Growth is the ambition. Performance makes it real.
As Founder & Chief Performance Officer of Today’s Growth Partners, Mary Douglas works where business ambition meets operational reality.
Her career has taken her inside businesses of different sizes, industries, and stages of development—from national retailers and emerging consumer brands to service organizations and entrepreneurial ventures.
That breadth has shaped her ability to recognize patterns others may overlook: where revenue opportunities are being lost, where operations are limiting growth, where customer experience exposes deeper problems, and where leadership decisions are affecting performance.
Mary works backward from the results a business needs to achieve, examining the people, processes, decisions, and capabilities responsible for producing them.
Her focus is not simply identifying what needs to change. It’s helping leadership understand why, determine what comes next, and build the organizational capability to deliver.
Know what you’re not seeing. Build from there.
Sales increase through a key Northern California distribution partner, driven by Today's Growth Partners · January–September 2026
Working directly with the founder of this specialty food company, Mary worked backwards from the shelf: why customers bought, why they came back or didn't, and whether pricing, packaging and distribution could support the growth the company wanted. Her contribution was connecting those pieces, challenging assumptions and helping leadership make more informed decisions.
Getting a product onto a shelf is an accomplishment. Getting customers to buy it, come back for it, and build a sustainable business around it is what really matters. That's the difference between pursuing growth and understanding how growth actually happens.
Year-over-year revenue growth
Consecutive quarters of sequential sales growth, ending in a record third quarter
Selling pickle SKU in its category, across approximately 200 retail locations
Packaging repositioned alongside a $5 lower retail price point
Company-reported results under Today's Growth Partners' direction. The distribution-partner increase reflects sales activity introduced by Today's Growth Partners rather than market growth. Revenue and distribution-partner figures compare January–September 2026 with the same period in 2025; four consecutive quarters of sequential sales growth culminated in a record Q3 2026.
What could this business become—and what must be true for it to get there?
Mary’s approach to business development begins with that question—not with today’s limitations, but with the future an organization is trying to achieve. She examines the revenue required, the customers it must serve, the operating capabilities it must develop, the leadership decisions it must make, and the people, systems, and resources necessary to support that future.
Working with startups and emerging organizations introduced a different challenge: building the operating structure before the business has the resources, systems, or stability of an established company.
Her experience includes preparing a Chick-fil-A restaurant for opening through workforce recruitment, training, and operating procedures; independently developing two retail storefronts at Circle Centre Mall, inspired by conversations surrounding Indianapolis’s Startup 317 initiative; hands-on startup work with The Halo App; and business development and organizational work involving Los Patios’ eight-restaurant environment.
Today, AI is a critical part of that forward-looking perspective. Mary examines how AI, automation, and changing market conditions may reshape a business over the next one, three, and five years. She helps leadership consider which capabilities will remain essential, which processes should evolve, where technology may create new opportunities, and what must change before the organization can successfully adopt it.
Mary doesn’t begin by asking how to improve the business as it exists today. She begins by understanding what the business needs to become—and determines how to get there.
Building Intelligent Systems for Human and AI Performance
Human judgment and AI capability, built into how the business runs.
Mary designs business playbooks and AI-enabled operating frameworks that turn strategy, experience, and institutional knowledge into practical systems for execution.
Her approach combines human judgment with AI capabilities—defining how work gets done, how decisions are supported, how performance is measured, and where human oversight remains essential.
She builds verification and accountability into these frameworks, helping teams recognize AI-generated errors, challenge unsupported conclusions, validate information against trusted sources, and understand when human intervention is required.
Rather than leaving behind static documents, Mary develops business-specific knowledge foundations that organizations can use with AI, refine over time, and expand as technology and business needs evolve.
The objective: businesses that operate with greater intelligence, stronger human judgment, and the ability to adapt without losing control of their performance.
Mary leads revenue and performance initiatives across TGP's client portfolio, including consumer brands, food producers, technology platforms, and service businesses.
Her work spans commercial strategy, operational improvement, organizational readiness, AI-enabled business transformation, and fractional leadership.
She also serves as an advisor to Qwell Community Foundation.
Mary helped bring the Pocket T to life at Gap — the pocket tee that became one of the company’s most enduring products — drawing on her understanding of customers and what sold in her store. The work reached founder Don Fisher and his wife Doris Fisher, and her commercial judgment led leaders at Gap and other organizations to seek her perspective on new opportunities.
Mary started EasyTech inside a Staples store she was leading, helping customers with their laptops. What began as a response to a customer need grew into a profitable service business for the organization.
Mary received the President's Award at Staples and was invited to meet CEO Ron Sargent to discuss the customer insights and innovative approaches behind her sales performance.
Mary's approach to performance wasn't developed in a boardroom alone.
It was shaped by years inside businesses—working with customers, leading teams, building operations, recognizing commercial opportunities, and confronting the difference between what leadership expects and what actually happens.
Across industries, the lesson has remained consistent: strong ideas and ambitious goals are not enough. Performance depends on whether the business has the leadership, people, systems, and discipline to deliver.
That understanding is the foundation of her work today.
“What are you not seeing?”
Mary Douglas is Founder & Chief Performance Officer of Today's Growth Partners, where she leads revenue and performance. She partners with owners, CEOs and executive teams across organizations ranging from $1 million to $450 million.
Mary's background spans hard lines and soft lines, big box, grocery and specialty retailers, including jewelry, cosmetics, and furniture, and the CPG brands that sell through them—as well as healthcare, ophthalmology, hospitality, restaurants and real estate. Across those settings, her method has stayed the same: get inside the business, reverse-engineer the results, and find what the numbers don't explain.
Her recent work includes Today's Growth Partners, her advisory work through MDC3 LLC, and regional human-resources leadership for two organizations.
She leads Today's Growth Partners alongside founding partner Brad Hayden, Chief Revenue Officer. Brad reads revenue from the outside in—markets, customers and opportunity; Mary reads performance from the inside out—leadership, operations and execution.
A business brings Mary in when something isn't adding up—or its next stage of growth requires a different perspective. Revenue may be slowing, expansion may be outpacing the organization's ability to deliver, or a significant opportunity may demand decisions leadership has not yet worked through.
She starts by listening, observing and asking questions that haven't been asked, working directly with leadership to understand how the business actually functions—not simply how it's supposed to function.
Mary brings forward the disconnects, missed opportunities and unnecessary complexity she sees. She helps leadership decide what needs to change, what deserves investment and what should stop—then establish priorities, align decision-makers and create a practical path toward measurable results. She stays engaged at the executive level to assess progress and help adjust course.
Her role isn't to run someone else's business. It's to help its leaders see more clearly, make better decisions and build an organization capable of achieving what they've been working toward.
At Today’s Growth Partners, Truth Marketing begins before we accept a client.
We look closely at the claims businesses make about their products, services, performance, and value. If a company says its product is healthy, clean, sustainable, or superior, we want to know what evidence supports that claim.
We look beyond the pitch. We question assumptions, examine the facts, and identify the gap between what a business promises and what it actually delivers.
Because growth built on claims that don’t hold up isn’t growth we want to lead.
For Mary Douglas, Truth Marketing goes both ways.
The same standards she expects from the businesses she represents are the standards she brings to her own work. That means being transparent about what she discovers, candid in her recommendations, and willing to share findings even when they challenge expectations or change the direction of an engagement.
Truth Marketing is more than a commitment to accurate claims. It’s a commitment to the relationships we build, the decisions we influence, and the trust placed in us.
Because what we do with what we discover matters.
Mary Douglas has an exceptional ability to see the bigger picture, understanding not only business operations but the complex human dynamics that influence leadership and organizational performance.
Her approach is logical, direct, and grounded in experience. She brings genuine passion to her work, challenges conventional thinking with sound reasoning, and recognizes the importance of making decisions based on established principles rather than the whims of leadership.
What sets Mary apart is her ability to combine strategic perspective with a deep understanding of people. Her presence, conviction, and leadership philosophy left a lasting impression on me and influenced how I approach leadership myself.
Mary Douglas is the kind of executive who doesn’t just develop a strategy — she gets into the business, understands what is actually happening, and takes responsibility for moving it forward.
At Britt’s Fermented Foods, Mary has played an extensive role in building and advancing our commercial operations, bringing together sales leadership, market expansion, distribution development, retail execution, and business performance strategy.
One of Mary’s greatest strengths is her ability to see the entire commercial picture. She understands that getting a product onto a shelf is only the beginning. Sustainable growth requires the right pricing, positioning, distribution relationships, retail support, customer demand, operational capacity, and disciplined execution.
Mary has personally gone into markets to develop our business. She spent a week in Oregon building retail relationships, opening stores, and helping establish our presence in a new territory. She also spent time on the ground in Southern California investigating expansion opportunities, evaluating market conditions, and pursuing distribution and retail relationships.
She has managed broker relationships, coordinated with distributors, developed retail opportunities, supported store-level execution, and worked to build the interconnected sales activities necessary to generate repeat business rather than simply increase distribution.
Her approach is both strategic and hands-on. She can evaluate a business from an executive perspective, identify where performance is being constrained, and then get directly involved in the work required to address those constraints.
Mary also understands the financial and operational realities behind growth. She examines pricing, product-market fit, sales velocity, market readiness, distribution economics, and the ability of the business to support expansion. She is willing to question assumptions and challenge decisions when she believes the business needs a different direction.
What I value about Mary is that she doesn’t confuse activity with progress. Opening stores, signing distributors, or entering new markets means little unless those efforts translate into sustainable sales and stronger business performance.
She brings a rare combination of commercial intelligence, operational leadership, entrepreneurial thinking, and the willingness to do the difficult work herself when necessary.
Mary is not limited to advising a business on what should happen. She knows how to organize people, relationships, resources, and execution around what needs to happen next.
For any founder, owner, or executive team looking to expand, improve performance, enter new markets, or navigate a critical stage of business development, Mary brings the experience, judgment, and leadership to make a meaningful contribution.
I would strongly recommend Mary Douglas to any business seeking an executive who can see beyond the immediate problem, challenge conventional thinking, and help build a stronger path forward.
Working with Mary Douglas at Today's Growth Partners has brought an entirely new level of operational clarity, strategic thinking, and executive perspective to my work with VolunQueer.
Mary has helped me see beyond my original vision and recognize opportunities I hadn't fully considered, particularly in understanding the possibilities of both for-profit and nonprofit business models and how to build an organization that is sustainable, scalable, and positioned for long-term success.
What makes Mary exceptional is her ability to look at the whole picture. She doesn't simply offer advice. She challenges assumptions, identifies opportunities, connects ideas, and brings the real-world business experience necessary to understand what it will actually take to move forward.
Our conversations have fundamentally expanded how I see myself as a founder and business leader. Mary has helped me approach decisions with greater clarity, recognize possibilities I might otherwise have overlooked, and think more strategically about the future of VolunQueer.
The confidence I've developed in Mary's judgment, experience, and ability to see the bigger picture has been so significant that I've invited her to take a leadership role in helping shape VolunQueer's future.
Mary brings a rare combination of executive perspective, operational intelligence, and genuine commitment to helping founders build organizations that can succeed. Having her involved in our strategic direction is an opportunity I value tremendously.
I would highly recommend Mary to any founder, business owner, or executive leader looking for someone who can expand their thinking, challenge assumptions, identify opportunities, and help turn an ambitious vision into a sustainable organization.
To lead, people have to want to follow you. Mary's intelligent, heart-led coaching helped refine my communication style for increased connection.
Mary's insights aren't always comfortable, but they are always true on a level that executives can easily miss in the rush of productivity.
After working with Mary, I feel better prepared to share our nonprofit mission with potential partners in ways that create excitement about the more beautiful world we can co-create.
A methodology within Mary's executive leadership work—not a separate promise of business results.
90-minute one-on-one sessions.
A different perspective can change the trajectory of a business.
Changing Frequency is an executive perspective intervention designed to examine the thinking, decisions, and leadership dynamics shaping business performance.
Through candid, one-on-one dialogue, Mary brings an independent perspective to the assumptions, patterns, and decisions that may be limiting progress.
The conversation moves beyond conventional thinking to uncover what isn't being considered, what needs to be reconsidered, and where a different approach could create meaningful change.
Because sometimes the greatest opportunity for a business isn't a new strategy. It's a new perspective at the top.
As Founder & CEO, Mary led Kindness To One Another through community partnerships and programs. It reflects a conviction that practical help and human connection can make a meaningful difference.
On July 11, 2019, Indianapolis station WTHR Channel 13 featured Mary's work. Mary Milz's story, “Indy woman spreads kindness through random acts,” highlighted the nonprofit's efforts to help people in need by paying bills.
Read the WTHR storyMary advises VolunQueer founder Jacob Buck and remains actively engaged with the organization today. Through Today's Growth Partners, the work began as a pro bono strategic case study focused on organizational growth, AI visibility, platform positioning, governance readiness, and the future of volunteering.
It explores how volunteering may evolve as technology changes how people work, contribute, build experience, and connect within organizations and communities. The engagement has expanded beyond traditional volunteer matching to examine broader opportunities around skills-based service, verified experience, workforce pathways, human connection, and the infrastructure needed to support meaningful contribution in an increasingly AI-enabled world.
Full case study available upon request.
“Seeing what others don't. Believing in what others can become.”
Mary's independence, resilience and attention to people were shaped long before her corporate career. Growing up without many of the advantages or support systems others take for granted, she learned that opportunity isn't always given—sometimes it has to be recognized or created.
Those experiences inform her belief in human potential, regardless of someone's circumstances, education or title. For Mary, compassion and accountability belong together: people deserve both the opportunity to grow and the honesty that helps them do it.
Where someone begins should never determine how far they have the opportunity to go.
An artist-placement concept in development, connecting creative work with businesses and hosts.
Mary has always loved horses, especially black stallions. To her, they represent untamed freedom, stamina, courage and a quiet inner power that does not need to announce itself to be known.
