Wall Street Vet Helps 1,000+ Small Businesses Scale Up

Makena Finger Zannini spent nearly a decade on Wall Street before noticing a pattern: entrepreneurs with big dreams were drowning in the day-to-day chaos of running a business.

She'd watched it happen again and again. Business owners started their companies chasing passion and freedom, only to get buried under emails, bookkeeping, hiring headaches, and marketing confusion. They had vision but lacked the systems to make it real.

So Zannini founded The Boutique COO, offering fractional chief operating officer services to businesses that can't afford a full-time executive. She later launched Brick by Brick Collective to serve real estate professionals specifically. Both companies help entrepreneurs build the structure their businesses desperately need.

Her own journey to entrepreneurship wasn't easy. Zannini left an extremely conservative evangelical community at 17, worked her way through the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania, and built her career from the ground up.

The biggest mistakes she sees? Hiring friends and family without clear boundaries, which inevitably strains relationships and complicates performance management. Many small business owners also struggle with pricing their services correctly and allocating marketing budgets effectively, leaving money on the table or wasting capital.

Workforce management remains the toughest challenge for most small businesses. Recruiting skilled people, setting performance standards, and navigating terminations have become increasingly complex in today's market.

The Ripple Effect

Zannini's approach is changing how small businesses think about growth. By providing affordable access to executive-level operations expertise, she's helping hundreds of entrepreneurs avoid the burnout that kills so many startups.

She's also pushing business owners to embrace AI tools or risk falling behind competitors. Small businesses can now do more with less, optimizing everything from customer service to product delivery through smart technology adoption.

Her advice for today's aspiring entrepreneurs? Start as a side project while employed to reduce financial risk. Focus on product-market fit by testing different offerings and pricing before going all-in. Stay flexible and let customer feedback guide your refinement rather than staying rigidly attached to your original vision.

Zannini believes that validation comes before vision. Testing the market, being willing to pivot, and building realistic forecasts are essential for turning entrepreneurial dreams into sustainable businesses.

For small business owners feeling overwhelmed by operational complexity, her message is clear: you don't have to figure it all out alone. Sometimes the smartest investment is bringing in someone who's built these systems before.