A conversation with
Montgomery “Monti” Pace, CEO & Owner of
Hera Hub DC and Founder & CEO of
Two Point Oh.
Interview and feature by
Roxana Rodriguez C., Founder of
NotionFlows.
I spend most of my working life inside Notion, building digital ecosystems and automations for founders who want to stop running their business out of their inbox. So when I had the chance to sit down with Monti Pace and dig into how she thinks about operations, systems, and AI, I knew I’d come away with something the Hera Hub community would want to hear. What I didn’t expect was that the most useful idea of our conversation would be a phrase she’s quietly been using for years — minimum viable systems — that reframed how I think about the work I do every day.
If you’ve ever felt like the next productivity tool, the next shiny AI prompt library, or the next course on automation is going to be the thing that finally organizes your business — Monti Pace would gently like a word.
“I see it a lot with the founders I work with,” she says. “They think the next productivity tool is going to be the one that saves them. And I have certainly fallen into this trap myself. You see a new shiny toy and think, oh, this new software, this AI, is going to be the thing that just makes me organized and makes everything run smoothly. And instead, they end up with ten half-adopted softwares that aren’t actually helping anything — that take more time to update than they actually save.”
For seven years, Monti has worked with founders and small teams on the systems and processes they needed to scale. Now, she splits her time between that consulting work and supporting the community of women who run their own businesses with Hera Hub DC. Across both worlds, one topic dominates: AI, and across both worlds, Monti keeps returning to a phrase she borrowed from the product world and rebranded for the operations side of the house: minimum viable systems.
Borrowed from product, built for operators
The phrase is a riff on “minimum viable product” — the lean-startup idea that you ship the smallest version of an idea you can, learn from it, and iterate. The same logic can be applied to systems, automations, and AI.
“People get really overwhelmed and feel like they need hours and hours of research to implement AI fully into their business, or they need to take all these courses,” she says. “Those things can be helpful. But the best place to start is just to find small ways to implement it.”
Her actual recommendation is simple: the next time you’re doing a task you know you’ll do again — or one that annoys you every Monday morning — pause for two seconds and ask whether AI or a light system could shoulder a piece of it. Don’t try to design the perfect workflow. Just find the next small thing.
“As you make those things a little bit easier, every time you do it, it’s going to be shorter than it took last time. And eventually, it’ll be fully automated, or AI will be able to handle 80 to 90 percent of the task for you.”
Audit first, automate second
For Monti, “minimum viable” doesn’t mean skipping the thinking — it means doing the right thinking up front so you don’t waste effort building the wrong system.
When she starts with a new client, the first move is almost always an audit. Not only an audit of the tools the client is already using, but most importantly, an assessment of the key pain points and bottlenecks preventing the business from scaling and growing.
“The real question is, what does their daily workflow already look like? And more importantly, where are the pain points in their business? What’s actually holding things up?”
The answer, more often than founders expect, isn’t a missing piece of software. It’s the founder.
“A lot of times it’s the founder themselves, and many of them will admit this — we’re not able to scale because all of this lives in my head. Or, I try to delegate things but I have more context than they do. They don’t take the time to think through how to get that stuff out of their head and onto paper, or into other people, or into a system.”
The fix is rarely a new app. It’s a behavior. A voice note dropped in Slack after a client call. A CC on the right email. A weekly fifteen-minute meeting to walk through leads. The plumbing of a real operating business.
“Sometimes people think software or some sort of tool is going to fix everything,” Monti says, “but in reality it’s the human processes — the knowledge transfer, the knowledge sharing. It’s figuring out: when can AI and software make something easier and more automated, and when does it just need to be a behavior change?”
Where AI actually changes the game
The honest catch with most systems is that they fall apart at maintenance. The database that was supposed to track every lead becomes the database nobody updates. The CRM becomes a graveyard of three-month-old notes.
This is where Monti — who openly describes herself as someone who loves building systems and dislikes maintaining them — has found AI to be genuinely transformative.
“I love systems and databases and tracking, and I can see how helpful they’re going to be. I also have ADHD, and I don’t like running and maintaining systems. I have all these systems I’ve abandoned over the years. This is where AI is making things so much easier — all these databases I found helpful in the past, I’ve gone back to, because Claude updates them for me now.”
The maintenance tax — the part that used to kill her systems — has dropped to near zero. She brain-dumps after a doctor’s appointment, and AI finds the right database, updates the right fields, and pulls the relevant notes together for next time.
“The cost of maintaining systems and databases and trackers is so much lighter now,” she says. “I don’t have to go in and update it. I just tell Claude to.”
That same dynamic plays out for her clients. A founder who would never sit down and type meeting notes into Notion might happily send a sixty-second voice memo. The system catches what they would have lost.
Measuring whether it’s actually working
How to tell if a system is really working — versus just looking like it is — comes down to two key markers.
The first is durability. “Years have gone by, and the client is still using the system we set up. That’s a huge sign of success. They wouldn’t keep using it if it wasn’t providing value.”
The second is goal alignment. “Systems aren’t created for themselves. They’re created in service of a goal. So when you’re designing systems, always keep the goal in mind.”
She tells the story of a startup founder she worked with on a fundraising tracker — every VC, every follow-up, every template, all in one system. The company ultimately didn’t make it. But over beers a couple of years later, the founder told her something that stuck.
“He talked about how he felt really good about letting the company go, because he felt like he had tried everything. He hadn’t left any stone unturned, and the system is what enabled that to be true.”
That, she says, is also success. Sometimes the win isn’t a unicorn. Sometimes the win is being able to walk away with clarity.
The founder still has to show up
There’s a reason Monti pushes back on the idea that AI can replace operational discipline. In the small companies she works with — usually under ten people — the founder is a fundamental part of the solution whether they want to be or not.
“It’s pretty important that the founder or CEO is part of the solution, especially when knowledge management between the founder and the employees is part of what needs improvement.”
That doesn’t mean the founder has to become the most diligent note-taker on the team, it means the system has to be designed around how the founder actually works.
“Maybe the founder is not going to pull up software on their phone and input notes after every meeting, but maybe they are willing to do a quick voice note or willing to have an AI thing join their calls, as long as the system is managing the notes on the back end.”
The principle is the same one that runs through everything Monti believes about systems: don’t fight the human. Build the smallest thing that works, that the people involved will actually use, and let AI absorb the cost of keeping it alive.
It’s a lesson I’ll be taking back to my own client work — and one I think any founder reading this can put into practice before the day is out.
Monti is the Founder & CEO of Two Point Oh, LLC, where she helps businesses identify, build, and implement the systems and processes they need to grow and scale. She is also the Owner & CEO of Hera Hub DC, a female-focused entrepreneurship community and business accelerator supporting business owners across the DC, Maryland, and Virginia area at every stage of their journey.
You can find her on LinkedIn and Instagram. You can also check out her website, newsletter, or book time during her weekly guru hours.
Roxana is an operations consultant, entrepreneur, and Notion expert who helps businesses streamline workflows, automate processes, and build scalable systems. As the founder of
NotionFlows, she works with teams worldwide to create efficient digital workspaces that improve collaboration, productivity, and growth. She is also a speaker and community builder passionate about technology, innovation, and entrepreneurship.
