About

When you bring Avalene a challenge, you get an operator who has run the business and owned the results.

Leadership

Sarah Smith has spent more than twenty years driving change in complex environments. She helps leaders identify the change that will deliver the impact they are after, and brings the experience to make it happen.

She has been accountable for real improvement across a range of organizations and roles: running a fulfillment operation at Amazon, leading global transformation at Halliburton, and serving as a Chief Operating Officer and Chief Procurement Officer.

Through all of it, one focus held: a better business, delivered for its customers, built with and through its people.

What operator-led means

Operator-led means the perspective comes from having run these businesses firsthand.

It brings the experience of someone who has made the decisions, owned the outcomes, and led the teams that carried them out. That is what moves work from first idea to finished result.

From the operating seat

Three very different operations, one way of working: simplify the problem to what matters most, align the people who own the work, and build the structure that keeps the gains in place.

An underperforming operation is usually a focus problem, not an effort problem. The people are working hard; too many things are being called priorities. The work is to cut the scorecard to the few that decide the outcome, and to align the team so everyone can see how their work moves the result. In a fulfillment operation at Amazon, that took the least efficient site in the network to the most efficient, and engagement rose with it.

Safety holds when the people closest to the work own it, not when it is handed down. The work is to rebuild the system around the controls that most reduce risk, then align teams across the business until those practices are simply how the work gets done. Across more than seventy countries at Halliburton, recordable and lost-time injuries fell by roughly half, and the capability held long after.

Procurement change does not hold when it is pushed as a number. It holds when the plant leaders and stakeholders who live with it help shape the approach first. Leading indirect procurement that way as Chief Procurement Officer at a $2B global manufacturer delivered about $22 million in finance-validated annual savings, and roughly tripled the team’s productivity.