About
This is why I built Referb. And what we stand for.
The first thing I notice when I walk into a room is never the data. It's the energy. I can feel the tension between stakeholders before anyone says a word. I can hear when two people are saying the exact same thing in completely different languages and neither of them realizes it. I can sense when something has been broken for a long time, not because anyone tells me, but because the silence around it is too practiced. The workarounds are too automatic. The frustration is too familiar.
That's not a skill I learned from a playbook. It's something I developed over years of sitting in almost every seat at the revenue table: product manager for an AI cybersecurity platform, product manager for a consumer mobile app, marketing across B2B SaaS and B2C campaigns, revenue leadership across seven companies. I've been the person in the room whose ideas didn't move until the title changed. I've watched the same thinking get dismissed as an employee and acted on immediately as a consultant. The information never changed. The structure around it did.
That observation became the foundation of Referb.
What I've learned about how revenue actually breaks
Most companies treat revenue like a sales problem. Hire the right closers, hit the number, move on. What that misses is that revenue is a systems problem. It lives in the space between marketing, product, and sales, in how those three functions talk to each other, hand off to each other, and hold each other accountable. When that system is broken, no amount of sales activity fixes it.
I learned this the hard way. Before Referb, I saw a gap in the market and built a digital marketing agency to fill it. That pivot taught me more about revenue systems than anything else I've done. Clients came in asking for social media management. What I kept finding was that the posts were never going to work because the infrastructure underneath them didn't exist. No website that converted. No email strategy. No real fulfillment process. They had a foundation problem that showed up as a marketing problem. I had entered a market, built something real, and immediately discovered that my clients had the same problem I was learning to solve.
The same pattern showed up everywhere I went after that. Companies winning clients on promise and losing them when the reality didn't match. Retention suffering not because the product was bad but because nobody owned what happened after the deal closed. Winning a client and keeping a client are two completely different problems that most companies treat as one. The same disconnects that make it hard to close deals: unclear positioning, misaligned teams, promises that outrun delivery. Those are the same ones that make clients leave. They just show up later in the relationship.
Retention was never a customer success problem. It was always a revenue problem that got assigned to the wrong team. Referb exists because the revenue table needs someone who can see all three functions at once and tell the truth about what's actually broken. That's what we're built to do.
What happens when Referb is in your business
What we almost always find underneath the tension is not a strategy problem. It's a communication and infrastructure problem. No shared process. No written handoffs. No agreed-upon definitions of who owns what. Just people who are smart and well-intentioned operating in a system that was never built to scale what they're trying to scale.
When I name what's in the room, one of three things happens. Some people push back, and that's fine, because the pushback usually points directly at what needs to move first. Some people go quiet, because hearing the truth out loud after carrying it alone for months takes a second to land. And some people exhale, because they've been waiting for someone to say it.
What I want every client to walk away knowing is that this problem is not unique to them. It's not a sign that they built something broken. It's almost always fixable with communication, planning, real listening, and implementation that happens over time with the right guidance. That's not a consolation. That's the actual diagnosis. And it's the reason this work is worth doing.
We don't hand off a deck and disappear. We stay in the room until your team understands the how and the why well enough to run without us. That's the whole point.
Outside the work
I'm based in Chicago and deeply active in my community. When I'm not in the middle of a GTM audit or a leadership session, you can find me traveling somewhere new, hunting down a great meal, shopping, staying active, or unwinding with a cozy game. I'm also a proud dog mom.
Referb is not the consulting firm that shows up with a framework and a theory. I built it because I've sat in most of the seats at the revenue table and I know where the bodies are buried. If any of that sounds like exactly what you've been looking for, I'd love to meet you.
Start with a free 30-minute conversation. No pitch. Just an honest look at your situation and whether we're the right fit.