Hi! I'm Rachel Flood!
This is my worky-work picture.
But this is a more accurate picture of me.
Hanging with my girls, no makeup, hair in a ponytail!
Aaaaand being the systems and technology nerd that I am, this is also an accurate picture of me.
I've been in the business of designing and redesigning businesses, agencies, and organisations for over 20 years now. In that time I've become a keen observer of process, an adept systems designer, and a passionate believer in the idea that HOW you do what you do is as important as WHAT you do.
I am also a technology enthusiast with the heart of a pragmatist. This means that while I believe that leveraging technology and tools is essential to success and sustainability for all businesses and organisations, I also know from experience that tech is not a silver bullet.
And I have made it my mission to help small businesses and orgs use the tech they have access to, in ways that will best help them to succeed!
So THIS is also an accurate picture of me!
Waaay back in 2001 at tender age of 23 I created an arts festival called the Sistahood Celebration that was my lifeblood for 11 years. It was more than I ever dreamed it could be! It brought the majority of my chosen family into my life, was the catalyst for so, so, SO much magic, and generally created space for some very cool shit to happen.
It was a beautiful thing!
It was also really, really f'ing hard.
I often refer to those years as how I earned an MBA from the University of the Hard Way! And truthfully my time at UHW, while exhilarating, was fraught with missteps and heartache. In fact, I was afraid for a long time that my time with the festival had broken me in some way.
Burn out is a thing. Apparently.
Thankfully, it turns out I am not broken after all and I now rock my UHW MBA proudly! I would argue, in fact, that I learned more from UHW than I could have from any business school.
One of the main reasons my time with Sistahood was so hard is that I never paid myself enough to make a living of any kind (...! I know! don't get me started!) so to make ends meet and support my arts production habit, I always had to have a day job, and it was always an office job!
Over those 11 years I worked my way from relief receptionist all the way through to Director of Operations, in almost every industry and sector you can imagine. All while supporting and producing a full MONTH of programming at venues all over the city!
It is exhausting to think about.
But I certainly did learn a thing or two.
Primarily I discovered that my obsession with operations design and technology planning was the nerd-sauce that I could build a business around! Because baby there are few people as nerdy as me about how to get sh!t done!
Enter - Alignment Ops, my ops and tech consultancy brainchild, where I have had the privilege to spend the last 10 years supporting small businesses and organisations as they navigate the road to digital maturity.
And being the operations nerd that I am, I have of course created a repeatable process for my client work. One that keeps me on track and transparent with my clients. One that reinforces ongoing benefit after our project is finished.
And one that I want to teach the world to use!
Enter - The Stop Using Spreadsheets Method. Or as I like to call it the SUS Method. This 5 step repeatable process has become the backbone of my work with clients and is the key to the many successful digital transformations I have lead.
While born out of the idea that using spreadsheets to manage your key metrics and reporting is a recipe for disaster and inefficiency, it goes way beyond that.
Using the Stop Using Spreadsheet Method I have helped many small-but-mighty shops like Elektra Women's Choir to clear out the noise of disorganized systems and create the organizational (and mental) space to focus on what matters!
