Operations for offices built around a principal. I work with elected officials, agency leaders, and mission-driven organizations to speed up decisions, clean up information flow, and modernize how the office runs. Built around how your office actually works, not how a playbook says it should.
What's stuck right now?When people call me
The mission expanded, the pace picked up, the team got bigger, and the processes didn't keep up. Decisions queue. Information lives in too many places. Everyone is working hard and things still stall.
A modernization project that keeps dying. A backlog that won't move. A problem that has outlasted several attempts to fix it. These are usually more solvable than they look. They just take someone willing to go find where they're actually stuck.
A newly elected official or incoming executive has weeks to build a functioning operation from scratch, and the decisions made in those weeks shape everything after.
How I work
The first stretch of any engagement is spent inside your operation: in the meetings, one on one, learning how your team and your principal actually work. The presenting problem is usually a symptom, a mismatch of expectations and resources.
Recommendations are calibrated to the people, budget, and pace you actually have. A perfect system your team can't sustain is worse than a solid one it can. When I leave, your team runs it without me. That's the test.
Federal agencies, presidential campaigns, congressional offices, international work, nonprofits of all sizes. I know what these environments demand and why standard consulting playbooks break in them.
Proof
At USAID, I served as Executive Secretary, the chief operating function for the Administrator's office at one of the world's largest development agencies. The agency had spent a decade trying and failing to modernize its knowledge management and decision systems. I delivered the new system in six months. Paired with new process norms and templates, average decision turnaround went from 16 months to 8 days.
Same people. Same budget. Different map.
Services
How decisions and information actually move through your office, where they stall, and what it's costing you. You get a findings memo and a prioritized fix list. Useful on its own, whether or not we go further.
Ask about the Diagnostic →I work inside your operation and build the systems: decision flow, tracking, templates, meeting cadence, norms. Your team is trained on all of it, and it's theirs when I leave.
Ask about the Build →For new offices and transitions. Staffing structure, decision and communications systems, and working norms, stood up in the first 60 days, fitted to your principal's goals and your team's reality. Built from lessons learned during two presidential transitions and setting up countless new organizations.
Ask about Opening Day →Laila ElGohary has spent her career making complicated systems work: Executive Secretary at USAID, White House Liaison at GSA, Deputy CTO of the Biden campaign, CTO of the first virtual Presidential Inauguration. Advisor to progressive labor and nonprofits. She has advised foreign leaders on referendums and campaigns on five continents.
She got her start in organizing, which taught her that good systems are ultimately about the people who have to live in them. She works with leaders who know something is stuck and want it fixed.