There is a copy of The Billionaire's Vinegar in my backpack right now. There has been one in there, more or less, since I picked it up at an airport bookstore when I was fourteen years old. I had no particular reason to buy a book about stolen wine, obsessive collectors, and one of the great frauds in the history of auction houses. I just saw it, thought it sounded interesting, and bought it. I read the whole thing before I was legally old enough to drink a single glass of what it was about. It is still the first book I recommend to anyone who tells me they want to learn about wine.
That is, I think, a fairly accurate introduction to how I tend to operate. Find something interesting. Go deep before I have any real reason to. Carry it forward long after most people have moved on to the next thing.
The MBA is real. The nonprofit work, the product management background, the board seats, the consulting practice. All of it is real and all of it is mine. But credentials are a summary, not a portrait. If you want to actually know who you are about to work with, the bio is the starting point, not the whole story.
So. Here are a few things you will not find on my resume.
"The resume version of me is accurate. It is also wildly incomplete."
I am a reader. Not a "leaders are readers" LinkedIn post kind of reader. I mean forty-two books into 2026 and chasing a goal of one hundred and twenty, with a rotation that runs from Steve Berry's Cotton Malone series to James Rollins to Patricia Cornwell's Scarpetta books, which I have been reading since I was probably too young to be reading them. There is always a thriller in the backpack next to whatever I am currently working through. I am a bad speller, which makes the whole enterprise both more impressive and more ironic, given the six years I spent running a literacy organization. I am fully at peace with the contradiction. (If you want to see what I am reading right now, I am on Goodreads: goodreads.com/ragail89.)
Off the clock, I am a different animal entirely. I still check email because I am constitutionally incapable of not doing that, but the version of me that shows up at the Outer Banks in the off-season has absolutely no idea what time it is and is only thinking about what is for dinner. The OBX is my reset. Specifically, you can usually find me at Eleanor Dare in Nags Head, which is worth the drive (eleanordareobx.com). Outside of that, I run on last-minute road trips and the occasional impulsive international adventure. No itinerary required. Plans are for people who have not figured out that the best part of traveling is the part you did not plan.
And then there is GCG. The honest origin story is that I started Gail Consulting Group in 2021 as a side hustle. Millennials are built for this, and I had skills, I had free time, and there were businesses and nonprofits that needed real help from someone who had actually done the thing. It was supposed to be fun walking-around money. It grew into something more, built on real work for real clients who needed real results. When I made the decision to leave United Way NSV earlier this year, it came after a lot of thought and a lot of conversations with the people whose opinions I actually trust. The conclusion was straightforward.
It was time to bet on myself.
I have always had my hands in multiple projects at once. That is not a flaw, it is a feature. GCG gives me the ability to do that at scale, working with clients across industries and across the country, bringing twenty-plus years of experience in nonprofit leadership, corporate product management, and community work to organizations that need someone who will tell them what they actually need to hear, not what is easiest to say in the room.
The resume version of me is accurate.
This is the rest.