About Karen Creveling-Hughes

Karen Creveling-Hughes, CPA, is an author, speaker, entrepreneur, and former CEO whose career has centered on a deceptively simple question: How can leaders make better decisions?

Karen co-founded Community Link Consulting with Joel Hughes in 1999 and spent more than 25 years building the company into a nationally recognized consulting firm serving community health centers and other healthcare organizations. As the company grew, so did the complexity of the decisions she faced—when to hire, where to invest, which opportunities to pursue, how to build the right leadership team, and how to create an organization that could grow without depending on its founder for every answer.

Her background as a CPA gave her a natural appreciation for numbers, but experience taught her that numbers alone rarely make a decision. Strong organizations require leaders who can connect financial realities with strategy, people, operations, governance, and execution.

Karen eventually moved from the financial side of Community Link Consulting into the CEO role, leading the organization through significant growth and organizational change. In 2026, Community Link Consulting was acquired, marking the end of one chapter and giving Karen the opportunity to decide what she wanted to build next.

One result of that experience is Lead Without Guessing: A CEO’s Framework for Success, Growth and Financial Strength, co-authored with Joel Hughes. The book captures many of the frameworks, questions, and lessons they developed through decades of building a business and working alongside healthcare leaders.

Today, Karen writes and speaks about leadership, decision-making, organizational growth, and financial strength. She is particularly interested in what happens between a good idea and a good outcome: the questions leaders ask, the assumptions they test, the numbers they examine, and the systems they put in place before making consequential decisions.

Her approach is practical rather than theoretical. It comes from having made those decisions herself—some successfully, some imperfectly—and from decades spent helping other leaders work through their own.

Karen is a Certified Public Accountant in Washington State.