Skip to content

Chief of staff and strategy leader

Jason
Gomory

I help executives bring order to complexity, then turn it into finished work.

Get in touch
Portrait of Jason Gomory

About

I advise the people who run organizations. For six years I have worked beside executives and boards, rebuilding teams, designing multi-year strategy, and growing the revenue an institution depends on. Along the way the work has crossed governance, board relations, marketing, and crisis response. The industries change; the problems do not.

My superpower is pattern recognition. I hear what is said and what is not, I see what others miss, and I turn that into a plan people can actually execute. I am a pragmatic visionary: I can set direction at altitude, then land the plane and deliver the finished product.

What I care about most is bringing order to complexity, and building the kind of environment where good professionals do their best work.

Experience

  1. Chief of Staff and Strategy, Office of the President

    Hope College

    Strategy · Governance · Executive operations · Crisis response

    Dare to Hope: Strategic Plan 2030

    18 months

    First prototype to
    Board adoption

    15

    Initiatives across
    3 pillars

    Our strategic plan started as a whiteboard of ambition, every division wanting its own future written into it. My job was to find the load-bearing ideas, engage everyone from students to trustees, and help the leadership team make the calls that gave the plan a spine. Alongside it, I rebuilt the executive team and the systems it runs on. And when it goes sideways, I am the triage point: I draft the statements, sequence the communications, and coordinate across the institution and its leadership team on the hard days a president's office inevitably has.

  2. Special Assistant to the President and Board of Trustees

    Hope College

    Board relations · Communications · Program design

    Founding program board member,
    first model funding tuition as a gift

    Hope Forward is a first-of-its-kind model at Hope College that funds student tuition as a gift. I was a founding member of its program board.

    A president's office runs on systems nobody sees: communication flows, correspondence protocols, the calendar discipline that protects a leader's time and keeps decisions moving. I built that operating foundation from the ground up. I also staffed and advised the 25-member Board of Trustees, strengthening everything from how trustees are chosen to how they are onboarded, and was a founding member of the program board for Hope Forward.

  3. Communications and Operations Lead, Admissions

    Hope College

    Org design · Revenue · Marketing

    1,000

    Record class, up from
    a typical 750 to 800

    5 years

    Sustained enrollment,
    net tuition growth

    When an incoming vice president needed to rebuild the team responsible for the college's tuition revenue, we redesigned all of it together: who owned what, how decisions got made, what the daily work actually was. Then I helped build the engine underneath, the CRM, the enrollment dashboard, the brand and the campaign. The record class followed. The quieter achievement: the engine is still running.

This is a highlight reel. The full record is in my resume.

How I think

See the whole board.

My first job is to notice what others miss. I read the patterns, hear what is said and what is not, and name the real problem before anyone solves the wrong one.

Set direction, then deliver.

Vision without execution is a wish. I can shape the strategy and then run the project that makes it real.

Build the machine, not the moment.

I design how an organization decides, communicates, and executes, so good people can do their best work without me standing in the middle of it.

Two more principles

Simplicity is the goal, not the starting point.

True simplicity is not the absence of detail. It is order brought to complexity. I do the hard work of clarifying so the decision in front of a leader is clean.

Show people their strengths.

The best outcome is a team that runs better because each person is in the right seat, doing what they are uniquely good at.

What drives me

What drives me is bringing peace to chaos. I love the moment an organization starts to hum: meetings get shorter, decisions stop pooling at the top, and people bring finished work instead of open questions.

I am not there to micromanage the result. I am there to build the environment where professionals thrive, then get out of the way. There is real beauty in a well-run thing.

Underneath all of it is something simple: I love to help. Nothing brings me more joy than delivering beyond what was asked and leaving something better than I found it.

Observations

Patterns I keep noticing: in strategy, in organizations, on the hard days.

Contact

If you are searching for a chief of staff, a strategy and operations consultant, or a steady hand when communication gets hard, let's connect.

Email me

jason.gomory@gmail.com

Connect on LinkedIn

in/jasongomory

Download my resume

PDF

Save my contact

vCard for your phone

I think there is a profound and enduring beauty in simplicity, in clarity, in efficiency. True simplicity is derived from so much more than just the absence of clutter and ornamentation. It is about bringing order to complexity.

Jony Ive · Apple