solving before the job ad, naming the three decisions the role removes from the owner’s plate, and putting the day-30 and day-60 conversations on the calendar before anyone needs them.
She will not say culture fit. She will not let you skip the problem statement. And she will not coach you through a search she thinks belongs at a recruiter.