Hi there.
I'm Sandra Halling.

I’ve led projects with consulting fees north of half a million, and helped tiny teams streamline from the inside out.

Sizing the solution to fit how your team actually works is one of my sweet spots — and I can support you in creating the operating environment required for the changes to stick.

My systems brain shows up everywhere, not just in client work. I don't simply do this work — I was built for it.

Allow me to paint a picture:

I can be unpacking groceries and will automatically categorize items, spot what’s missing, confirm details, and hand off the final state in two minutes.

“Here are the snacks, this is off-limits, they were out of your favorite thing so I got the next best instead.”

That's assessment, taxonomy, gaps, assumptions, clarifications, shared context, and closing the loop.

I do this automatically, without thought, and without creating friction — even when things are being moved under my feet or directions aren’t followed.

‍Another example — I’m the friend people call when they need to clean out their closet.

‍‍Once a friend tried to pull a sweater out of the give-away pile while my back was turned. I knew it was gone without seeing it move. She... was flabbergasted.

Once I normalized the action, sneaky as it was, we discussed it further and the sweater went back in the give-away pile.

That's clarifying decisions, verifying location and state, and re-establishing context — governance through agreements.

(It's been over 15 years and we still laugh about it, too.)

What I'm naming here is exceptional pattern recognition skills and a keen sense of genuine ownership.

I see structure quickly, reduce friction quietly, and restore coherence before anyone else realizes something is off.

And I do it with kindness.

That instinct scales from butter on a counter, to old clothes, to complex, multi-team implementations.

I don’t start with tools, features, or “best practices."

The tech stack, features, and dashboards you want are as irrelevant as the snacks and sweater in the examples above — because those details are not what makes a system run smoothly or handle change gracefully.

What actually drives success is the layer underneath all of that:

• The structure and decision-paths
  (you’ve been relying on these whether they're named or not)
• The pre-existing agreements
  ‍(both spoken and implicit, plus your assumptions around accuracy)
• The shared context and the gaps
  (that are too easy to dismiss, show up during stress, and derail things)
• The workarounds and biases towards status quo
  (how long have you been "building it why you fly it"?)
• The operational debt that's accumulated over time
  (the faster you've grown, the more likely you cannot see this)

So I start with:

• Who’s holding which decisions and why
  (and whether that matches their perceived and actual authority)
• How work moves across teams
  (or gets stuck because ownership of process or data isn’t clear)
• Where operational debt has accumulated
  (from past decisions, skipped steps, or growth that was never integrated)
• What your values look like when translated into workflow
  (and where those values maybe unintentionally undermined because structure or clarity is missing)

From there, the architecture emerges naturally.
(And so do SOPs your ICs actually use and appreciate.)

The bottom line is that tools follow the logic — not the other way around.

This approach reduces risk, prevents rework, and makes adoption easier because the system reflects your real operational reality. Clarity before strategy. Strategy before building. People before process and tech.

[Read more about my methodology here.]

Last but not least — going alone is a fool's errand.

When a project requires specialized expertise, I draw from a trusted network and bring in collaborators deliberately — at the right time, for the right reasons.

I no longer list collaborator names publicly. That information was misused in the past in a way that could have caused harm, so I changed this policy.

The people I work with are exceptional humans and serious professionals. Some have been clients, peers, or collaborators for many years. They also work with other organizations, as do I. That flexibility is part of what keeps the work clean and resilient.