About Our Founder
Sarah Cheek is a certified Lean Leader. Since 2009, she has led multiple organizations in full scale adoptions of Lean Management. Sarah has facilitated hundreds of people in Kaizen (aka rapid improvement) workshops, and she has trained all levels of staff ranging from executives to front line employees in Lean Management.
Sarah was born with a desire to help and serve. She naturally found herself drawn towards a career in healthcare. After earning her degree in nursing, she jumped into the deep end in the Intensive Care Unit at UCLA Medical Center. What better environment to serve humanity than when patients and families are in their most powerless and vulnerable state? Sarah was honored to be in their service.
During her first year in the Bay Area, Sarah was fortunate enough to be selected to participate in the inaugural Lean activity at the hospital where she worked. Sarah immediately witnessed and experienced the value of this management method. Lean gave the front line staff (the true experts) a voice to advocate for improvements to better serve the patients. She was hooked.
After that first Lean workshop, Sarah served as a Lean Champion in her department and since has held director positions leading entire organizations through Lean Transformations. She has taken the principles and tools and applied them across a variety of venues from corporations to small businesses and now into people’s lives.
The principles of Lean are intuitive and adaptable into any environment looking to improve the quality of an experience by improving efficiency through eliminating waste. The customer or end user wins by having a stellar experience; the employee or service provider wins because they were able to deliver the product of service with ease; and the business or home wins in having happy customers, cost reduction due to increased efficiency, and loyal and fulfilled employees.
As a working mother of two energetic boys, Sarah recognized the need to apply these principles to her home life in hopes to create more quality time with them and less mom guilt. She struggled in juggling; managing a household, making meals, cleaning the house, spending time with her kids, getting homework done, connecting with her husband, getting a moment of alone time.
Sarah realized that she wasn't the mom or woman she wanted to be. Something had to give! This way of living was not sustainable. There had to be a better way of "doing" life. Turns out there was!
Sarah started applying the Lean tools that she'd been studying and implementing, over the prior 7 years, to her home life and BAM! Life instantly changed! Her perspectives and attitudes shifted to ease and relief in each of the areas as she applied the Lean principles. Sarah found she had more time and less stress. She created systems to support living better. Her first achievement was that she gained back 2 hours a week by just improving her laundry process; no added resources or money spent.
Sarah's desire is to share these adapted tools with the world and give people their time back to engage and live more deliberately. Lean Into Living provides the tools to raise consciousness in every home by bringing more ease and grace to living and experiencing life.