How Coach Mandy Burage Uses Align to Transform People, Communication, and Performance

When Mandy Burage talks about business improvement, she starts with people.

As President of Petra Coach, Mandy leads a team of Scaling Up coaches across the U.S. who work with organizations of every size and industry, from tech to manufacturing to service industries. Despite the industry, a pattern has emerged: leaders come to her with people and communication problems disguised as business performance issues.

Mandy shared how she helps her clients turn that messiness into momentum.

The Challenge: Communication Gaps and Cultural Drift

Over the course of their growth journey, clients reach a threshold—$10M, $50M, $100M—and suddenly the system that got them there starts to break down. The founder still sees the future clearly, but no one else can quite picture it. Communication slows. Department heads start making their own calls just to keep things moving, and the once-tight team becomes a patchwork of independent operators.

Mandy sees it over and over. “Most of the time, what I hear is, ‘It’s in my head,’” she says. “Or it’s in a random Google file. Or worse, a piece of paper that’s probably in a file cabinet that's collecting dust.”

What starts as a small disconnect quickly becomes a drain on culture and performance. Leaders find themselves repeating the same message in every meeting—more messenger than strategist. “They become the Chief Repeat Officer,” Mandy says. “And the team still isn’t hearing it.”

Without a shared plan that’s visible and connected to daily work, departments drift. Marketing’s chasing leads. Sales is chasing numbers. Operations is chasing deadlines. “I call them siloed departments,” Mandy explains. “That vision casting is completely missing.”

The result is exhaustion at the top and frustration everywhere else. The founder feels like no one’s stepping up. 

The team feels like no one’s steering. 

Productivity turns into busyness. 

Momentum turns into burnout. 

And without visibility, no one can see how far off course they’ve gone until it’s too late.

The Solution: Visibility, Accountability, & Trust with Align

For Mandy, the bridge between good intentions and execution always comes down to one thing: 

Visibility. 

“Align has been our partner since the beginning of Petra,” she explains. “It’s the living and breathing tool that keeps the plan alive after we leave the day.”

When she introduces Align to clients, she’s giving leaders a way to finally see their vision in motion. “Dashboards are the number one easiest, low-hanging fruit,” she says. “We give visibility to the roles, or the KPIs of this person, or this department, or this goal—and we can see it in real time.”

That visibility shifts the culture almost immediately. Instead of asking for updates, leaders can coach through data. Instead of confusion about priorities, everyone sees what matters most right now.

“If we wait until quarterly planning, it’s too late,” Mandy says. “With Align, we know where we’re at before things become problems.”

It’s also what keeps communication from unraveling as companies scale. Teams across offices, job sites, or time zones stay connected to the same rhythm. “The app is great,” she explains. “They can log in very quickly and say, ‘Where am I at? What’s behind? What’s still moving forward?’ Do quick updates and move on.”

The impact is more than operational—it’s cultural. Align takes what once lived in a founder’s head or a forgotten document and turns it into a living plan that everyone can see, measure, and contribute to. Visibility becomes accountability. Accountability becomes trust. And that’s the foundation for sustainable growth.

A Coach’s Advantage: Guiding People, Not Gathering Data

For Mandy, Align is a force multiplier for her coaching.

“Each Monday, I get over 100 reports,” she says. “It gives me a very clean and incredibly actionable snapshot: what’s working, what’s not, which priorities are behind, who’s logged in, what numbers haven’t been updated.”

That level of visibility means she can skip the administrative prep that used to eat up hours. No more hunting through spreadsheets or waiting for updates. “I’m not spending my time building data just to have a conversation,” she explains. “I can coach immediately on what matters most.”

Instead of reacting to past performance, Mandy’s coaching happens in real time, removing obstacles before they slow momentum. That clarity doesn’t just make her more effective; it expands her reach.

“It allows us to coach more members and have a bigger impact,” she says.

As a team, the Petra coaches can spend less time collecting information and more time doing what they do best.

The Human Result: Culture, Retention, and Trust

With visibility and follow-through in place through Align, ownership emerges. Teams begin to take pride in their results—and in the company itself. Retention rises, revenue follows, and a business that once struggled to communicate finds its rhythm again.

She recalls one client whose Employee Net Promoter Score (eNPS) started at a painful –75! “I’ve seen organizations start with something as low as a negative 75 and move up to a positive 30,” she says. “That’s a 100-point swing. It wasn’t overnight. It was 18 months of work, but it changed everything.”

The shift came from employees feeling heard. “Even listening to employees, as silly as that sounds… closing the loop on feedback says, ‘We heard you, and here’s what we’re going to do about it—or not do about it.’ That makes people feel valued.”

What followed was a culture grounded in clarity and trust. “We hired on core values. We gave people clear KPIs so they could know at the end of the week if they had a good week. It’s a small change that makes a significant shift.”

The company culture became something people were proud to be part of. Overall satisfaction improved, and revenue followed. 

The Takeaway: Businesses Don’t Grow Until People Do

Mandy reminds her clients that companies don’t grow until their people do.

And she has proven time and again that Align is the pulse to keep that growth alive.

“It helps leaders stop being the bottleneck,” she says. “It unites teams around a shared rhythm, makes priorities visible, and gives every person the ability to see how their work matters.”

That rhythm turns strategy into something living, something that breathes inside every role, every meeting, every goal.

“At the end of the day, everybody—whether it’s the coach, the member, or the Align platform itself—is working toward one goal.”

In other words, real growth starts when communication flows, people feel seen, and everyone moves in the same direction—aligned, accountable, and unstoppable.