Q and A with Avy from Atlanta, Georgia
“When you design your life and business around how you actually function—not how you think you should—everything becomes more sustainable, more humane, and ultimately more successful.”
Q: What are you passionate about?
A: I’m passionate about building systems that actually work for real humans—especially women, parents, and neurodivergent people who have been told (explicitly or implicitly) that they’re “too much,” “too scattered,” or “bad at follow-through.”
My work lives at the intersection of operations, delegation, and human behavior. I help women-owned businesses stop white-knuckling their way through growth and instead build support systems that fit their brains, their lives, and their values. That means processes that are clear but flexible, teams that are empowered instead of micromanaged, and businesses that don’t require burnout as the price of success.
This passion came from lived experience. I’ve been the overwhelmed founder, the parent trying to do everything herself, the person who knew she was capable of more but couldn’t figure out why traditional productivity advice kept failing her. Once I realized the problem wasn’t effort—but design—everything changed. Systems shouldn’t require you to become someone else to work. They should work because of who you are.
Right now, through Alisto, I lead a distributed team that supports founders with operations, project management, and delegation in a way that’s deeply personalized. I’m also building educational content and frameworks around delegation, emotional labor, and sustainable leadership—especially for women who are carrying far more than their job description suggests.
At the core of everything I do is this belief: when women are properly supported, they don’t just succeed—they lead better, build better, and change the rules for everyone coming after them.
Q: What were your younger years like?
A: My younger years were a mix of high expectations, deep responsibility, and a lot of internal pressure to “have it together.” I grew up in a family that valued contribution, intellect, and community, which meant I learned early how to be capable, reliable, and useful. I was the kid adults trusted. The one who could be counted on. That shaped me in powerful ways—and also quietly taught me that being needed was the same as being valued.
Academically, I did well, but school was never just about grades for me. I was constantly asking questions, challenging assumptions, and trying to understand people beneath the surface. I was drawn to leadership roles, organizing, and problem-solving, even when I didn’t realize that’s what I was doing. At the same time, I struggled with boredom, restlessness, and the sense that I was working twice as hard as others to stay “on track.” I didn’t have language then for neurodivergence—I just knew I could be both highly capable and inexplicably overwhelmed.
Outside of school, I was always in motion—working, volunteering, taking on responsibilities, filling gaps. I learned how to manage chaos early, how to anticipate what others needed, and how to hold things together when systems failed. Those skills made me look competent and confident from the outside, but internally I carried a constant low-level anxiety: if I dropped the ball, everything might fall apart.
Choosing social work later on wasn’t accidental. It came from years of watching how poorly designed systems punish people for being human—and how often women, especially, are expected to absorb that failure quietly. My upbringing taught me resilience and leadership, but it also taught me how easily capable people can become overextended when support is missing. Looking back, those years didn’t just lead me to where I am now—they explain it. They’re why I build systems that don’t rely on self-sacrifice, why I’m allergic to hustle culture, and why my work today is about creating structures that let people succeed without disappearing themselves in the process.
Q: What is something valuable you’d like others to know?
A: One of the most valuable things I’ve learned is that struggling doesn’t mean you’re broken—it usually means the system around you is poorly designed.
For a long time, I thought my exhaustion, inconsistency, and overwhelm were personal failures. I assumed I just needed to try harder, be more disciplined, or “get it together.” What I eventually learned is that many high-capability women are operating inside structures that were never built for them—at work, at home, or in leadership. When you place a capable person in a misaligned system, they don’t fail quietly; they burn out.
What I want others to learn from my story is that support is not a weakness and delegation is not a moral failing. You don’t earn rest by suffering enough first. You don’t need to prove your worth through over-functioning. Building support—whether through systems, boundaries, or people—is an act of leadership, not indulgence.
If there’s one takeaway, it’s this: you are not meant to do everything alone. When you design your life and business around how you actually function—not how you think you should—everything becomes more sustainable, more humane, and ultimately more successful.
Q: What does feminism mean to you?
A: To me, feminism means autonomy, access, and honest choice.
It’s not just about equal opportunity on paper—it’s about recognizing the invisible labor women are expected to carry and refusing to treat that as normal or inevitable. Feminism, for me, is naming the unpaid emotional, logistical, and relational work that keeps families, teams, and businesses functioning—and insisting that it has value.
It also means rejecting the idea that empowerment looks the same for every woman. Choice only matters when real options exist. Being able to build a career, ask for support, delegate, rest, lead, or opt out of certain expectations without punishment—that’s feminism in practice.
At its core, feminism is about women having sovereignty over their time, energy, bodies, and labor. It’s about designing systems—at home, at work, and in society—that don’t rely on women’s burnout to succeed.
MORE ABOUT AVY: One thing I’d want to add is that a lot of what I do now comes from learning—sometimes the hard way—that being strong doesn’t mean being endlessly self-sufficient.
I’m a builder by nature, but I’m also someone who had to unlearn the belief that my value was tied to how much I could carry. Becoming a parent, leading teams, and running businesses forced me to confront that. They made it impossible to pretend that willpower alone is a sustainable strategy.
I care deeply about creating work and lives that leave room for joy, rest, and humanity—not as rewards, but as foundations. I believe women deserve systems that support them before they break, and leadership models that don’t require martyrdom to be taken seriously.
That belief shows up in everything I build, everything I teach, and the way I choose to lead.
Thank you for reading!
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