Why growing a consulting business made sense for me

“How did you get to where you are today?”

At conferences or lectures, I’m often asked this question, though the asker isn’t always ready for the long and winding road that brought me to opening my own firm. Sometimes, it’s a pleasant question that opens up a conversation. And sometimes, the asker is a young person who dreams of starting their own niche business, or a woman in science who is searching for a roadmap that might resemble the one she’s charting.

So here, I detail the decisions and factors that led me to opening Grow Well Consulting, so that it may help those who are looking for a way to make their passion for food systems and sustainability a part of their everyday life.

The path to starting my own company

I’m measuring GHG fluxes from the soil in the forest at Harvard Forest, a NSF Long Term Ecological Research station, my first job in the field. We were ground truthing measurements from eddy flux towers by doing various stock and flux measurements on the ground.

My high school experience in the LA Zoo at a biology-focused magnet school was formative in encouraging me to take a science path. Getting experience with research as a high school student – I spent a lot of time with the kikuyu colobus monkeys collecting behavioral data – bit me with the research bug. I also completed a docent training program at the zoo and loved sharing my knowledge with others. I still do some form of both those activities everyday, though admittedly my form for knowledge sharing these days is not as exciting as the grounds of a zoo, typically.

My career path has been relatively diverse and curvy, which I actually do not think is too unusual for either the sustainability field or for my generation. I started with an interest in climate change and the environment, an interest that has been relatively consistent throughout, but my first jobs were all research: first at the Harvard Forest doing carbon inventories to correlate with eddy flux tower data, and then shifting from the trees to the soil at UNH looking at how microbial metabolic efficiency changed in response to temperature and substrate treatments. 

From soil, it was a natural shift to move over to ag systems, particularly organic ones at the Rodale Institute. There, I got my first real experience with all the aspects of running a research program, from getting funding and building collaborator relationships to recruiting and retaining staff. 

From there, I decided to try my hand at more applied work, taking a position with Penn State Extension running their new and beginning farmer training program, where I was responsible for their suite of 19 different courses covering everything from soil health and pest management to business planning and food safety. I enjoyed that work engaging directly with end users to bring them the knowledge they needed to make their businesses run better, but decided I needed more knowledge, so I went back to school and completed a dual-title PhD in Biogeochemistry and Ecology at Penn State, focusing on ag management impacts on field-level GHG emissions. 

Here I am going deeper in the soil, preparing to measure nitrate leaching under various organically managed plots as part of my dissertation research at Penn State.

The first year of my PhD program brought both my daughter and a career opportunity for my spouse in NJ, which helped shift my post-PhD pivot to the private sector. First, I spent several years in various roles up to and including leading the food procurement and corporate sustainability departments at Blue Apron. 

Around 2019, I realized that there was a broader need and market for the type of supply chain management, sustainability, and food system knowledge and skills that I had honed. So, I decided to start, Grow Well Consulting, in June of that year. It took a year to decide to start my own business and a potential lead for a first client to take the leap.

Since then, I have been working with dozens of clients, including individual companies, industry associations, non-profits, and foundations to navigate this space and generally grow their food and ag supply chains well, not just in terms of environmental impacts, but increasingly in a more holistic way including social, animal welfare, and nutritional dimensions.

What I’ve learned and where I am today

Earlier in my career I mistakenly thought there was some set of skills and knowledge I needed to master and then I would spend the rest of my career applying them. I finally appreciate that my education is never ending – my formal education was just the starting point and honestly, I learned no less in my years at Blue Apron figuring out how to make pitch decks that worked for VC audiences, or how to do the weekly costing reports, write job descriptions or sections of the 10-K, or run annual supplier RFPs for key items. Learning how to convert a business from Google sheets to one that ran off of true ERP and MRP systems like Netsuite and Cloud Analytics with accurate Master Data and receiving processes to enable accurate inventory management were skills I learned on the job, rather than in school. I also learned some of the pitfalls of growing too fast, regardless of how revolutionary a business’s regenerative vision or mission might be. Without the right systems, processes, or product-market fit in place, none of that scaling or sustainability impact can come to fruition or endure. 

This is in part why I founded and named Grow Well, Grow Well: to help businesses and the organizations that influence them build and adopt the systems and tools necessary to integrate sustainability into their foundational business processes like supplier onboarding, long-range capital planning, integrated risk assessment, and beyond. 

In 2024, my work took me to a massive 3,000 acre commercial organic farm, which is heavily reliant on fossil fuels. I was reminded of the landscape simplicity and fossil fuel dependency inherent in the structure and scale of modern commercial agriculture. Even organic agriculture. 

Through Grow Well, I am able to draw not only on technical skills and knowledge collected in academia, but also on my experience in the business world to develop an understanding of my clients needs and build solutions that advance their sustainability performance and work with their financial, operational, and other realities of today.

Like any big life decision, there were a mix of factors that motivated me to make the move: personal and professional, pull and push. Professionally, I had moved into a much more conventional supply chain executive role. The company had gone public and the focus of leadership and the leaders themselves all shifted away from some of the big vision food system change ethos of the founders to much more focused on financial performance, cutting costs and growing margins. 

On one hand, this was great business management experience for me – learning how to run RFPs and supplier negotiations really allowed me to do great internal operationally focused work to reduce food waste and deliver the cost saving and margin building results the CFO was looking for. 

On the other hand, I felt disconnected from my academic training and interest in engaging with producers to build more sustainable and climate friendly systems. When an opportunity came along to help a distributor build their sustainable sourcing framework and supplier review process, I decided to take the leap and found Grow Well with that distributor ultimately becoming my first client.

Work-life balance, especially at that moment in time with a 2 and 7 year old, was a real challenge. I saw running my own business as a way to potentially better manage my professional interests and contributions with the responsibilities of motherhood. It’s still a challenge, but I like being able to have a better handle on the throttle.

My vision for the future

The field is maturing and becoming less wild west, reactive, and voluntary, to be more structured, regulatory-driven, and proactive. In some ways this is a huge relief to me. It will hopefully shift the motivation for engaging in sustainability from marketing to operations and regulatory compliance, which in general, I believe will result in more enduring or sustainable changes in how businesses conduct themselves. 

On a site visit to a farm in Georgia in 2024 to learn more about their citrus and pecan groves, environmental practices, community engagement, and business practices.

However, this means young people interested in entering the field will need to have a more rigorous understanding of the regulatory landscape and be prepared to contribute to projects that need to not just support good marketing, but stand up to increasing regulatory and investor scrutiny.

Every day, I think about this question: What might a just food future look like?

First and foremost, all people have access to the foods they need to live healthy lives. Not just the calories, or even just the nutrition, though that’s already a far cry from where we are today, but also culturally relevant and appropriate foods, and the time and space to prepare and enjoy them. 

In practice, this means reorienting the conversation about sustainability to be about more than just climate or water or biodiversity, but also to include the people in the value chain. How are they being employed and paid? Do they have access to any sort of anonymous grievance reporting system? Are labor laws being enforced? How many OSHA violations have there been in recent years? What corrective actions has the company put in place to better protect workers in the future? 

These are big questions and we have a long way to go in addressing them. In fact, I don’t think we’ll ever be finished answering these questions, just like I have come to realize that I will always be learning, but I am proud to be a part of the solution in my own way.