Leadership
Melissa has spent 25+ years diagnosing what's broken inside organizations — operations, finance, compliance, workforce systems. Not advising from the outside. Running them.
She's managed global operations across 7 countries and 47+ jurisdictions, built infrastructure for 12,000-employee enterprises, recovered $2M+ through operations unification, and diagnosed $800K+ in preventable losses that nobody else could see.
At Barry-Wehmiller, she led a $600M global HCM transformation with zero audit findings — earning the Global Implementation Award, Instilling Trust Award, and Badge of Excellence Award. She created SCOS™ and Fractal Diagnostics™ to systematize what she'd been doing by instinct for decades.
GOVERNMENT | HEALTHCARE | CONSTRUCTION | MANUFACTURING | FINANCIAL SERVICES
Oorja brings deep expertise in education sector operations, process improvement, and multi-jurisdictional compliance. She's led operations inside complex systems at Rutgers University (70,000+ students), Washington University's Olin Business School, and Edward Jones — coordinating with 40+ state agencies across tax, labor, and regulatory requirements.
She and Melissa first collaborated at Barry-Wehmiller, where Oorja contributed to the same $600M global HCM transformation across 7 countries — earning the Global Implementation Award for excellence in system deployment.
HIGHER EDUCATION | K-12 | HEALTHCARE | FINANCIAL SERVICES | GOVERNMENT
CCMF Certified (GAQM)
Our Story
We met over wine at Oceano's — two operators who'd spent years inside broken systems, saving companies millions while watching our ideas get plucked for board meetings we'd never be invited to.
We'd sat in war rooms teaching executives how to calculate the compliance formulas they'd later claim credit for. We'd warned leadership when systems weren't ready to go live — then got blamed publicly when payroll failed anyway. We tracked our KPIs, answered every call, worked every weekend, and still got told we weren't the right fit, didn't have the right credentials, weren't "executive material."
The system didn't just fail the workers. It was designed to fail us — the fixers — so we'd absorb both the collapse and the blame.
We started Johnson Strategic Group because we stopped waiting for permission. Credentials had become corporate camouflage for operational blindness. The real problems were never in the spreadsheets. They were in the infrastructure — and in the silence of people too exhausted to keep fighting.
Now we find what others miss. And we help organizations see what it's actually costing them — before the people who hold it together walk out the door.
Recognition & Credentials
- Global HCM Implementation Award, Barry-Wehmiller (2023)
- Instilling Trust Award, Barry-Wehmiller (2023)
- Badge of Excellence Award, Barry-Wehmiller (2023)
- Enterprise Design Thinking Practitioner, IBM (2025)
- Forensic Intelligence Practitioner Certification
Let's Talk
See something that isn't working? Let's find out what it's actually costing you.
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