Adair Vilella

Adair Vilella is the founder of La Pausa Consulting and a trusted Fractional COO to e-commerce and retail brands ready to scale with clarity and confidence.
Adair specializes in helping women founders evolve from one-woman shows into fully built, high-performing dream teams while supporting brands as they scale to $2 million and beyond. Her approach blends operational strategy, data clarity, and people leadership to create businesses that are both profitable and sustainable.
Before launching La Pausa Consulting, Adair spent 12 years in California, where she helped expand Equinox and worked closely with investors and founders in the Los Angeles startup community. This experience gave her a dual perspective on what operators need inside the business and what investors expect from leadership, systems, and reporting.
Adair supports founders in building operational foundations that scale. Her work includes developing and leading dream teams, defining departments and responsibilities, aligning sales and marketing, and creating accountability structures that remove founders as the bottleneck. She is known for simplifying complex ecosystems, including Shopify app stacks, tech platforms, and third-party tools that often slow growth instead of supporting it.
Her expertise also spans data dashboards, analytics, understanding COGS and gross margins, and building budgets that clearly define what should stay in house versus what should be outsourced. Adair regularly prepares brands for investment by tightening operations, clarifying reporting, and ensuring teams stay strategically aligned as outside capital enters the business.
For founders who feel overwhelmed, stuck, or unsure of their next operational move, Adair acts as a strategic right hand who brings structure, momentum, and confidence. Whether clients need full operational leadership or want to engage the LPC team solely for data clarity and analytics, La Pausa Consulting meets businesses exactly where they are.
A few Southern C–connected brands Adair is currently supporting, and who are always happy to give a glowing review, include Petite Paloma, ZEBRA, Sara Hillery Interior Design, Lila & Hayes, Larkin Lane, Christina Greene Jewelry, and Catherine Cartie.