Women-Owned Business Series: Katrina from Managed Chaos

Welcome back to our Women-Owned Business Series! Today we’re featuring Katrina, the founder of Katrina Purcell LLC — a growth operations consultancy helping seed to Series C tech startups, small businesses, and non-profits optimize their operations and achieve ambitious growth.

The inspiration behind Katrina Purcell LLC comes from the founder’s own experience navigating high-velocity startup environments and leading teams through an IPO, where she saw firsthand the intense mental load and human cost of process chaos. That journey revealed a deep alignment between her operational expertise and a more human-first mission, ultimately leading her to leave the corporate world and launch a consultancy — and the Managed Chaos podcast — built on the conviction that raw hustle isn’t a sustainable business model. Read more about her story below!

First, tell us about your business and anything special we should know about it or you.

Katrina Purcell LLC is a growth operations consultancy that empowers seed to Series C tech startups, small businesses, and non-profits to optimize their operations and achieve ambitious growth. You can find us at www.katrinapurcell.com. After years of climbing the corporate ranks and building high-performing teams across media, technology, and operations at companies like Bloomberg and IAS, I realized my true purpose was in translating that elite enterprise playbook for organizations that need it most. I left the corporate world to launch this consultancy because I wanted to democratize access to the information and infrastructure needed to grow a resilient business. My mission is to help underrepresented founders and local leaders remove the complexity tax that stalls their execution, moving them away from the burnout of constant tactical hustle and into true system-driven predictability.

https://www.themanagedchaospodcast.com/

Why do you feel a connection to your work?

My connection to this work stems from a deep alignment between my professional operational expertise and a personal, human-first mission. Having navigated high-velocity startup environments and led teams through an IPO, I know the intense mental load and human cost of process chaos. I launched my growth operations consultancy and the Managed Chaos podcast because I wanted to put my skills to use in ways where I could see an immediate, tangible impact on the businesses and people around me. I am driven by the conviction that raw hustle is not a sustainable business model. Every time I build an operational floor, implement a streamlined workflow, or establish an anti-burnout firewall for an underrepresented founder, I am protecting their sanity, preserving their passion, and giving them their strategic bandwidth back.

As a business owner, community is everything. In what ways do you serve your community and how has your community served you?

Living in Brooklyn with my family, I believe that actively shopping local and contributing to your local economy is the baseline for collective success. I serve my community by working fractionally with neighborhood small businesses to move them from complete operational chaos into scaling businesses with strong infrastructure, just as I recently did with Camp Barrk where our dog attends camp. I also serve the broader entrepreneurial community through the Managed Chaos podcast, delivering practical, fluff-free business strategies that busy founders can implement during their morning commute. In return, the Brooklyn community has served as our anchor and gateway. Exploring the neighborhood with our dog has connected us to incredible local mainstays like Brooklyn Pawhouse and Rancho Avocado, introducing us to a resilient network of local owners who remind me daily why local economic ecosystem building matters.

What advice would you give to others who want to start a small business?

My absolute number one piece of advice is to always bet on yourself. When it comes to the things you want to accomplish in your life and career, you have to be willing to take chances and embrace calculated risks. Building a business from scratch is inherently chaotic, and there will never be a perfect moment when you feel 100 percent ready. Do not wait for permission or for the perfect infrastructure to fall into place before you step out. Trust your training, rely on your business acumen, and realize that navigating the squiggly parts of the journey is exactly how you build the structural resilience required to scale over the long term.

What women inspire you and why?

I am constantly inspired by masterful growth operations and revenue leaders like Jennifer Ravalli who approaches business scale as a discipline of structural predictability rather than just sheer hustle. I am also deeply inspired by Gesche Haas, the founder of Dreamers and Doers. She designed a powerful, high-impact ecosystem that handles community building with operational excellence, creating a literal framework for women entrepreneurs and trail-blazing creators to connect, share resources, and support one another. These women inspire me because they do not just occupy space at the top of the ladder. They actively use their platforms, frameworks, and strategic voices to anchor other women, showing them the exact operational path to sustainable success.

What do you think are the most significant challenges for small business owners or women in leadership positions?

The most significant challenge for women in leadership today is the impossible dual expectation to work like we do not have external responsibilities, while simultaneously handling our personal and family responsibilities like we do not have a career. We are forced into an exhausting balancing act that leads directly to burnout. To break this cycle, we need to create environments where women can bring their unique superpowers and every amazing facet of who they are to every single professional instance. Overcoming this requires active systemic support, which is why we need more women in operations and executive roles explicitly supporting other women and showing them the concrete way to operational success.

Please plug any promotions, events, or recent milestones you have!

I would love to invite everyone to tune into the Managed Chaos podcast, available on Spotify, YouTube, and Apple Podcasts. It is a bite-sized, fluff-free business show designed specifically for founders, operators, and small business owners who need tactical revenue, leadership, and operational strategies they can implement immediately. If you are a growth-stage founder or local business owner struggling under the weight of process sprawl and looking to build a bulletproof operational floor, you can connect with me directly for fractional COO advisory services and tailored strategic guidance via my growth operations consultancy at www.katrinapurcell.com.