CXO and Co-Founder of WISE Advise + Assist Team | Strategic Growth Advisor | Culture-Driven Leader | Team Builder | Business Strategist | Project Manager | Communication Specialist
The three-year-old sitting across from Laura Early wouldn’t make eye contact, repeat the sound she asked for, or follow the sequence she had built for him that morning. Everyone else in the room had already tried louder instructions and firmer tones. Laura did something different. She stopped and she asked why.
Years later, in a very different room, a small business owner sat across from her on a video call, staring at a disputed $15,000 invoice, a list of broken deliverables, and a client relationship one email away from falling apart. The instinct here was the same as it had been in that first room: raise your voice and assign blame. Laura paused and did the same thing she had done with the three-year-old. She stopped and asked why. The therapy room and the boardroom are not supposed to be the same room. For her, they always have been.
The Instinct Behind WISE
Laura Early is the Chief Experience Officer and Co-Founder of WISE Advise + Assist Team, the firm she started ten years ago to help small businesses fix the operations they have outgrown. Before WISE, she spent years inside behavior therapy sessions, learning to diagnose resistance instead of labeling it. That habit, asking why before assuming, is what still defines every project she touches.
From Clinical Plans to Corporate Scorecards
Her path there did not run through business school. Early graduated from Lee University in 2010 with a degree in Special Education Support Services, then spent nearly three years as a Project Specialist with People for Care and Learning in Cleveland, Tennessee. She worked directly with the nonprofit’s international director and board, traveled to Asia to coordinate with government officials, and planned an international youth camp that welcomed more than 170 children. She also helped host a Korean children’s choir visit and contributed to a curriculum used to teach English abroad.
Early training in logistics and diplomacy became the foundation for what followed. Early moved into Applied Behavior Analysis, first at Little Miracle Child Development Services in Fayetteville, North Carolina, then at the May Institute in Columbus, Georgia. She wrote behavior plans for children on the autism spectrum, aged three to seventeen, and tracked their progress in small, measurable increments alongside primary care providers and interdisciplinary teams. Every regular client on her caseload showed measurable gains in language, social functioning, or behavior. None of that was accidental.
“You do not teach a complex skill in one leap,” Early says. “You define the outcome, understand the current behavior, and design the smallest possible next step.”
Around the same time, Early took on a very different kind of caseload. As Merchandise Manager for Chloe + Isabel, based in California, she managed a distributed network of roughly fifty independent entrepreneurs. “The biggest performance driver wasn’t introducing another sales tactic,” she says. “It was accountability to the commitments each entrepreneur had made for herself.”
The settings were different, but the lesson was surprisingly similar. Both were teaching Laura that clarity, a steady cadence, and real accountability moved people further than any complicated system ever could.
What Was Actually Broken
In 2015, she co-founded WISE Advise + Assist Team with a simple idea: small businesses do not always need more tools. Sometimes, they need someone to step back, look at what’s not happening and figure out what is actually getting in the way.
WISE grew around two sides of that work. The advising team helps businesses build the process and structure they need to grow. The assisting team helps the day-to-day marketing, communications, and administrative work off of the owners plate. “My background in behavioral therapy influences how I approach business more than people expect,” Early says. “When someone resists change, my first instinct is to ask why, not to label them difficult.”
That instinct was tested when a digital marketing project worth roughly $15,000 had spiraled into disputes over scope, approvals, and billing. Early stepped directly into the conflict andchanged project leadership and spent the next two weeks separating the facts from the frustration and listening to both the client and her team. Drawing on her Harvard NPLI Meta-Leadership training, she managed both relationships at once: helping the client feel heard and pushing the relationship forward while pulling her own team back from blame and toward problem-solving. WISE ultimately comped $5,500 in disputed work; the client paid for the scope that had genuinely changed. The client left satisfied. The team ran after-action reviews afterward that reshaped how WISE handles scope and escalation since. “Resist the urge to immediately add another tool, employee, or system,” Early tells founders drowning in operational chaos. “The thing creating the pain is very often not the thing that’s actually broken.”
Harmony, Not Balance
That same way of thinking extends beyond work.As a founding member of The Grand Pursuit, a community for entrepreneurial mothers, Early rejects the idea that career and family belong on opposite ends of a scale.
“I don’t believe in balance,” she says. “It is about harmony, where one season doesn’t have to consistently diminish the other.”
She has built that philosophy into WISE itself, into the boundaries she sets and the roles she designs. What she wants most, she says, is for her children to watch her love her work without ever believing it costs them anything.
The three-year-old who would not look up eventually did, once the sequence in front of him made sense. The founder staring at the disputed invoice eventually settled, once someone finally asked what was actually broken instead of who was to blame. Different rooms. Identical repair.
Laura Early has built a career on the belief that resistance is rarely about the person resisting. It is about a system that has not yet been made to make sense. Change the system, and the person changes with it.
The room keeps changing around her. The question never does.
Laura Early is the Chief Experience Officer and Co-Founder of WISE Advise + Assist Team, based in the United States. She helps small business owners build the operational clarity and team accountability needed to grow without breaking, and is a founding member of The Grand Pursuit, a community for entrepreneurial mothers. To connect with Laura or learn more, visit her LinkedIn Profile or Home – Wise Advise Team.
