Katelyn (Kate) Avruch is an operations strategist, tech integration specialist and frequent industry speaker, best known as the founder of Operator Academy, a training platform that helps businesses in emerging, highly regulated industries build lean, scalable operations. She has opened more than ten licensed facilities across New England, trained hundreds of frontline teams, and is a regular voice on industry stages including MJBizCon, NECANN, MJ Unpacked, IWCC and Cannadelic.

When Kate entered cannabis, there was no accessible education for the people doing the work, so she built it from her own experience. She rose from boots on the ground to licensed facility operator, then turned those lessons into curriculum. She co-founded the Cannabis Education Center at Holyoke Community College, built 9 of the 11 courses in the Cannabis Control Commission’s Social Equity Programming, and co-founded Cloud Creamery, Massachusetts’ first state approved food based cannabis edible. Over the last several years, she has designed bespoke technical solutions for each of her clients, from POS migrations and CRM builds to AI agent workflows, that connect teams, streamline communication and remove the roadblocks that keep business owners stuck in the day to day.

At the heart of her work are values of access, rigor and equity. In 2021 she founded the Decriminalize Nature Massachusetts chapter, whose organizing helped eight Massachusetts cities, from Somerville to Medford, decriminalize entheogenic plants and fungi. Part strategist, part vibe setter, Kate also knows how to throw an event people talk about for years, from intimate VIP tasting dinners to parties of 1,000 guests. She serves on the CSQ Technical Advisory Committee and has been quoted in PBS NewsHour and the Boston Globe. Kate doesn’t just train teams. She defines and builds the systems an industry runs on.