Leadership You Can Trust. Expertise You Can Scale With.
Blackbird Strategic Solutions is led by Markita Billups, LCSW, CPC, an experienced operator, clinician, and strategic advisor known for building systems that elevate performance, strengthen alignment, and drive sustainable growth.
To strengthen impact and expand capacity, as needed, Blackbird leverages a small, carefully curated network of strategic partners. These collaborators are brought in selectively and only when their expertise enhances a client’s outcomes or accelerates execution.
This approach of purposeful augmentation — extends Markita’s leadership through aligned experts who share Blackbird’s standards of precision, excellence, and integrity.
Leadership Team
Principal / Founder
Markita is a strategic growth partner to founder-led service organizations navigating inflection points between early traction and institutional scale. She works directly with founders and executive teams to install the leadership structure, decision clarity, and operational architecture required for sustainable growth.
With over a decade of executive experience leading complex, regulated, and high-growth environments, Markita brings rare depth at the intersection of strategy, operations, and people systems. She is the Founder of Blackbird Strategic Solutions, where she partners with organizations typically ranging from $3M–$25M in revenue who are experiencing structural strain as growth accelerates.
Prior to founding Blackbird, Markita served as SVP of Operations at Oshi Health, where she led Business Operations, Practice Operations, and People Operations, building the nation’s first gastroenterology-focused value-based virtual care clinic from inception to 50-state coverage. Under her leadership, the organization scaled from 10 to over 150 employees while earning multiple Best Place to Work distinctions, including recognition from Modern Healthcare, Built In, and Inc.
Earlier in her career, Markita held senior operational roles at Vital Decisions (acquired by Evolent Health) and Highmark Health, where she led clinical operations strategy and expanded innovative care models across state lines.
As a licensed clinical social worker (LCSW) in Pennsylvania and Delaware, Markita possesses a distinct ability to translate between executive priorities and operational realities, ensuring that growth initiatives are both strategically sound and practically executable.
Today, Markita’s work centers on helping founders:
- Remove themselves as operational bottlenecks
- Clarify decision rights and leadership accountability
- Sequence hiring strategically
- Stabilize operations before and during scale
- Reduce structural drag that silently erodes growth
She is particularly experienced in complex service environments, including healthcare, multi-location organizations, and founder-led businesses operating in regulated or high-accountability industries.
Markita serves on the Alumni Board for Temple University’s College of Public Health and as an Adjunct Professor at Thomas Jefferson University. She has been nominated for Modern Healthcare’s 40 Under 40 and recognized as one of Culture Amp’s Top 25 Emerging Culture Creators.
