Who We Are
Meet Naomi
Naomi’s early career began in food and hospitality, both as a chef and in operations, tethered to the pillar of nourishing people. She spent almost a decade helping to operate and scale the Boulder-based mission-focused, high-growth restaurant group, The Kitchen, while simultaneously co-founding her own CPG company, Birch Benders, which was acquired by Sovos Brands in 2020.
Naomi is a firm believer that a business can only be successful if it supports its people. With that principle in mind, she created a People Ops function during her tenure at The Kitchen, developing all core and strategic People Ops processes while scaling the company from 75 to 800 employees in 6 states. With her passion in startup and growth businesses, she has since scaled sustainable and strategic People Ops functions in Cannabis, Consumer Goods, and venture-backed eCommerce industries. She’s worked with a full spectrum of work environments from fully remote to having an all hourly, in-person team.
Naomi is a truly collaborative leader who has touched all areas of people operations and is knowledgeable in the functional areas of payroll, benefits, and compliance. However, she is most driven in supporting strategic process development, organizational design, retention strategies, hiring, and facilitating strong executive-level communication and collaboration. Naomi holds her SPHR certification, is a Certified Practitioner of the ECHO Listening Profile, and is a facilitator of ECHO Listening’s 6-week Listening, Leadership, and Performance communication training series.
Meet Greg
For nearly 30 years Greg has been focused on helping businesses of all sizes make better decisions with data, modeling, deliberate testing, strategic planning, trade off evaluation and structured thinking in order to drive growth and profitability.
His career began in financial services before shifting towards tech focused, e-commerce retailers. Throughout the years, Greg has successfully built Business Analytics functions and teams to support decision automation, predictive analytics, marketing personalization tools, capacity planning and novel cost allocation models which powered precise pricing decisions. He has led initiatives to build credit loss forecasting, revenue forecasting, Business Intelligence platform development and many strategic pricing optimization projects.
Greg believes that analytics are often the overlooked key to building an amazing team and business strategy. If you understand, measure and optimize around the truly important business KPIs you can use your human capital investment to drive the most impactful business levers.
Greg approaches problems in a very pragmatic way which allows quick wins, fast iterations and continued progress in a cost-effective way. Greg is passionate about addressing pricing and profitability problems, helping build an organization’s analytic mindset and developing team members’ capabilities while furthering their career opportunities.
Meet Carly
Carly started her career in the non-profit sector as a case manager and care coordinator for at-risk communities, driven by compassion and the desire to support continuous growth. She spent a decade building meaningful connections, cultivating a nurturing environment, developing action plans, and empowering her clients to facilitate change in their lives. She honed her soft skills and developed a toolkit of tactical practices that she then channeled into her work in People Ops.
Over the last 5 years Carly has led several HR technology implementations, designed and implemented people operations processes across the employee lifecycle, and created and delivered training on performance management, Worker’s Compensation, Onboarding best practices, and more for in person and remote audiences for teams upwards of 200 employees. Additionally, Carly is experienced in leave management, benefit administration, and compliance.
Above all, Carly is passionate about creating engaging employee experiences, promoting a culture of learning, and implementing effective processes. She believes in a compassionate and heart-centered approach to People Ops and is a collaborative partner who seeks to find solutions that benefit both the business and employee. She obtained her PHR certification and as an HR practitioner has exclusively supported startup and high growth companies spanning in the Tech, Cannabis, and eCommerce industries.
Meet Missy
Missy is a senior internal recruiter and implementation specialist with a passion for creating cohesive teams. She honors and encourages emotional intelligence in the workplace; behavioral interviews are her happy place. She is an extrovert, known for her ability to easily communicate and gain trust with cross-functional groups. She is unrelenting and does not rest until she finds the right candidates for not only the role, but the culture and the product as well.
Missy is curious with a lifelong love of educating herself. Because of this curiosity, she has degrees in history, interior design and a teaching credential - and she's used them all. She has found that history does indeed repeat itself, whether it’s in politics or how to build a team. Her time in interior design taught her how people inhabit space, and that translates to how people inhabit a meeting, a team, or a role. It is so important to watch and listen in order to do a job well. Her teaching credential gave her a deep understanding of how to scaffold learners, be it teaching 3rd graders about adverbs or onboarding new team members. We must seek understanding, check for understanding, and meet each other in the middle in order to succeed.
From a career perspective, Missy's experience ranges from working for rock stars, reporting to Steve Jobs, producing international events to recruiting for highly niche roles in the tech industry. In each role, she has built teams, streamlined systems and been the glue. In fact, her family sometimes calls her Elmer and once surprised her with an Elmer’s Glue t-shirt for her birthday. She wears it with happiness.
Meet Iva
Iva Marie Townsend is a Midwestern native, born and raised in Chicago, Illinois and the surrounding Northwest suburbs. A proud CU alum, she studied Biology and History at the University of Colorado, Boulder and graduated with a B.A. degree in 1997. Well traveled through Europe, Southeast Asia and the United States, she returned to Boulder, Colorado and it became her permanent home in 2000.
For over 20 years, Iva was a member of the senior management team at Big Red F Restaurant Group, instituting policy and building BigRedF's Human Resources Department. In 2021, she pursued an opportunity in the craft beer industry, occupying the role of Director of HR and Culture, at Denver Beer Company, collaborating with the leadership team to grow the organization and people culture. A driven, innovative, and trusted Human Resources professional with expertise in policy development, employee relations, HR strategic planning and 15+ years of experience in a senior leadership position, using her passion to create small powerful moments to impact people's lives.
Iva lives in North Boulder and continues to be a rabid Chicago sports fan, foster a love of travel, trail run, tele-mark through the trees, cook for crowds and eat & drink with her family and friends..