ABOUT RACHEL

Strategy that starts with you. Not someone else's blueprint.

I'm Rachel Anzalone, a business strategy advisor to owners of established service businesses.

There's no shortage of advice on how to grow a business, and most of it comes in the form of a blueprint.

But what worked for someone else was built for someone else, with different resources, different constraints, and a different idea of what the business was for.

The owners I work with don't need another blueprint.

They need someone to look at their actual situation, take their constraints and priorities into account, and help them find what works for their business, even if it doesn't look like what anyone else is doing.

I learned how businesses work from the inside.

$14 million

7 locations | 350 employees | full P&L

Grew from managing one location to directing seven

I began in my late teens at a startup coffee company, and over five years I held roles across training, marketing, and retail operations as the company grew past $5 million in revenue and prepared to franchise. From there I worked across multiple areas of hospitality management, eventually becoming a Director of Operations for one of the largest restaurant franchisees in the country. I had full P&L ownership across seven locations, with $14 million in revenue, 28 managers, and 350 employees.

17 years

Running my own business

10+ years working alongside other owners

I’ve run my own business for over 17 years, and for more than a decade I’ve worked full time alongside other owners, inside companies of many sizes and types. Most of them brought me in for marketing, but the work rarely stayed there. Over time I became the person owners pulled into conversations about operations, finance, and how their teams were structured, and in some companies my role grew to lead across all three. I wasn’t advising from a distance. I was in the meetings where the decisions got made, and I saw what happened after.

100+

Businesses advised across industries

Including health & wellness, education, events, retail, and professional services

Across all of it, I kept seeing the same pattern. Capable people made reasonable moves in one part of the business, and each change showed up as a cost somewhere else. When you cut the team, the same work falls on fewer people. When you generate more leads without a system to deliver on them, the strain lands on delivery. Seeing how the parts of a business affect each other, and the order they need to be addressed in, became the center of my work.

"Rachel has a business mind that I find rare and exceptional. I'm continuously amazed by her understanding of her clients' needs and her ability to effectively communicate to all parties involved."

Andrew Gottlieb | Founder & CEO, Not Typical Moments

What I believe

Most growth problems aren't what they look like on the surface.

Strategy starts with the owner.

What you want the business to be, the life you want around it, and what you need to earn are the starting point, not whatever is left over at the end.

Past a certain point, growth isn't just more of the same.

It requires a different version of the business, and that version works best when it's chosen on purpose.

A change in one part of the business ripples into every other part.

Which is why the order matters as much as the change itself.

Real numbers come first.

Experience and judgment decide what they mean.

Build the structure before you add the people.

Nobody can do their best work without a system that supports them.

Bigger isn't the only version of better.

Profit can grow whether or not revenue does.

Meaningful work should be sustainable, both personally and economically.

How I work

You own the decisions. I help you make them with clear eyes.

We work on this together. I bring the diagnosis, an honest view of the options, and the experience to know what to address first. You bring what you know about your business, your clients, and what you want from it. You’ll get straight answers from me, delivered with care, about what I see and where the problem actually sits.

I do my best work with owners who are ready to commit to shaping the future of their business.

Some want to grow, some want to step back, and some are preparing to hand it off one day. What they have in common is that they’re willing to look at the real numbers and do the work to build the business they actually want.