For more than twenty years, Kara has sat at the table where the hardest decisions get made. She brings two things that rarely go together: the operational depth to run a company and the boardroom judgment to govern one. She does her best work in the moments that decide a company’s next decade: the shift from founder-led to institutionally run, the market entry that can’t misfire, the acquisition that has to land.

Deals rarely fail on the numbers. They fail on the cultural friction, the buried interpersonal risk, and the leadership gap no one wanted to name. Kara’s work at Stanford Graduate School of Business trained her to see it coming. The boards and family offices doing the most important work are the ones willing to examine not just the plan, but the people who own it.

As a fractional COO and CEO advisor, she works inside the company, not just the boardroom. She builds the executive team, sets the succession and compensation plans that survive scale, and closes the gap between how the business is run and how fast it’s growing.

On boards, she has done the work that actually tests a director: CEO succession, executive compensation, internal investigations, and crisis. She has done it across ESOP, venture and PE-backed, founder-owned, and nonprofit, which means she reads a cap table’s incentives before the first meeting starts.

Kara’s range comes from two decades leading global teams across five continents, through the regulatory friction and high-stakes negotiations that come with it. She has integrated a $2B acquisition into a global platform, led two exits, and scaled one company from $10M to $20M in eighteen months.

She has advised clients in pharma, retail, consumer goods, manufacturing, media, aerospace and defense, and financial services, often for founders and families building something meant to outlast them. Away from the boardroom she skis, cycles, and travels on purpose, reading what food, wine, and unfamiliar places reveal about how people decide and who they trust. That curiosity walks into every room with her.

If you’re a board weighing your next independent director, or a CEO staring down a decision that can’t go wrong, let’s talk before the decision, not after.