Before Germaine Advisory
None of this started with a credential. I went to college for equine science, but my real drive was in the saddle, competing, and I needed a way to support that drive. In my sophomore year, I pulled a job posting off a bulletin board and submitted drawings for a firm that assumed I was studying design. They hired me anyway and later asked me to join them full time. Horses came first, so I said no, but I kept doing the work until it built into my first pivot.
For seventeen years, I started and ran a full-service architectural design and build studio, managing between nine and fifteen client projects a year. With five in-house designers and craftspeople plus contractor crews, I led residential, commercial, and corporate work from concept through construction to the last piece of furniture in the room. I coordinated with architects and structural engineers on every build, delivering concurrent projects on budget and on schedule, every time. The work was featured in dozens of local and national design publications, as well as on television design programs. (I still take on one or two design clients a year as a consultant.)
At the same time, I cofounded the AIDS Coalition of Southern New Jersey alongside five colleagues. Over the years, we grew it from a handful of volunteers to an organization with an annual budget reaching $7 million at its peak. I moved wherever the organization's next gap appeared: training and grant writing in the early years, and later community health education and peer training program design, building each function until it was strong enough to hand over to dedicated staff.
By the time I was ready to step back from the design studio, I was looking for a new challenge. One of my design clients of nearly eight years, someone I'd also drawn into supporting the AIDS Coalition, made an unlikely recommendation: JPMorgan Chase needed someone who could get scattered teams working together. I came in as a contractor and enterprise-level program manager in the bank's Card division, bringing together national and international teams.
The work went well enough that Chase hired me directly, moving me into leading the governance function for a $65 million international acquisition integration, an unusually fast rise that proved the underlying skill translated immediately. Over five and a half years at the bank, I built and led an 8-person governance team coordinating 265+ people across IT and business, reporting to the CTO in Kansas City with financial accountability to Finance in New York.
While still at Chase, I took on a side consulting project and realized my true calling: helping organizations build the structure they needed, the work I'd been doing my whole career without ever calling it that.
I’m an ops person because I like when things work smoothly. Operations and governance get a bad rap when they are just process for its own sake. Done right, designed around people, budget, and mission together, it takes the pressure off so teams stop guessing and stop carrying things that were never theirs to carry.
Germaine Advisory is what happens when you take that entire path-competitive sport design and build project management, nonprofit capacity building, and bank-scale international finance- and turn it into a practice. Today, I bring that experience to every room, and regularly speak and train on governance, board development, and cross-functional communication for associations, nonprofit boards, and business audiences.
Kristin