Every principal reaches a point where the business outgrows what they can personally hold in their head. On a 10-person team closing $53.5M in a nine-month span, I was the person who held the rest, the systems, the deal pipeline, the financial detail, and the follow-through, so leadership could spend their attention on clients and growth instead of on whether the machine was running.
The team was producing at a high level on the strength of individual talent, but the operation underneath was improvised. Priorities lived in people's heads, the daily read on the business took an hour and a half to assemble by hand, and the details that quietly kill deals, a mispriced board package, a commission calculated on the wrong split, a listing stuck in compliance limbo, had no systematic safety net. I was brought in to build the layer that made execution reliable and gave leadership something they could trust without re-checking it themselves.
Leadership was flying on instinct and a 90-minute manual briefing. I architected a dual-AI reporting system across Gmail, Calendar, Sheets, the Compass CRM, Domecile, StreetEasy, and Zapier that reconciled seven data sources into a trustworthy daily briefing in 20 minutes. The point was not speed; it was that leadership could open one document each morning and know exactly where the business stood, without asking anyone.
I ran a live pipeline of 30+ simultaneous transactions from $450K to a $15.5M top deal, across co-op, condo, townhouse, sponsor-unit, and estate-sale structures, from contract to close. Owning it end to end meant leadership never had to wonder which deal needed attention; the system surfaced it, and I had already moved on it.
A good operator is not a bottleneck. I built a 12-document SOP library across the full buyer and seller cycles, a template system of 14 transaction emails, a fillable REBNY financial statement, and a branded offer form, then a knowledge-extraction process from recorded meetings so the team's operating knowledge lived in systems rather than in my head. I hired and trained a virtual assistant and a transaction coordinator against those systems, with weekly quality reviews, and scaled capacity beyond myself.
I ran the listing marketing operation rather than just executing pieces of it. I moved the team off basic StreetEasy exposure and built targeted Google Ads campaigns aimed at real buyer segments, and I ran the pre-listing groundwork myself, comparative market analysis and property research, so every listing reached the market with accurate pricing and a complete, defensible set of property details. Leadership handed me a raw listing and got back one that was positioned, marketed, and ready.
I ran the weekly client newsletter to 1,000+ contacts and the biweekly seller reports with comp analysis and pricing recommendations. This is the steady, visible cadence clients feel, and it ran without leadership having to think about it.
Across all of it, the job was the same one a chief of staff does: take the operational weight off the people at the top, exercise judgment in their place on the things that matter, and build the systems that let a business grow past what any one person can personally hold. That is the work I want to do next, at a larger scale.
Compass CRM · Gmail · Google Sheets · Zapier · Domecile · StreetEasy · Claude