Leslie Cohen has been in the commercial real estate business for more than 20 years at two of the most prestigious development firms in Boston. She is now taking that expertise and translating it into a new venture. 

Cohen, who served as chief operating officer at Samuels & Associates and The Davis Cos., this week is launching a new operations consulting firm called Ops Alchemy. She told Bisnow she plans to target smaller, growing firms to help them restructure their internal operations.

"The focus for me is founder-led organizations that are at an inflection point of change," Cohen said.

Cohen markets her business as a "fractional COO for real estate firms." She would act as a senior operating partner for companies that need structural organization and a clear road map for the future.

"These are organizations that are growing, that are scaling. The growth has necessitated more work on the operations side and somebody who can help work on the business so that they can focus where they are best, which is working in the business," Cohen said.

When asked how she came up with the name for her company, Cohen said the word "alchemy" best describes the experience she is offering: a "blend and a mixture of things" from her background in development and operations and her real-world experiences in the industry.

"I've been on the development side, I've been on the operations side, I've owned a P&L for organizations," Cohen said. "I'm different from a typical consultant."

Cohen left her most recent role at Davis in July, saying on LinkedIn at the time that she was excited to move her youngest son off to college. In the background, she was building her own business.

At the time of her launch, which she plans to announce Tuesday, Cohen is a one-woman show, but she said she is already working with several companies. She declined to share specifics on them but said they fit in her wheelhouse.

"This is a big change for me," Cohen said. "I do feel like there's a lot of change going on within our industry, and Boston in particular has a lot of founder-led organizations that are thinking about succession, that are thinking about the next generation and thinking about growth."

Cohen spent the bulk of her career working at Samuels, joining when the firm had roughly 20 employees. She started on the development side, first as a development manager, then executive vice president of development. 

She said that in hindsight, she knew she was probably destined to transition into operations, being drawn to the organizational development and behavior classes she took while getting her MBA at Babson College.

At Samuels, her interests bubbled, and she said the entrepreneurial environment was a great place to "speak up and try to drive change at any level of the organization."

"I had incredible exposure from the time we were still a grocery-anchored shopping center developer to then moving into all of the mixed-use development and was just fortunate to work on so many different asset classes," Cohen said.

She said Steve Samuels, the founder of Samuels & Associates, asked if she would be interested in stepping into a new role, and in 2015, she became the company's first chief operating officer.

The move came at an inflection point for the development firm.

Cohen said Samuels wanted to be less involved in the day-to-day operations of the company, which meant Cohen needed to begin restructuring leadership and hiring where it fit.

"We were excellent at servicing our clients and our projects, and we needed to be excellent at servicing ourselves and really running the business," she said.

Cohen helped hire the back-end support, including marketing, human resources and information technology professionals, while also overseeing the company's financial reporting and general processes. Over her twenty-year career at Samuels, the company grew to employ more than 150 people. 

During her tenure, Samuels advanced several large developments in Boston, including the 650K SF air rights development built atop the Mass Pike branded as Lyrik. Samuels also owns several Fenway office and residential properties, including Van Ness and Fenway Triangle.

In September 2022, Cohen left Samuels and began working at The Davis Cos. as the company's first chief operating officer. She took on the role to help with the succession planning process: In March, founder Jonathan Davis stepped back to an executive chairman role, and his son Stephen Davis became CEO. 

Cohen said in her July LinkedIn post that the leadership transition being complete made it the right time for her to leave the company "from a position of strength, on a timeline we planned."

"A lot of what I did there was developing standard operating procedures and processes and systems as an investment went through the life cycle in the organization," she told Bisnow. 

She said her experience with these personnel changes at Samuels and Davis has set her up well to assist other companies with their operational needs through her new venture. 

"We're in the real estate business, but we actually ultimately are in the people business, and I fortunately have had a lot of experience in that side, and I can help bring value to other organizations working on both of those areas," Cohen said.