Twenty years at the seam.
Hi, I'm Angela. I've spent twenty years working the seam between strategy and the day-to-day, almost always alongside founders and CEOs figuring out what comes next. Different industries, different stages — the pattern of the work has stayed the same.
Big company, then small. Both, deliberately.
I started in marketing at UBS and worked my way into the transformational initiatives that drive real change inside a Fortune 500. NYU Stern gave me the formal grounding in leadership and change management. From there I led digital transformation at Lincoln Financial, then went back to the small side as second-in-command at a startup, riding it through scale-up and a merger.
And then I built ARL Elevate, so I could do that same work with more than one company at a time.
Change is the part most leaders try to manage around.
I think it's the part most worth getting good at. The companies I've watched grow well over twenty years aren't the ones that managed to avoid change. They're the ones that got organized for it, deliberately and without flinching, and made it part of how they operate rather than something that happened to them.
Your superpower can't be having all the answers all the time.
Family, the kitchen, and the trail.
Outside the work, life is family, time in the kitchen, and time on the trail. I'm a real hiker, which is to say the "see over the mountain" framing I use with clients is a literal one as much as it's a metaphor. I'm also a New York / New Jersey native, which is the polite way of saying I don't sugarcoat. That tends to be exactly what the work needs.