About Kellie
This didn’t start with a title.
I spent twenty years inside a payroll company, never an executive, always the fixer: dropped into broken teams, brand-new departments, technical functions I had no technical background for. Every time, the same two things happened. The team turned around. And people kept closing my office door and saying “can we talk?” then saying things they’d never said to anyone. Peers navigating something they couldn’t name to anyone with a stake in it. Leaders above me carrying things that had nowhere else to go.
What I gave them wasn’t advice. It was a space where they could finally think out loud with someone who had no agenda in what they decided.
That pattern followed me through every role I held. Most recently as Director of Global Culture and Employee Experience at a private equity firm, I served as a confidential resource for more than fifty senior leaders across the globe. The message always came the same way: Can we talk? Not from people looking for guidance. From leaders carrying something they couldn’t bring to anyone else inside the organization. A decision with no clean answer. A relationship quietly breaking down. A call already made that they couldn’t stop second-guessing.
What I saw, across all of it, was the same structural reality. The higher a leader goes, the more their circle fills with people who have something to gain or lose from what they decide. And the conversations that matter most end up happening nowhere.
I grew up in government housing and I’ve sat in rooms where seven-figure decisions get made, and I remember exactly what a 25-cent raise feels like. That’s why I can hear the corner office and the front line in the same afternoon, and why both tell me the truth.
I built at the TOP because that gap doesn’t fix itself, and because I’d already spent years being the person who filled it inside organizations. This is the same work, without the constraints of an org chart.
“I don’t use frameworks. I don’t use models. I talk to people. It’s rigor, just not the laminated kind.”
What this actually is
at the TOP is not a coaching program. There’s no curriculum, no framework to work through, no intake process that ends with a package.
It’s a confidential, ongoing thought-partnership, 1:1, structured around what you’re navigating, with someone who has no connection to your organization and no stake in what you decide.
The first conversation is diagnostic, not a pitch. You share what you’re carrying. I listen and ask questions until the real issue surfaces. Then we decide together whether this is a fit. If it isn’t, I’ll tell you.
For most leaders the work is ongoing, a confidential space to think out loud on a regular basis. For some it begins with the Baseline: a focused read of what’s actually sitting in the way at your company, what your building is carrying, and what’s in the way of the things you’re trying to do. In some cases the work extends to leadership teams, but only when that serves the leader, not as a default.
I work with CEOs, business owners, and senior leaders. Experienced, capable, and successful by every external measure. Quietly aware that the list of people they can genuinely talk to has gotten shorter, not longer.
If that’s where you are, my inbox is open.
at the TOP 