Bonterra was born from a private equity acquisition that merged several organizations, including NGP VAN, into a single entity and rebranded the whole thing. The result was a revenue organization of 500 employees across multiple verticals, all trying to operate as one company while still figuring out what that meant.

I came in as Chief of Staff to the CMO. My primary mandate was annual planning: getting every vertical aligned on progress, priorities, and the story they'd tell the board.

The coordination problem. Post-acquisition organizations have a specific kind of chaos. You have teams that used to be separate companies, each with their own metrics, their own planning cadences, their own definitions of success. The CMO needed a single coherent narrative for the board, but the raw material was fragmented across verticals that weren't yet speaking the same language.

Building the planning process. My job was to create the connective tissue. I designed and ran the annual planning process that brought all verticals together: aligning on shared metrics, reconciling competing priorities, and synthesizing progress into a board-ready narrative. This meant working across marketing, sales, product marketing, and revenue operations to ensure that what we presented wasn't just a stack of departmental updates but an integrated story about where the business was and where it was going.

Translating for the board. Private equity boards care about specific things: revenue trajectory, integration progress, operational efficiency, and whether the thesis behind the acquisition is playing out. The planning work had to translate the messy reality of a mid-integration organization into a clear, honest picture that addressed those questions without papering over the complexity.

Operating in the middle. Chief of Staff work at this scale is fundamentally about operating in the space between strategy and execution. You're close enough to leadership to understand what the board needs to hear, and close enough to the teams to know what's actually happening. The value is in bridging that gap without distorting either side