Greater Toronto Area, Canada
TRUSTED PARTNER TO CEO'S FOR OVER 15YRS Michelle Banham is a seasoned executive strategist with a career spanning over 15 years in high-impact roles, partnering directly with CEOs, Co-Founders, Executive Teams, Board Members, and Investors. Currently, she is the Chief of Staff for the fast growing AI business, elvex.ai, spearheading the departments of Ops, HR, Finance, Legal and Admin. She also serves as a Fractional Chief of Staff to tech startups, where she provides consultative services to innovative, fast growing startups. With her experience and expertise, she aids in hiring founding team members, constructs necessary foundational systems, preparing the business for the launch of their primary product offering and priming the business to scale. As a 5x Chief of Staff, Michelle has overseen fundraising, strategic goals, internal operations, and a multitude of transformational projects that have positioned organizations as leaders in their space (including unicorn AI tool, you.com). Michelle co-led successful two Series B fundraises of $152M and $50M with notable investors (TPG, NVIDIA, Salesforce, SBVA, Georgian, etc). Her tenure is also marked by a number of successful initiatives, scaling from three full-time hires to a team of 27 in 7 months, 30 to 100 in a year, restructuring departments, leading multiple business units simultaneously, and building comprehensive employee programs from scratch. In each of her roles, Michelle exhibits an unwavering commitment to operational excellence and strategic leadership. She is known for her capacity to manage complex projects and foster strong relationships across teams as a 'player-coach' type of leader. Chief of AI Fellowship, COS Network - June 2025 Leading in the Age of AI, Analytics + Technology Program - Schulich School of Business - July 2025 Mini-MBA, Schulich School of Business - Dec 2023 Mentor - Ask a Chief of Staff 2024/2025 On Deck Chief of Staff Fellowship - 2022 Cohort Member of the Chief of Staff Network, Fractionals United, the People People Group, Coho, and Tandem Network Public speaking for various communities (ie. Ask a Chief of Staff, On Deck, Coho, CoS Network, etc)
Multiple fractional consulting assignments as an experienced Chief of Staff assisting early stage, fast growing startup organizations. Clients include; VENTUREPARK LABS , ACCELERATOR [2023-2025] Human Resources consulting services for Venturepark Labs, the top accelerator in Canada for food, beverage, health and wellness entrepreneurs originally founded by Arlene Dickenson. HR / People Operations support will include reviewing existing HR policies and procedures, as well as creating and supporting new HR projects required for the business' growth trajectory. Consultancy also included running recruitment of critical functions such as President and Board Member, as well as terminations / lay offs of multiple team members, due to the business closing their kitchen facility. OFFSITE [2023, 2025] Initial consultancy included strategic initiatives, such as owning the partnerships department to expand online marketplace. Accomplishments include doubling the amount of marketplace partners within a 3mo window of owning the function. Second consultancy period was to assist with overflow of client relations, ensuring a high level of client satisfaction with the services they received. RIVET [2023] Fractional CoS consulting for an incredible social justice startup who I've partnered with to assist with hiring founding team members and building out required systems and scaffolding to prepare the business for the launch their main product offering in August 2023. Accomplishments include refining Hiring playbook, implementing a candidate scorecard, leading recruitment, hiring and onboarding efforts for the CEO, SOP for CEO’s Executive Assistant daily operations.
This fast growing LLM hit Unicorn valuation ($1.5B) shortly after Michelle spent 15mo leading the Ops, HR, Finance, Legal and Admin departments for You.com, as well as, guiding company strategy, strategic project management and investor/Board relations. Recent accomplishments include fundraising and due diligence for $50M Series B round with investors such as Georgian, Nvidia, SBVA, Salesforce and other notable funds, implementing company wide programs and policies (PEO, 401k matching, centralized storage system, employee handbook, performance management system, compensation audit, pay-band and role levelling system, etc) You.com is a fast growing GPT-4 LLM out of Silicon Valley. The company was founded in 2020 by Richard Socher, the former Chief Scientist at Salesforce, and Bryan McCann, former Lead Research Scientist in NLP at Salesforce. In 2022, You.com surpassed one million active users,[8] the number of searches grew over 400% in six months. You.com has transformed how people discover and engage with information online as an AI Assistant that helps people accomplish and solve everyday needs. Recognized as one of Fortune Magazine’s 50 AI Innovators for 2023, and featured in Time Magazine’s “Best Inventions of 2022”, You.com has pioneered many solutions for Large Language Model (LLM) challenges - especially around trust and accuracy! You can find out more about what You.com is up to on their Linkedin page.
A cohort of 120 global applicants selected this fellowship. OnDeck is a community for accomplished Chiefs of Staff who want to empower their principals and teams through professional development and access to a trusted peer network. Undergoing High Performance Coaching sessions on a monthly basis, as well as participating in peer to peer Mastermind Sessions.
Michelle steps into the role of Chief of Staff (acting Head of Ops) at Offsite and will oversee Offsite's upcoming fundraising efforts, strategic goals/OKRs, internal operations, SOPs, as well as driving foundational projects to establish Offsite as a leader in the Executive Retreat space. • Accomplishments include scaling the business 400% GMV year over year, data room + due diligence for $3M Seed Round fundraise, OKR management, created new manager training program, hiring/onboarding and performance improvement SOPs, business development for SaaS marketplace, offsite event planning, hiring + onboarding the team from 3 to 27 in 7 months, financial modeling, complete audit and optimization of Client Success team (incl. re-org of team), client escalation, drafting legal agreements, collaborating with Engineers on product roadmap, pricing and packaging, built new revenue stream for marketplace, main conduit from colleagues to cofounders, implementation of international payroll (Deel), PEO (Rippling) and benefits (Aetna), corporate card program (Brex), ATS (Lever), investor relations management (Carta, Cabal), etc