Rachael Donham Email & Phone Number

Kirkland, Wa, Us

Albany, Or, Us

Participated in the executive management (and board of directors) of a high-value agribusiness from the first business plan and initial funding raise to operations of 50+ employees across 4 locations and 3 states, building a national customer base of more than a hundred resellers and growing annual booked revenue to $12 million.Scaled the management team from 3 to 10+, creating job descriptions and 90-day expectations, interviewing, hiring, onboarding, training, and goal-setting.Managed financial and IT department operations by choosing business systems, allocating resources, setting objectives and key results, scheduling deliverables, and designing processes and policies.Ran greenhouse operations, leasing greenhouse space, sourcing materials and logistics, hiring and managing the team for seed propagation of high-value crops; and delivering more than $250K worth of starter plants to farms throughout Washington and Oregon per year.

Durham, Nc, Us

As the first Data Scientist at Avalara, I pioneered cross-functional data analysis for the company, blending marketing, sales, financial, and transaction data to find actionable patterns in customer behavior. I used data visualization and analysis to provide decision support for department heads and executive leadership on pricing strategies, customer segmentation, and feature or content development. I also played a key role in identifying data infrastructure needs and spearheading the development of a Hadoop cluster to query large datasets.Key Accomplishments:- Combined government datasets from the Bureau of Economic Analysis with customer profile data and lead conversion metrics to model Avalara’s Total Addressable Market (TAM) and potential market penetration by industry.- Used a regression tree to predict days-to-go-live for Avalara's customer base and forecast customer support workload.- Developed market segmentation based on hierarchical clustering of anonymized customer transaction data to define customer groups by shared products and pain points.- Used time series analysis of transaction data to find interesting trends in retail sales for PR value. - Discovered and diagnosed errors in a billing algorithm, helping Avalara recover millions in lost revenue.

Durham, Nc, Us

Seattle, Washington, Us

Design analytical solutions to answer key business and operational questions. Develop quantitative models that describe, predict and optimize.

Managed data and analytics for an Internet start-up offering college and career planning tools.Designed the first nationwide state-aid calculator for college-bound students.- Led research staff in collecting and interpreting state legislation and regulatory code for over 100 state aid programs, representing over 80% of state sponsored grant aid for students attending 4-year colleges.- Translated aid distribution formulas into a data model, algorithm and requirements.Spearheaded the creation of a multi-site business intelligence system.-Successfully advocated for the creation of an enterprise-wide reporting database, combining Google Analytics data from multiple web properties with internal event logging.- Designed and deployed a set of automated reports using open-source software to monitor cross-network activity, evaluate acquisition campaigns, and identify new link-backs to web properties.- Analyzed data to identify website problems and provide decision support.Updated operational processes to reduce costs, boost performance, and increase data integrity.-Hired and managed a remote, on-demand research workforce to respond to seasonal fluctuations in workload, cutting marginal labor costs in the group by over 20%.-Administered a new customer-relationship-management system that drove a 25% increase in weekly web traffic.-Wrote SQL scripts to automate data updates and quality-control diagnostics.Refined company algorithms.-Diagnosed and resolved issues with algorithms that were resulting in customer dissatisfaction.-Designed and implemented test strategies for uncovering latent problems.-Used mathematical models, such as regression and k-nearest neighbor, to estimate missing parameters.

Boston, Ma, Us

Monitored national and regional economic conditions and assessed their impact on commercial real-estate markets.Developed original quantitative tools for measuring market risk.- Designed and implemented an industry risk scorecard for metro areas, which alerted investors to rising risk in telecom-heavy office markets in 2001.- Created a diffusion index of leading indicators for office-market returns (NCREIF Index) that predicted a turning point in late 2002.Wrote economic analyses for due-diligence reports and marketing materials.

New York, Ny, Us

Managed the Regional Economic Service.-Supervised a staff of 5 economists.-Handled all client contacts.-Automated econometric modeling processes, saving 64 days of labor per year.Edited the group’s quarterly publication on regional economic conditions.-Set production schedules, assigned articles, and edited the final publication.-Wrote up to fifteen 1500-word articles each quarter.Forecast regional economic growth and residential real-estate market conditions.-Presented forecasts and analyses at conferences across the country.

Boston, Ma, Us

Ma, Economics

Ba, Economics And International Studies

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