about
Who’s Who
Zoe Fairfax is a fractional CRO and COO, go to market and revenue operations executive, and the founder of StraDGy 360. With more than 20 years of experience across finance, SaaS, and consulting, she designs operating systems that align strategy with execution, helping leadership teams scale revenue with clarity, discipline, and confidence.
Most companies do not fail loudly. They stall quietly.
The numbers look acceptable. Dashboards are full. Meetings increase. Teams stay busy. Yet something feels off. Confidence in decisions erodes, forecasts feel fragile, and leaders sense that growth is costing more than it should. For Zoe Fairfax, these moments are not mysteries. They are signals. Quiet ceilings created by misalignment, where effort increases but clarity disappears.
For more than two decades, Zoe’s work has centered on diagnosing those ceilings and designing systems that remove them. Her career spans institutional finance, global go to market leadership, entrepreneurship, and advisory work. Across each chapter, one principle has remained constant. Growth becomes durable only when execution is designed to hold.
Precision, Accountability, and Early Lessons in Alignment
Zoe’s perspective on growth was shaped early in environments where precision and accountability were non negotiable. In institutional finance roles at Brown Brothers Harriman and later at General Motors Asset Management, misalignment was never theoretical. When assumptions were wrong or controls drifted, the consequences were immediate and measurable. Risk exposure increased. Decision quality declined. Trust eroded quickly.
Those early experiences instilled a deep respect for discipline, data integrity, and systems that reflect reality rather than aspiration. They also shaped her understanding that alignment is not a cultural nice to have. It is an operational requirement.
That lesson deepened during her eight years at Thomson Reuters, where she helped launch, scale, and operate go to market and revenue operations for two global business lines, Indices and Benchmarks. These were complex businesses that required close coordination across product, commercial teams, finance, legal, and external partners. Growth depended far less on individual performance and far more on whether the system worked end to end.
Ringing the opening bell at the New York Stock Exchange marked a visible milestone in that journey. But for Zoe, the moment that mattered most was not the ceremony. It was the visibility behind it. When systems were aligned, forecasts became credible, decisions accelerated, and growth held under pressure. When they were not, activity increased but confidence declined. That contrast stayed with her.
From Leadership Roles to Building Operating Systems
After years of leading inside large, complex organizations, Zoe saw the same pattern repeat across industries. Capable leaders. Clear strategies. Modern tools. Yet execution continued to break down in predictable ways. Strategy conversations happened in one room, while operational reality lived somewhere else. Marketing optimized activity. Sales focused on pipeline. Finance reported results after the fact. Customer success managed outcomes downstream. Each function performed well in isolation, but no one owned the system connecting decisions end to end.
Leaders asked reasonable questions they could not answer with confidence. Where exactly is growth leaking. Which constraint matters most right now. What decision should come first. The data existed, but it was fragmented, lagging, or disconnected from how the business actually operated.
Nine years ago, Zoe left New York City to build companies of her own. She founded StraDGy 360 to help leaders see and fix the same structural breakdowns she had observed throughout her career. The goal was not to introduce another framework or set of slides. It was to build a real operating system that translates strategy into execution across marketing, sales, customer success, and finance.
At the same time, Zoe co founded Let It Ride Charters, a fishing and diving business based in Key Largo. Operating this business alongside advisory work reinforced her convictions in a different way. On the water, there is no abstraction between decisions and outcomes. Weather, equipment, timing, communication, and execution either work together or they do not. Misalignment shows up immediately.
Running businesses in both environments sharpened her understanding of systems and accountability. In growth companies, feedback loops are slower. Teams can rationalize friction. Metrics can obscure truth. In a charter business, reality responds instantly. The lesson was the same in both worlds. Growth stalls not because people are not working hard enough, but because the system cannot support what is being asked of it.
Making Execution Visible and Growth Deliberate
Zoe’s work today sits at the intersection of strategy, execution, and visibility. Through StraDGy 360, she partners with founders, executive teams, and revenue leaders to design and install operating systems that make performance visible before results break down. Her approach integrates dashboards, unit economics, forecasting, capacity modeling, enablement, and operating cadence into a single connected engine.
One engagement illustrates the impact of this approach. A leadership team believed their growth challenges were driven by demand. Pipeline volume looked healthy. Activity targets were being met. Yet results lagged expectations. When marketing, sales, customer success, and finance were connected into a unified operating view, a different story emerged. The constraint was not top of funnel activity. It was capacity and timing. Sales coverage, onboarding throughput, and customer readiness were misaligned, creating bottlenecks no single team could see on its own.
Once those constraints became visible, priorities shifted. Hiring plans were adjusted. Onboarding was resequenced. Enablement was recalibrated against realistic capacity. Forecasts became more conservative in the short term, but far more accurate. Within a few cycles, execution stabilized and growth became predictable again.
Colleagues and clients consistently point to this ability to see the whole system as Zoe’s defining strength. One executive described her as “the gatekeeper of data integrity,” noting that her focus on operational excellence and clear KPIs brought discipline and confidence back into decision making. Another client shared that even brief conversations with Zoe opened new possibilities because of her deep understanding of systems, technology, and execution. Across roles and industries, a common theme emerges. Zoe does not simply identify problems. She operationalizes solutions and builds systems teams can run.
Her leadership style reflects the same philosophy. Those who have worked directly for her often describe a balance of rigor and humanity. Clear expectations. Strong accountability. And a commitment to mentorship that helps teams grow alongside the systems they operate.
Vision for the Future: Normalizing Clarity
As go to market leadership evolves, Zoe sees a shift underway. Less emphasis on shiny tools and surface metrics. More focus on fundamentals, operating discipline, and execution systems that hold under pressure. In her view, technology does not fix broken foundations. Profitable, scalable businesses do.
Looking ahead, the legacy Zoe wants to create through StraDGy 360 is simple and ambitious. To normalize clarity. Too many organizations accept confusion, rework, and reactive decision making as the cost of growth. Zoe believes it does not have to be that way.
When teams see the same signals and understand constraints, decisions become calmer, faster, and more deliberate. Execution stops relying on heroics and starts relying on systems that compound over time. Growth becomes something leaders can manage intentionally rather than chase reactively.
Her work continues to attract recognition across the industry, including being named among the women in go to market leadership to watch as companies rethink how execution is evaluated. Yet for Zoe, recognition is secondary to impact. What matters is helping leaders build businesses where growth feels disciplined rather than chaotic, ambitious rather than fragile.
Editorial Note
Zoe Fairfax’s career is a reminder that growth is not sustained by pressure or noise. It is sustained by clarity, alignment, and systems that tell the truth early. For founders and executives navigating complexity, her work offers a clear challenge. Stop chasing tactics. Start designing the system that will hold your ambition.
