About
I'm Andrew Kaluza. I've been the CEO, the COO and the co-founder — not adjacent to those seats, in them, with the payroll and the board and the Monday morning consequences.
That's why the vision doesn't scare me and the details don't bore me. I know what it costs to hold both at once, and I know what a founder actually needs from the person sitting across from them.
Three seats
Which matters for one reason: each seat teaches something different, and the gaps between them are where companies usually break.
CEO
Scaled a founder community from one Austin room to seventeen national markets. That seat teaches that direction without a working model is just a wish.
COO
Steadied a mental health organization losing footing on three fronts at once, with patients in the building. That seat teaches sequence, because nothing there could be paused.
Co-founder
Built a wellness brand from a blank page to 700,000 organic followers and a working clinic. That seat teaches what a founder is carrying when they describe something that doesn't exist yet.
How I think
I don't force things. Every company is already moving in some direction, with its own current — customers behaving a certain way, a team that is good at certain things, a founder with instincts worth trusting. The work is to read that honestly and build with it, rather than impose a model on top of it.
It is also why I don't sell a framework. There is no order that applies to every company, and anyone claiming otherwise is selling what they already built for someone else. We figure out the next step together, then the one after that.
The one thing I hold firmly: stay focused on the next step, so you never lose footing. The big vision held whole at the top of the page — one step at a time underneath it.
What I won't do
Hand you a deck and leave
Apply someone else's playbook
Talk your vision down to fit my capacity
Build growth on a foundation that won't carry it
Stay longer than the company needs me
The thread
My career didn't follow a playbook. Waste management in Texas, a national wellness brand, a mental health organization, a founder community across seventeen cities. The thread was never the industry.
Revenue growth at a Texas waste management company — the first time I saw that rebuilding how a business operates moves the number further than working harder inside it does.
Organic audience at a wellness brand I co-founded, with no paid media — plus the operating company underneath it, because attention without operations is a liability.
A P&L stabilized and returned to growth as COO, in a clinical setting where the consequences of getting it wrong were not financial.
Markets in twelve months as CEO, with twenty-five people running them — which only worked because the playbook existed before the expansion did.
How an engagement runs
Not a methodology. Just the shape every engagement ends up taking, whatever the company turns out to need.
Into the numbers, the team, the systems or the absence of them. The questions nobody has asked yet. By the end of it we both know where the footing is missing — and that's a shared conclusion, not a diagnosis I hand you.
SOPs, CRM architecture, financial models, org structure, hiring frameworks, reporting cadence — whichever of those the company actually needs. Built, tested and documented, not recommended.
Dependency is a failure mode. When it's done your team runs it, the systems are documented and the processes are owned. The measure is whether it's still standing after I leave.
With the last build standing on its own, we turn to what comes next for the company's growth and start building toward that. By then we know the business well enough to see the next thing early.
Fit
Naming this early saves us both a month. I would rather tell you it isn't a fit than take the engagement and prove it.
This works when
The vision is genuinely large
You want the truth more than reassurance
The founders agree on direction
You want to own it after I go
You can move on a decision once it's made
This doesn't work when
The co-founders don't agree yet — that comes first
You want a pair of hands, not a point of view
The real need is a full-time hire
Growth is wanted before the foundation exists
Someone is looking for a name on the deck
The next step
Thirty minutes, no deck, no pitch. Tell me where things actually stand, and I'll tell you what I'd look at first — whether or not you hire me.
Book a 30-minute call