About Rachel

From the time I was a small child, I was transforming and leading ideas of change and inclusion. From the first girl to play in the small towns tee ball league, because I just simply didn't understand why girls weren't included, and then roll into the business role and the kitchen of small businesses.

I sat at kitchen tables and back counters teaching owners how to use the software they had just bought and were afraid of. I carried them through Y2K, when a whole generation of small businesses were told their systems might stop working and nobody was explaining it to them in plain language. That decade taught me the thing I still carry: technology only matters when the person using it feels capable.

Then I spent more than twenty years inside corporate America doing the work most people never see.

Building early PC and server system software. Solving problems before anyone had named them. Leading organizations through acquisitions, technology advancement, and B2B software engineering, including the long transitions from public to private and back again. Twenty two of those years were spent inside the floral industry, including my time at FTD, where I learned how an industry can quietly drift away from the people who built it.

When I left that role in 2022, something shifted.

I founded Odin's Heart Foundation to honor caregivers in the rare disease community, a cause that lives inside my own family. I built two SaaS programs, Pawdesk and FPSetlist, and created nearly twenty websites for small business owners across many industries. In 2023 I launched K9sport.co, home of Odin's Dock, an eighty foot mobile dock jumping experience that travels Michigan and the surrounding states, carrying caregiving education, awareness, and community wherever it goes.

That work changed me from the inside out. I came face to face with beliefs that no longer fit, a leadership style that had drifted from my values, and a deep longing to connect differently. I spent 2025 slowing down, re-evaluating, and healing. What came through that process was clarity, gratitude, and an alignment I had not felt in a very long time.

That same year the Million Hearts Movement took me seven thousand miles across the country, through Salt Lake City, for the inaugural SheLeadsAI conference, where I spoke on Transforming Fear into Your Dream. The talk was the shortest way I know to describe the last four years of my life. The drive was the long way of truly connecting in small towns and wherever else the road took me.

In October 2025, I pivoted. I found new partnerships and turned my full attention to the Million Hearts Movement, Connecting Grace and Gratitude, one heart at a time.

Today I build from that same ground. Advanced Performance Solutions holds the work: Connecting Grace and Gratitude and MedPi.life, K9Yearbook, AboutMyBrandAI, SparkQuote, and Real Estate Media. With my partner Brooke Carroll Lemchak I am building WholeCut, born from everything those twenty two floral years taught me about who gets seen and who gets skipped. I write three daily hyperlocal newsletters for the towns of Greenville, Howell, and Genesee County, because a community stays connected when someone bothers to tell it what is happening. And I serve as Chair of the Board for Odin's Heart Foundation, still walking beside caregivers who are holding more than anyone can see.

Thirty years in, I am still doing the same work I started at those kitchen tables. Sitting with someone and making the hard thing feel possible.

What changed is what I understand the hard thing to be. For a long time I thought it was the software, the system, the strategy. It was never those. It was the fear underneath them, and I could only name that in others once I had walked through it myself.

I am a transformation coach devoted to guiding others toward lives rooted in grace, gratitude, and authentic connection. My own path has been shaped by healing from anxiety, fear, chronic illness, addiction, workaholism, and the quiet exhaustion of performing instead of living. What once felt like heavy chains became the very teachers that led me to presence, patience, and the freedom of no longer being defined by fear or the constant drive to fill something that felt empty inside.

I believe that when we pause and stay centered in the present moment, we uncover our own purpose and create space for others to do the same. Giving forward, extending grace, offering an open invitation to connect. These small acts create ripples that touch families, communities, and humanity itself.

My work centers on helping people reconnect with their inner truth and live from the inside out. Together we can turn fear into courage, isolation into connection, and the relentless pursuit of more into something that actually feels like peace.

I live in Michigan with two chocolate Labs, Bailey and Rizzo. I hand out laser engraved wooden hearts, the way my grandfather did before me.

I am honored to walk beside those who are ready. Each step forward, no matter how small, is an act of grace.