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The Team

Small by design.
Senior on every engagement.

You work directly with the people who built the firm, not with coordinators managing your relationship with them. Every client has a named principal. There is no junior bench.

Founder & Principal
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Founder
Jonathan Zelaya
Founder & Principal

Jonathan founded The Zelaya Group after 12 years of watching capable businesses hit ceilings that had nothing to do with their product or their team. The ceiling was almost always the same thing: strategy without execution, or execution without strategy.

He built the firm to close that gap. Today he leads strategic advisory and business development engagements directly, and serves as the principal on every integrated and embedded engagement the firm takes on. He is also the primary architect of the firm's technology solutions practice.

Based: Temecula, California
Specialty: Strategy, technology infrastructure, business development, and the gap between where a business is and where it is trying to go
Background: Professional services advisory, custom software development, operational design across healthcare, legal, financial, and real estate sectors
Schedule a Call jonathan@zelayagroup.com
The Principal Team

Everyone who works on your engagement is named.

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Michelle A.
Director of Operations
Leads process design and workflow automation engagements. Former operations director at a regional healthcare system with 9 years of experience scaling team-based service businesses. Deep background in making complex operational systems simple enough to actually run.
Operations Design Healthcare Workflow Automation
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Rafael T.
Head of Technology
Architects and builds the custom technology solutions for client engagements. Specializes in automation pipelines, web applications, API integration, and the kind of infrastructure that runs without a dedicated engineer to maintain it. Eight years of production systems across professional services industries.
Custom Applications Automation Infrastructure
CL
Christine L.
Creative Director
Leads brand identity, digital presence, and content strategy engagements. Background in agency creative direction and in-house brand work for regional professional services firms. Specializes in making brands communicate at the level the business actually operates, not at template level.
Brand Design Web Design Content Strategy
Why We're Built This Way

The case for staying small.

We've been offered opportunities to scale the firm significantly. We've consistently declined. Here's why.

🎯
Every client has a named principal
At larger firms, principals sell the engagement and junior staff deliver it. We don't do that. Every client engagement has a named principal who is accountable for the outcome and directly involved in the work. If you work with Jonathan, you're working with Jonathan, not someone Jonathan manages.
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No coordination overhead
Large firms introduce layers between the client and the work. Account managers, project managers, status calls that exist to manage the relationship rather than the work. We eliminated those layers. The people doing the work are the people you talk to. Decisions happen in minutes, not days.
🔒
Selective by design
We take a limited number of engagements so that each one gets the attention it needs. We turn away clients who aren't the right fit, businesses that need a different kind of firm, or engagements where we can't see a clear path to a meaningful outcome. This makes us selective. It makes every engagement better.
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Accountability to outcomes
Larger firms are structured around deliverables. We're structured around outcomes. The engagement isn't finished when the deliverable is handed off, it's finished when the result we committed to is running. That accountability is easier to hold when the team is small enough that there's nowhere to hide.
Work With Us

Meet the team on a call.

30 minutes. You'll know whether we're the right fit, and we'll know whether we can deliver a meaningful outcome for your business.

Schedule a Call Our Story