Melissa didn’t start out planning to be a coach — she started out building a career inside some of the biggest names in technology.
She brings 25 years of technology industry experience — building and leading global HR teams at companies like Google and Cisco, where she was also a Top 10 business salesperson, and where she designed, planned, and executed more than 50 large-scale organizational changes with quantified multi-million-dollar business results. Along the way, Melissa saw the same pattern play out again and again: talented, driven leaders who could run a team, a P&L, or a product roadmap, but who had never been given the space to work on the person doing the leading. Titles changed. Org charts changed. The leader underneath rarely got the same attention. The old ways of leading — policy over conviction, strategy over trust — were no longer working, for her or for the people she watched burn out around her.
That gap is what led Melissa back to the thing she’d always leaned on privately: her faith. She founded DeLuca & Willow to bring it into the room professionally — paired with neuroscience and proven leadership frameworks, so leaders could trust the process even before they understood the faith behind it. Her own certifications reflect that same integration: ICF Certified Coach, NLP Master Trainer, NLP Master Coach, and Ayurveda Wholistic Lifestyle Teacher, among five cutting-edge modalities she draws on to help clients get extraordinary results, quickly.
It’s what a decade of coaching senior executives has revealed, echoed in her own experience leading: trust your intuition before you dismiss it. Policy isn’t always the right call — especially when something deeper is saying otherwise. Vulnerability is a strength, not a liability. The hardest conversations, handled with integrity, are what build trust rather than break it. And healthy boundaries aren’t the opposite of support — they’re what make support sustainable.
Having spent her career inside technology organizations — and now regularly facilitating conversations with leadership teams navigating AI adoption — Melissa has a front-row view of a hard truth: the more connected our tools make us, the more disconnected our teams can feel. This faith-based approach doesn’t reject the technology reshaping how organizations work; it insists that whatever tools a team adopts, trust, presence, and being truly known by the people you lead can’t be automated.
Melissa works with global clients across industries, from individual leaders to full organizations, on everything from one-on-one coaching to large-scale team facilitation. She lives in Meridian, Idaho — a long way from Steubenville, Ohio, where she was born and raised — with Willow, her rescue pitbull and the firm’s namesake.
