Alex Newmann,
Founder & CEO
THE MVP OF 2022
The Rookie of the Year of 2021
Anna Mellas
Senior Success Manager
After a fast and furious start in advertising and PR, Anna tackled a new challenge with a large agency where she became a complete stud at client management and sales sequencing. After becoming the top performing account manager, Amy and Sara went after her to join the AK Ops team.
Anna now takes over onboarded clients who are ready for the hard sprint in campaign testing and dialing up. Like a secret weapon, she joins other managers on difficult accounts for additional creativity and execution bandwidth. Pairing Anna’s incredible work ethic and creativity makes her a massive contributor to our clients and an invaluable Sharp Chick at AK Ops. There’s also no denying that the amount of laughter in the office has exponentially grown since hiring Anna!
Anna, a born and raised St. Louisian, is a former competitive figure skater and loyal IU graduate—go Hoosiers! She loves her big Greek family and enjoys being with her niece and nephew!


From Amy:
“Where do I even start about the impact Anna has had on our business? Her work is always on point, making her a perfect manager, but her spunk, humor, and goodness makes her the perfect teammate. I love joining her client calls—her professional yet charismatic delivery comes completely natural. Interviewing her felt too good to be true and hiring her was a total no-brainer. It’s only a matter of time before Anna becomes a leader on our team, and I cannot wait to watch her soar.”
These are my faves
My family
Cooking
Travel
Figure Skating
Hosting
Fashion
These are not my faves
Being hot
Disorganization
Laziness
Liars
ANNA’S CLIENTS ROCK!
Starr Commonwealth
Anna brings fantastic energy to her meetings. She presents polished analyses and does a great job of breaking down information in a clear and concise manner.
Beau Hutchings,
Sales & Accounts Manager
a)plan Coaching
I've never had a resource like this in sales. It's changed my ability to close and be more effective with my pipeline. You guys taking completely cold leads and sourcing Enterprise deals has been huge for us.
Jenna Slater,
Director of Business Development
a)plan Coaching
AK Ops was and is some of the best money we’ve every spent. They created a repeatable and predictable process for our sales that was game changing for us and enabled us to grow to the next level.
Michael Counts,
Founder & Chief Experience Officer
Streamloan
AK operates as a true part of our team – especially Anna and Sara. They are analytical, thoughtful, data driven, and fun to work with on sales & marketing – and their technical ability to manage our CRM/Hubs platform is strong. AK rolls up their sleeves to be a true team player, jumping into whatever is needed to make the business successful. They are creative and agile in nature, which is important as we learn to scale our GTM efforts.
Stephen Bulfer,
CEO / Co-founder, Streamloan
Sicura
Anna is smart, efficient, creative, and a joy to work with. I look forward to our meetings every week because I know she’ll have good news, in-depth analysis, and a great new idea for increasing engagement or streamlining our processes.
Arianne Price,
COO Sicura
Medi Leadership
AK Operations has accelerated our speed to implement a robust marketing and sales process within MEDI Leadership. They have taken the time to get to know our services and people to get us to the right people for marketing and sales conversations. I know that I can connect with anyone at AK Operations to help me problem solve our marketing and sales pipeline issues. This is one of my favorite partnerships and love working with this team. Anna has been an amazing addition to our team. She is understanding what issues we are facing and quick to help address those needs. She is helping to pull us up to a new level in marketing and sales. I value our time working through issues as it always gets me thinking on a higher level.
Deena Fischer,
Medi Leadership
StreamLoan
StreamLoan started to build out its first GTM team, by hiring a sales leader, and complimenting him with sales & marketing growth hacker AK is a strong professional sales & marketing firm, who own both projects and their outcomes. They have become a part of our operating team, interwoven with our sales team. Sara and Anna are open minded to learn, iterate, and apply new learnings to achieve higher quality outcomes. They bring an analytical view into the sales & marketing process, and are very detailed in the data management / CRM workflow. I’d recommend working with the team.
Stephen Bulfer,
CEO, StreamLoan
SnoutID
I’ve had the pleasure of working with Anna as my primary point of contact for a couple of months and have found her be extremely responsive and timely in her communication as well as to addressing matters that need immediate attention. She’s very intelligent and creative in thinking “outside the box” when faced with challenges, which has help our organization immensely. I find it a pleasure to work with Anna on a number of fronts, whether is be CRM organization, marketing messages or targeting the right prospects for our services.
Damon Flynn,
Director of Sales, SnoutID
Beehive
We’re creating a new software category, and generating revenue in a new space requires a lot of creativity, education, and engaging efforts with an outbound go-to-market strategy. Anna, Sara, and the entire AK Ops team tackled our outbound go-to-market strategy with incredible grit, hustle, and creativity. I’ve been incredibly impressed with the level of partnership, collaboration, and responsiveness we receive from AK Ops. Anna’s ability to adapt and pivot our campaigns and targets based on the metrics we’re generating is incredible. She’s continuously improving campaign messaging or making minor strategy pivots until we hit our targeted conversion rates. Quick, visible improvements are historically hard for an outsourced partner to prove, much less achieve but AK Ops has been able to prove both. I feel the reason for this is AK Ops doesn’t act like a 3rd party partner, they have become a direct extension of our team.
Adam Kling
Director of Sales, Beehive
OUR CLIENTS ROCK
Starr Commonwealth
Alex Newmann,
Founder & CEO
Tenna
Colleen Lyerla,
Director of Marketing Communications
StageConnect
Amy Kohl and AK Ops have completely blown us away. After kicking off mid-June, they hit their 45-day goal in 20 days by booking us 20 meetings. The speed at which they make things happen is shocking—they have violence of action! Every time we’re looking at a new goal or objective, we’re used to a report taking a week or two to build. With the AK Ops team, it’s either the same or next day. Every expectation has been met or exceeded. Our two closers now feel like they have the horsepower of a fully-staffed, well-tuned sales org behind them. We’re incredibly happy and plan to work with AK Ops for as long as possible.
Cole Morgan,
CEO & Founder of StageConnect
Crowdsmart
As a small startup, we were challenged to develop new qualified leads and a robust pipeline quickly. Instead of hiring an army of SDRs, training them, and managing them going forward, we chose a modern sales approach with AK Ops. AK Ops are experts in digital marketing and lead development techniques. They developed a dynamic process to drive quality outbound communication and lead generation. They complemented this approach with weekly analytics to manage our progress. This allowed us to focus on the most important work of turning these leads into customers.
Sam Rapp,
VP of Partnerships at Crowdsmart
VertifyData
I believe the most important factor that can make or break a startup is having the right people in place on your team as you work to execute your strategy. More than anything else, this is why we have been thrilled with AK Operations – and not just AK herself… this especially includes Mallory first, and now Christy and Sara!
In 90 days, Amy and team have been instrumental in most of the areas I would consider critical to our go-to-market success, including:
- Contributing greatly with ongoing thought leadership and solid, foundational planning
- Assisting us in identifying the right data points and patterns as we look to measure results.
- Providing us with the ability (and agility) to iterate quickly as we continue to look for ways to accelerate our progress.
- They balance a wealth of experience and know-how with creativity and collaboration.
- They are aligned with our goals with a passionate commitment towards achieving results.
If you are a revenue leader and your priority this year is to build a successful, scalable, and predictable revenue machine in the ever-chaotic world of startup sales, AK Operations should be your first call!
Cortney Smith,
VP of Sales at VertifyData
Streamloan
AK operates as a true part of our team – especially Anna and Sara. They are analytical, thoughtful, data driven, and fun to work with on sales & marketing – and their technical ability to manage our CRM/Hubs platform is strong. AK rolls up their sleeves to be a true team player, jumping into whatever is needed to make the business successful. They are creative and agile in nature, which is important as we learn to scale our GTM efforts.
Stephen Bulfer,
CEO / Co-founder, Streamloan
BotDoc
Imagine waking up every day with an average of 3-4 emails a day from warm leads that are being forwarded over to you. Sound too good to be true? That’s what I thought before working with AK Ops and Danielle Matthews. They are “difference makers” inside and outside of the workplace. They truly go above and beyond for their clients. Danielle is a rockstar. She is encouraging, disciplined, and equally determined as I am. I am glad to have her as my account manager.
Gavin DeWitt,
Sales at BotDoc
Worklete
Amy and team have been a phenomenal addition to our marketing efforts, becoming an integral piece of our go to market team. Lead by the amazing Sara Bray, AK has driven significant top of funnel growth through multiple channels. The amount of time and dedication to our account is second to none, allowing us to hone in on what is working, making macro and micro adjustments to achieve a broad spectrum of specific KPIs. Thank you!
Ben Kanner
CEO, Worklete