A former COO, CCO & journalist,
Cara Mia DiMassa is
your next key hire.
Bringing structure to a growing wellness practice
As fractional Chief of Staff, I've worked across systems, communications, and HR to help The Marigold Center operate like a larger organization while staying true to its patient-first mission.
That's included building procedures for attracting and organizing patients, overseeing staffing, and writing the newsletters, press releases, and other communications that keep the practice visible in the community it serves.
Creating the operational backbone for a scaling consumer brand
As fractional COO for a global consumer brand, I built the financial and inventory systems that let the business scale. That work started with reconciling years of untracked purchase orders and duplicate records across the company's e-commerce and accounting platforms, work that had no system in place before I arrived. From there, I rebuilt the product naming and merchandising structure ahead of a full seasonal launch, and became fluent in building AI-driven tools and automations, standing up a set of recurring reports, inventory checks, and commission tracking that now run on a fixed weekly cadence instead of depending on anyone's memory.
The clearest example is the company's approach to goods sold, cost of goods, and inventory. What had been a static spreadsheet for hand-written notes, disconnected tabs where information went stale quickly and decisions relying on someone's memory is now a linked, rules-based system. Asingle source of truth drives inventory targets, reorder flags, assembly pulls and margin checks. It gave the business a live operating backbone and freed up hours previously spent reconciling numbers by hand.
One measure of the shift: the percentage of each week's booked revenue actually collected that same week rose from roughly 53% to over 75% within a matter of weeks, as payment application and accounts receivable processes were rebuilt from the ground up. The business has also been hitting or exceeding its weekly revenue targets consistently since.
Building a parent communication system from scratch
Summerkids ran for decades as a beloved Altadena day camp, but when I started, it had no digital presence, families relied on phone calls and paper for registration and updates about their kids' day. I designed and administered the camp website, giving the camp its first real public face and a way to communicate its programs and outreach. From there, I led development of a parent-facing communication app, working with outside developers to bring it to life, that gave families real-time visibility into their children's activities, schedules, and camp life, along with a companion portal for staff. What started as nothing evolved into a full communications system that replaced a patchwork of phone calls and paper with something families and staff could actually rely on.