The Chief of Staff role. What it actually is, why most organizations get it wrong, and what it costs them.

Rachael speaks from a vantage point very few people have. She has done this work inside the White House, the Gates Foundation, the USDA, and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, where she was employee #19, built a team of 250 people with 94% retention, and earned the only net promoter score of 100 in the entire organization. She has also spent years studying the role systematically, interviewing Chiefs of Staff across every industry and organizational type.

Her talks are rigorous, specific, and frequently uncomfortable in the best way. She will tell an audience of executives exactly how they are misusing this role, and exactly what to do about it. She will tell an audience of Chiefs of Staff the things their executives won't say to their faces. She does not do inspiration. She does insight that changes behavior.

The operating environment you create is a leadership decision. Most leaders have never made it deliberately.

Suzi speaks on leadership coherence, organizational dysfunction, and the structural operating systems that determine whether senior leaders succeed or stall. She draws on direct experience at the highest levels of British government, including Chief of Staff to a Deputy Prime Minister, and the diagnostic frameworks she has built through years of practitioner research. Her diagnostic lens is systemic. She reads the environment a leader creates, not the impression they make.

Her style is direct, analytical, and characteristically human. She surfaces uncomfortable truths without leaving damage behind. She uses precision and, occasionally, wit, including in situations that most speakers approach with either gravity or platitudes. Audiences tend to leave with something they can use before they get to their car.

Every speaking engagement is scoped individually. Tell us about your event, your audience, and what you are trying to achieve, and we will come back to you with a proposal that fits. We do not send a standard deck. We ask the right questions first.

For time-sensitive requests or events within 60 days, please reach out directly at info@coulandgold.com

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30 minutes, live, with Rachael or Suzi directly. Best if you want to talk through your situation in real time and get an immediate read on what fits.

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Rachael Goldfarb

Rachael Goldfarb has spent her career in rooms where the stakes were high and the structure had to work. She graduated with honors from the University of Pennsylvania, then helped John Podesta run the Clinton White House Chief of Staff's office, managing his schedule, his communications with Cabinet members, and the day-to-day coordination that kept the most consequential office in the world running. When the administration ended, she joined him at his Georgetown office to help launch the Center for American Progress, working on congressional investigations and building the operational infrastructure for what would become one of the most influential think tanks in Washington.

After law school and federal clerkships on the Eastern District of Pennsylvania and the Third Circuit, she joined the Gates Foundation as traveling Chief of Staff to the President of Global Health, in the field 89% of the time across Bangladesh, Japan, London, and Mexico, responsible for ensuring every commitment made with every head of state was tracked and delivered. She returned to Washington to support Raj Shah at the USDA, then helped recruit and build the National Institute of Food and Agriculture, including bringing in Roger Beachy, the first person to genetically modify a food, as its founding director.

As employee #19 at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, she helped build an agency from scratch under Senator Elizabeth Warren's guidance, hiring the first internal group of developers and designers in US federal government history, launching the first technology fellowship program in the federal government, negotiating the first government-wide open-source policy, and running a $22 million contract with PwC. She built a team of 250 people, 94% of whom stayed through four years of aggressive private-sector recruiting. She earned a net promoter score of 100 from her colleagues. Not 98. A hundred.

Today, Rachael serves as fractional Chief of Staff to Sparely.ai, a fast-growing startup navigating the transition from early-stage to scale. She is a spokesperson and strategic partner for Prime Executive Office, a recognized voice in the Chief of Staff community, and an active adviser to both executives and sitting Chiefs of Staff on how to design the role, introduce it to the broader organization, and make it work at the level it is actually capable of reaching. She is precise where others are vague, direct where others hedge, and she has been doing this long enough to know which battles are worth having.

Suzi Coul

Suzi Coul is a leadership and organizational intelligence practitioner with nearly two decades of experience operating at the center of complex, high-stakes environments. Her career spans senior government, elected public office, corporate leadership, and the commercial sector, giving her a grounded, practitioner-level understanding of how organizations actually function, and where they most commonly break down.

At the peak of her political career, Suzi served as Chief of Staff to a Deputy Prime Minister and Lord Chancellor, one of the most senior roles in British government. She held complete operational authority across parliamentary, ministerial, and political responsibilities, three power centers that routinely pull in different directions. Before that, she spent fourteen years as co-founder and COO of a specialist commercial business, building its operational infrastructure from the ground up. She has also served as an elected District Councillor and Cabinet Member with responsibility for Finance and Rural Economy, as Chair of Trustees for Citizens Advice, and as a Town Councillor. Her record in public life is not performative. The things she is most proud of are the ones that never made headlines.

Suzi's work is not behavioral coaching. It is structural diagnosis. She identifies the operating systems, decision patterns, and human dynamics that determine whether a leadership environment produces coherence or dysfunction, and works with leaders and organizations to close that gap. She has a rare combination of strategic intelligence and genuine human warmth, and she does not choose between getting things done and bringing people with her. She does both, and each makes the other more effective. The complexity that defeats other people is, to Suzi, just the work.