Michelle

About Michelle

Floor-level knowledge with senior-level execution is the philosophy I've built my career on. I'm Michelle Gonzalez, founder of True Rein Leadership, where I work as a fractional VP of Operations for growing companies that have outgrown the way they've been running things. I run a diagnostic first, focused on the future vision and current state. My super power is seeing the path between where things are today and where they want to be. I didn't get here solely through my degrees. I started my career young and grew up in operations, working my way from frontline to executive. My career spans CPG, home services, property management, collections/evictions, vendor management. I've led teams of 150+ onshore and offshore and owned P&Ls up to $400M. I earned a Master's in Management and a second in Leadership & HR Development, both while working full-time in those roles. Some of the results I'm proudest of: $1.5M in annualized savings through vendor restructuring and process redesign, a 51% productivity increase at a Fortune 50 CPG company via Lean Six Sigma and a contact center overhaul that held a 4.5/5 CSAT score the entire time. I also co-founded Vestd Inc., a pre-seed fintech startup building income protection for W-2 workers, where I serve as COO/CFO, which keeps me grounded in the exact growing pains my consulting clients feel every day. What I love talking about is the gap nobody prepares first-time managers for, why most "culture problems" are unowned process problems in disguise and what it looks like to build operations that keep working after I leave the room.