Who We Are

Gilded Goose exists for owners who want a real operating partner, not another minion to manage. Someone as passionate about growing the practice as you are. A partner who pushes past comfort zones, looks at problems from every angle, and drives toward the best result.

If you are stuck in an echo chamber, you need an honest mirror, someone who helps select the ideas worth pushing and cuts the inefficient tangents.

Being a boss does not mean you have to have every answer, just that you need to find a way to get the right ones.

  • Problems get turned over from more than one angle so the path chosen is the strongest, not the easiest to agree on. Devil’s advocacy is not a personality quirk here; it is how the work gets done. That means taking a hard line and asking the difficult questions.

  • Advice and decisions stay built around your goals, and your company is treated with customized care. Whether the aim is to last for many more decades or to build the practice up to sell, the work stays pointed at that outcome. Together we name the north star and push the business toward where you actually want it to go.

  • There has yet to be a software or tool that has stumped us. Plenty are hated and would never be recommended, but that has never been an excuse to leave the job unfinished or the infrastructure unimproved.

    Expertise locked to a single system is a trap when tool sprawl and systems spaghetti are the norm. Fluency and adaptability matter more: get inside how the tech stack really behaves, fix the joins where data disparity hides, and leave the practice with something the team can easily use.

  • Reporting has to be trustworthy before it is useful. Analytics, definitions, and the story in the numbers come before bigger spend or a prettier dashboard. Always look at the numbers. There is almost always information to base decisions on, or at least enough to examine before anyone green-lights the next round of spend. Data disparity between the slide deck and the live systems is not a minor annoyance; it is the problem.

    Clients who do not believe in data, or who treat gut feeling as a strategy, are not a good fit.

Meet the Founder

Kate Stannard

From my first role, I have been hired to fix broken things: processes, systems, tools. Or I was simply the only one foolish enough to take ownership of failing marketing automation, and bullheaded enough to wrangle marketers and salespeople into training. Problem quickly became synonymous with puzzle: a constantly shifting mix of technical spaghetti I get to organize into reliable infrastructure. Yay. Sign me up. No, really it is addictive.

After a B.S. in Marketing from the University of Central Florida in 2012, I sought out the most interesting roles I could find with the best toys, err, tools. That path ran from the Atlantic to the Pacific through finance, high tech, healthcare, and consulting agencies. After a while it seemed the best way to learn technology was at the source, and to see how the best operate.

At Salesforce—No. 116 on the Fortune 500—my work sat inside Marketing Automation and Technology Operations. It started in Campaign Operations, making sure marketing spend and activity were tracked and the team was recognized and rewarded for what it drove. As the skills and scope grew, so did the mandate: leading teams and building the integrations, choosing software, multimillion dollar budgets, and reporting behind them. One key project tracked attribution and the KPIs leadership cared about, recovering $1.3B in marketing pipeline attribution. More importantly, it recovered the only thing worth more than money in high tech: time, by cutting manual data-entry errors by about 70%.

A Master of Engineering in Engineering Management came while working full time, so the coursework applied straight to the job: widening my team's scope, sharpening leadership, and laying the groundwork to eventually run my own business. The University of Colorado Boulder awarded it in 2021, having designed the program as an MBA alternative for technical professionals: finance, project management, leadership, and communication, plus stronger technical judgment for leading teams and running programs.

Continuing education is a lifelong plan; between degrees there are always new certifications, tools, and hobbies to pick up. A Ph.D. sits on the horizon someday, but the current focus is growing other businesses. Leaving corporate America was partly about living a fuller life: getting back to my own passions, helping others discover theirs, and bringing businesses to their full fruition. The next phase means packing up to travel, fully indulging in art, and launching my next venture, Lazy Goose Acres in 2027.

Let’s Work Together

Tell us what you are trying to grow, which tools and systems you run today, and where the work feels stuck. Or just let me know what day and time you’re free and I’ll ask a lot of questions. We respect your privacy and your data is not shared or enrolled in a third-party client portal.

The best leaders prefer hard truths to beautiful lies.

The worst believe putting lipstick on a pig is a job well done.