Operations Portfolio — Carly Hutchinson

I build the systems that make teams faster, smoother, and more efficient.

Operations Manager at a boutique leadership development company. I specialize in:

Why operations

I got into operations by being the person who could not leave a broken process alone. Colleagues describe me as someone who figures things out without waiting to be told, and that is the whole method: find the thing quietly costing everyone time, understand why it is still like that, and build the version that should have existed all along. I am self-taught across Google Apps Script, the Monday.com API, and AI agent workflows, and I learned all of it the same way: by shipping.

Grand Rapids, MI car.s.hutchinson@gmail.com linkedin.com/in/carly-hutchinson

Carly's Impact

~5,000+ hrs
Saved per year across all systems
~$300K+
Recurring annual cost savings
11
Systems built zero-to-one, all shipped in the last 12 months
Total: roughly 5,000+ hours and $300K+ per year in work automated or eliminated, on a boutique team where that capacity matters.

Time and cost figures are annualized estimates. Client names are anonymized throughout.

How I work

The operating system behind the systems.

Operating principles
01

Start with the people in the workflow, not the workflow. The people doing the work are the source of truth. I ask what's broken and what their dream version looks like, then build from their vision, so they become a thought partner instead of a ticket.

02

Ship V1, then let reality edit it. Nothing rolls out until at least one stakeholder has run it live and confirmed it works for them. I iterate on real usage, not predictions, and when the gap between versions keeps stretching, the workflow has found its shape.

03

They say the devil's in the details. In operations, the details are the bible. I test at every step, not just at the end. When something won't resolve in the moment, I park a placeholder and let the rest of the build answer it.

04

Build to give people their time back. Every system turns organized chaos into something structured and seamless, and hands people back the hours it was quietly eating.

Things I believe about operations

AI is here to assist people, not replace them. I automate the busywork so people can spend more time on the human work: sales with people, service with customers, time face to face.

Priority is a human decision. You can hand a pile of projects to AI and ask it to rank them, but only real people know what's actually working and what isn't.

Most "people problems" are infrastructure problems in disguise.

If you're the only one who knows how it works, you haven't finished building it.

Key Systems

Find selected projects below including the situation, strategy, impact and build details.

Client Portal

Systems DesignReporting

The Situation

  • Clients experienced their engagement through a patchwork of shared Google Sheets, emailed PDFs, and status updates. Real insights only surfaced in infrequent meetings.
  • Every progress update was hand-assembled from data scattered across 8 Monday.com boards.
  • No self-serve option existed for clients to see their own data: program insights, attendance, progress, feedback, or schedule.

The Strategy

  • Prove the concept with one client's use case first, using Monday.com as the live source of truth so there is no separate sync step.
  • Expand that proof of concept into an architecture that works across every engagement type, built from a library of reusable page templates.
  • Goal: shift client-facing time away from status updates and toward discussing insights and solving problems, freeing up team bandwidth to build real client relationships.

The Solution

  • Built password-protected client portals with live data, covering six types of client engagements. Deployed on Netlify, pulling directly from Monday.com so there is no manual syncing.
  • Kept sensitive data safe: credentials never touch the browser, and small-group feedback stays anonymous by design until enough people have responded.
  • Automated the scheduling process: clients approve proposed session dates, and the system notifies the team and creates the sessions automatically.
  • Built a fully anonymized demo version for the sales team, plus complete documentation so anyone on the team can maintain the platform.
Tour the demo → Recreation of a system I built and ran, rebuilt with fictional data.
How it was built
  • Monday.com GraphQL API with a server-side proxy so API credentials never reach the browser
  • Library of reusable page templates assembled per client, one codebase for six engagement types
  • Tolerant name matching across training, coaching, intake, and historical feedback boards
  • Anonymity gates requiring 3+ responses before NPS and before/after measures display
  • 21-check automated verification suite, including a zero real-name sweep of the demo build

Leadership 360 Automation

Process AutomationReporting

The Situation

  • Producing each leader's 360 report was fully manual: copying survey data between spreadsheets, relabeling rater categories, merging small groups for anonymity, refreshing charts, and generating the PDF by hand.
  • On the intake side, leaders relied on one-off emails to understand the process, chase responses, and check their status.
  • At 10 to 20 reports per cohort, this was one of the biggest recurring time sinks in delivery, and every manual step was an error risk on a client-facing document.

The Strategy

  • Automate everything the platform allows inside the existing reporting pipeline rather than rebuilding a stack that already worked.
  • Flag the few remaining manual steps exactly when they are needed, so nothing depends on memory.
  • Make the intake side self-serve so leaders can run their own process without hand-holding.

The Solution

  • One-click report preparation: select a leader from a menu and the system handles data prep, rater categories, small-group merges, and score calculations.
  • Auto-written key insights for each leader, generated in the company's non-evaluative voice and flowed straight into the report.
  • Built-in anonymity guardrails that flag when a page must be dropped, so no small group is ever identifiable.
  • A public instructions site with a self-serve status tracker, plain-language anonymity rules, and a copy-paste survey email.
Tour the demo → Recreation of a system I built and ran, rebuilt with fictional data.
How it was built
  • Google Apps Script menu inside the source sheet driving the full data-prep sequence
  • Rater relabeling, small-group merge logic, and eNPS calculation handled in code
  • Existing Sheets-to-Slides merge pipeline retained, with setup documentation for template changes
  • Instructions site and status tracker built as a static site on Netlify

Feedback Intelligence Hub

ReportingAI Enablement

The Situation

  • Session and coaching feedback lived in a shared spreadsheet plus cohort docs scattered across Google Drive.
  • Coaches had no way to see their own feedback history without someone compiling it by hand.
  • Years of historical feedback was effectively invisible to the people it was about.

The Strategy

  • Centralize everything in Monday.com and build a coach-facing dashboard on top of it.
  • Iterate directly on named coach feedback rather than guessing at requirements.
  • Design for trust: coaches see only their own feedback, and anonymity rules are enforced in code, not by policy.

The Solution

  • A dashboard where each coach sees their weekly, personal, and all-time feedback, with AI-written summaries and sentiment labels on every written response.
  • A percentile-based leaderboard designed to celebrate coaches rather than create anxiety.
  • A one-time migration of 222 historical feedback docs into a searchable hub going back to 2021.
  • A two-page coach guide and rollout announcement, written from the actual app behavior so every claim is accurate.
Tour the demo → Recreation of a system I built and ran, rebuilt with fictional data.
How it was built
  • Built as a Monday.com Vibe app with per-coach auto-filtering and admin access controls in code
  • AI sentiment labeling pipeline over written feedback responses
  • Anonymity thresholds enforced before any group metric displays
  • Scripted one-time migration from Google Drive with per-record verification

Leader Operations Playbook

DocumentationProcess Mapping

The Situation

  • The entire leader operations workflow, from deal ping to continued coaching, lived in one person's head: mine.
  • Fourteen phases across roughly a dozen connected tools and boards, with no map anyone else could follow.
  • Any absence or handoff created a bottleneck: the team's time-to-unblock sat at 30 days against a 7-day target.

The Strategy

  • Capture the real workflow live through narrated walkthroughs instead of writing documentation from memory.
  • Treat the documentation as a discovery tool: watching the actual work surfaces the workflows and automations that need correcting.
  • Turn what surfaced into a prioritized improvement roadmap, now actively in progress through Q3.

The Solution

  • A 15-page playbook covering all 14 phases, each with its trigger, owner, numbered steps, and gotcha callouts.
  • A known-bugs list and 10 prioritized improvements, ranked by impact and now driving the Q3 roadmap.
  • A gap audit of the playbook against a real 117-task cohort project plan to catch undocumented steps.
  • Documentation targets operationalized into quarterly goals with an audit cadence and usability testing.
How it was built
  • Narrated screen-share walkthroughs of each phase, structured into a consistent phase template
  • Cross-audit against a live 117-task cohort project plan
  • Improvement backlog ranked by impact and folded into quarterly goals

More Projects

AI EnablementProcess Automation

Daily Morning Briefing System

Mornings started with an hour of email and calendar triage. A scheduled AI agent now reviews a week of email, two calendars, and task boards every weekday and drafts replies in my voice, so the day starts decided instead of buried.

~125 hrs/yr saved (~$6,000)
Systems DesignDocumentation

Coach Backgrounder Portal

Coaches had to ask around for client company context before sessions. An 84-company sales board became self-serve briefing material through a password-protected web app with search and cohort filters.

~35 hrs/yr saved (~$1,750) · 84 backgrounders self-serve
Reporting

Cohort Dashboards & Branded PDF Export

The delivery dashboard exported as five pages of raw junk nobody would send a client. Rebuilt it into a branded one-page executive report, reproduced for every training cohort.

~25 hrs/yr saved (~$1,250) · 5 pages → 1
GovernanceSystems Design

CRM Contacts Board Overhaul

Months of meetings about the bloated CRM board produced nothing. Shipped a clean default view with required fields, let real usage drive feedback, and locked in governance decisions along the way.

~75 hrs/yr saved (~$3,500) · 79 → ~70 columns, 26 → ~13 views
AI EnablementProcess Automation

Session Recap Insights Automation

Clients never saw a synthesis of what happened in their sessions. A scheduled agent now turns facilitator recaps and leader feedback into one client-appropriate insight per session, with guardrails that keep internal notes internal.

~15 hrs/yr saved (~$750)
GovernanceDocumentation

Automation Estate Audit

101 accumulated automation scenarios with no inventory made external handoff impossible. Audited every scenario programmatically, verified true on/off status, and mapped each one to the boards and sheets it touches.

30-50 hrs one-time saved ($3,000-7,500) · 45 of 101 actually active
AI EnablementDocumentation

Brand Kit & Claude Skill

On-brand documents depended on whoever made them. A branding kit plus a shared Claude skill now makes docs, decks, and client materials come out consistently on-brand by default, no design review bottleneck.

Team-wide adoption across docs and decks

Certifications

M
Monday.com Work Management
Certified · May 2024
M
Make.com Workflow Automation
Certified · Nov 2023
RTB
Raise The Bar Certified Leader
Coaching · Nov 2021

Toolstack

Automation & AI
Make.comAI agents (Claude)Google Apps Script
Systems & Data
Monday.com (GraphQL API + Vibe)PubligoTypeformActiveCampaignCalendly
Web & Delivery
HTML / JSNetlify

What managers say

From the people who led me at two different companies.

Carly has that rare ability to scale efficiency without losing the human element. She became our go-to expert, automating countless workflows across marketing, sales, customer experience, finance, and delivery. But here's what I love most: she doesn't take herself too seriously, she's genuinely fun to be around, and she steps up whenever the team needs her most. Any team would be lucky to work with Carly.

Heather Ostroff People-First Strategic Operator & Chief of Staff Managed Carly directly for ~4 years at a boutique leadership development company

She is a jack of all trades, willing to take on challenges in any aspect of the business, from customer service to operations. She spearheaded multiple projects including streamlining the appointment process and training the team. She's adaptable, reliable, smart, and driven, a natural leader and a joy to work with.

Kristi Lotta All-Star leader in Visual Merchandising, Operations & Project Management Managed Carly directly at Rent the Runway