Member Spotlight: Sarah McNamara
I’ve been a systems thinker my entire life. As a young kid, my dad would play logic games with my sister and me, and have us think through the legal cases he was working on. Perhaps it’s no surprise that I studied philosophy at UC Berkeley, where every paper I wrote was an exercise in figuring out where the holes were in a given philosopher’s argument.
My first job after graduation was as a corporate trust administrator for The Bank of New York (formerly Irving Trust Company). Jumping from philosophy to Wall Street may seem like an odd move. In fact, it was a great fit. My role required me to participate in drafting the many legal documents that support new corporate and municipal bond issuances. As the bond administrator, I was representing the future bondholders’ interests and ensuring that the operational requirements for administering the bonds made sense and were doable. I loved finding the holes in these documents, too, specifically the ways in which the drafts didn’t work, weren’t clear, or weren’t consistent with each other.
My fellow officers in the front office didn’t always care so much about the operational details, or finding all the inconsistencies. From them I heard, “Operations will figure it out” which never made sense to me, because once the documents were finalized, you had to follow them even if they weren’t clear. It also didn’t sit well with “Operations” - the people in the back office who had to follow unclear directions from the front office.
This disconnect became the driving force behind my first business, Business Systems Analysis, which I started shortly after leaving The Bank of New York. In that business, I described myself as a traveler and translator who moved comfortably between the visionaries and leaders in an organization who set goals and the detail people and doers responsible for making the vision come to life. Bringing comprehensive business systems analysis, project management and the systems thinking that bridges the conceptual and the specific, I helped organizations like Morgan Guaranty Trust Company, Citibank and the Forum Corporation avoid major headaches, losses, and audit issues by ensuring that their operations were always aligned with the goals of leadership, especially minimizing risk.
Fast forward to March, 2020 when I was the extremely happy COO for Work and Play, a coworking space with onsite, licensed child care. Having taken many years off from full-time work to raise my two sons in Maplewood, NJ, I had just completed 3 years at Work and Play with no plans to leave. But the pandemic had other ideas and Work and Play wasn’t able to weather this particular storm.
In October of that year, I founded Sarah McNamara Solutions, LLC, helping small business leaders get unstuck. My clients are visionaries, leaders and creators, driven by a passion for a product, service and/or mission. They often are not passionate about the business of running a business - the operations and back office that makes any business ultimately succeed or fail.
I design and implement solutions for the operational and strategic challenges that so often drag entrepreneurs down when they have outgrown the ad-hoc approaches that served them well when they first started, but now stand in the way of growth and happiness. My solutions often include research, analysis, synthesis, systems and procedures documentation and implementation, training and support. My clients leave our engagements feeling stronger, more in control, more knowledgeable about their own finances and operations, better able to delegate and understand what type of person they need to onboard as part of their growth, and, most importantly, able to get back to doing what they love to do best.
I learned of The Co-Co as a result of my position at Work and Play, and am thrilled to now be a member. I’m always looking to learn about other people and what they do, to support them, and make lasting connections and friendships. So happy to be here!
