Get real return from your most important business asset, your people.
I partner with you to co-create how you hire, lead, and run your team so you can make confident calls and your people actually drive the business forward.
I work with founders, entrepreneurs, and business owners.
Sound Familiar?
Who is modern day teams for?
I work with founders, entrepreneurs, and business owners.
Here's what usually brings them to me.
There's no people playbook yet.
Early hires, first leadership moves, and the culture conversations that set the tone. You're building the team that will build the company.
Leadership that grows with your business.
What got you here was instinct, hustle, and being in every decision. What comes next is a different kind of leadership: enabling others instead of doing it all yourself.
Scaling the team you have.
Teams outgrow their early ways of working. Roles evolve, structures shift, and culture needs tending. This is the work of building an organization that scales with clarity.
Why founders trust this work
Bringing Big 4 rigor and startup scrappiness to the people side of your business.
What I Help With
The people challenges that show up as your business grows
Every business hits these moments. Let’s work through what’s getting in the way of working well together.
Let’s talk about your businessLeadership
Leadership development
Build self-awareness, understand how your team experiences you, and change the habits that get in the way of their success.
Trust, delegation, and letting go
Give people the authority and support to move work forward without everything coming back to you.
Co-founders & business partners
When your partnership gets in the way of the business
Understand your own patterns and each other’s perspective, work through disagreements, and agree on responsibilities and decisions.
Hiring & team design
Hiring that actually aligns
Define the role you need and hire for the skills, values, and ways of working your business needs.
New leader integration
Help new leaders build trust, understand expectations, and find their footing with the team.
Team & culture
Culture that scales intentionally
Turn your values into everyday decisions, habits, and expectations as the business grows.
Team alignment
Build shared purpose, agree on priorities, and clarify who owns what.
Retention, morale, and engagement
Understand what’s making people disengage or leave—and address what’s driving it.
People & AI
Building your agent team
Build agents with defined roles, responsibilities, and workflows around the work your business needs done.
Leading people and agents
Decide what people own, what agents handle, and where human judgment stays essential.
Services
Ways we can work together
Tell me what’s happening with your people, which conversations you’re putting off, or what you want to make possible for your business. We’ll figure out where I can help and what working together could look like - with the scope and investment agreed upfront.
Focused projects
A defined engagement to work through a particular challenge or transition and develop a practical way forward.
A specific people challenge or transition you want to tackle with a clear scope.
- Interviews and synthesis
- Facilitated sessions
- Working agreements
- Building and testing a new workflow
Ongoing people strategy
A partner for the people decisions that keep landing on your desk, from changing roles to supporting managers.
Founders weighing hires, navigating tension, or wondering whether the way the team works still fits where the business is going.
- Someone who knows your business
- Decisions worked through together
- Support putting changes into practice
- Help thinking ahead, not just reacting
Workshop design & facilitation
I design and facilitate workshops for retreats, offsites, and events.
Teams planning a retreat, offsite, or event. Have something else in mind? Let’s explore it.
- Leadership development
- Team building
- The people side of AI
- Career growth
Selected Work
Work in action
From hiring decisions to partnership tensions to how leaders learn - here’s what the people side of business looks like in practice.
Early Education Franchise
15 employees · New Jersey
Hires weren’t aligning with the culture, good people were leaving, and new leaders were stepping into roles without the trust of their teams. I ran a people strategy diagnostic to uncover how those challenges connected and delivered a roadmap with values-based interview questions, a listening tour for the new director, and recurring recognition and connection practices to sustain energy beyond one-off events.
Series C AI Company
281 employees · California
A venture-backed AI company serving Fortune 500 clients needed consulting-pedigree talent across leadership, Customer Success, and Transformation. As a talent advisor on this engagement, I drew on my Big 4 background and consulting network to run targeted searches. I also built its talent partner a recruiting strategy and operating system—clarifying what each role needed to deliver and giving recruiters a consistent way to find, assess, and engage candidates, with clear ownership from outreach to handoff.
Creative Studio
5 employees · California
A strained co-founder partnership was holding up the business: decisions kept reopening, responsibilities overlapped, and disagreements remained unresolved. Through facilitated sessions, I helped both partners understand each other’s experience, examine their own impact, and uncover hidden patterns that were keeping them stuck. I delivered a partnership roadmap and practical tools to clarify decision authority and work through disagreement.
All Raise
31 registrants · Nationwide, U.S.
In partnership with All Raise, I designed and facilitated multiple leadership development cohort sessions for female investors at associate through principal levels. Participants represented firms including Comcast Ventures, BBG Ventures, and Energy Impact Partners. Through reflection and peer dialogue, they explored their strengths, envisioned their next chapter, and set concrete goals with accountability built in even after they left the room.
Technology Company
Manager development · 90-minute workshop design
Leadership communication expectations were defined, but the challenge was making them part of everyday work. I designed a manager practice lab connecting self-awareness, peer feedback, and rehearsal of difficult conversations, including those about AI and changing work. Deliverables included a facilitator plan, conversation tools, an AI practice-space design, and a month-long peer follow-up plan designed to carry learning into real conversations beyond the workshop.
Testimonials
What clients say
Like many entrepreneurs running a growing business, I was constantly managing the usual pressure points — staffing, retention, morale, and growth. The people side of the business often kept getting pushed aside because there was always something more urgent demanding attention.
What I realized through working with Niki is that investing in your team isn’t just about hiring or filling positions — it’s a strategic part of building a strong, sustainable business.
When I initially came to her for hiring advice, her questions helped uncover deeper opportunities around team connection, leadership trust, culture, and the daily systems that support long-term growth. Together, we built a plan that aligned how I lead and invest in my team with the bigger vision I have for my business.
If you’re growing a business and trying to navigate the people side more intentionally and strategically, I highly recommend working with Niki.
Rashi J.
Early Education Franchise Owner & Operator
Niki and her team are different. This group has authentic intention. We applied affirmative frameworks to our challenges and envisioned what we want to achieve. It was a success with excellent connection.
Product Manager
High-growth medical device startup
Nikita has an obvious passion for the human side of business and shows clear interest in motivating our team, promoting an inclusive, uplifting culture, and utilizing each member's strengths for the achievement of collective team goals.
Founding Team Member
Early-stage startup
Nikita was a pleasure to work with. Her organization, clarity, and refined content made it easy to create a high-value experience for our program participants. Our audience is venture capitalists who are short on time and seek a high-impact experience.
Program Manager
All Raise (nonprofit serving the VC ecosystem)
Published Research
How Founder Leadership Shapes Startup Culture
Published research from Pepperdine exploring 5 leadership pillars that turn culture into a growth advantage. Based on interviews with 11 founders across diverse industries. 1,167+ downloads.
About
Experience that translates
I've spent 10+ years on the people side of work. I've lived in both worlds: Big 4 structure (ex-EY, leading 25+ recruiting searches with 90% acceptance) meets startup scrappiness (co-founder/COO who built people infrastructure from scratch, recruiting 100+ experts).
With an MS in Organization Development from Pepperdine and published research on how founder leadership shapes startup culture, I bring rigorous academic grounding to practical, hands-on work across 4 continents.
I care about questions like: How do you build people systems that grow with you, not against you? How do you create change that actually sticks? What's getting in the way of the next version of your team?
I Also Work With
Individuals and builders
Beyond working with founders, I bring the same depth to two other areas.
Shaping Modern Careers | AI Layoff Coach (Lina)
Job loss can shake your sense of identity, stability, and direction no matter how experienced you are. It's a human experience, not just a professional one.
I built layoff.coach to offer accessible, judgment-free support for people navigating layoffs. It's an AI-powered career transition coach grounded in my 10+ years of people strategy and career transition work, helping people process what happened, regain clarity, and move forward with intention - available anytime.
This isn't a replacement for personalized coaching. It's immediate, thoughtful support when people need it most.
Newsletter
How Will We Work
Career transitions, modern people advice for founders, AI through a people lens: trends, takes, and how to build with it.
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Let's talk about what you're building.
If you're navigating the people side of your business, I'd love to hear what's on your mind.
Open to consulting, project-based work, and embedded or in-house roles.