VLC Advisory brings senior leadership in operations, strategy, and business development to organizations that need it without a full-time hire. I am Vanessa Coulomb, its founder. For more than fifteen years I have designed and rebuilt the systems, structures, and strategies that allow complex organizations to perform, compete, and grow without breaking. That work has crossed sectors and kinds of organization: luxury houses, a private family estate, large nonprofits, and for-profit firms, on four continents.

Operations rarely get attention when they work. When everything runs smoothly, it is taken as the normal state of things, and most leaders learn what their operations cannot carry only when something breaks. I work on that part of the organization, before it breaks or after it has.

I led operations across more than $330M in international portfolios in over fifteen countries, most deeply in Africa and Asia, for large nonprofit organizations, including Save the Children and RTI International, and for-profit firms such as Palladium and Abt Global. My work in foreign assistance spanned global health programs in health systems strengthening and institutional capacity, multi-country organizations, and institutions navigating significant transition. I have built operating models from nothing, restructured organizations that had outgrown their systems, and led Finance, HR, Contracts, IT, and field teams as one system, not merely coordinated among them.

Business development ran alongside the operations work throughout. I have secured more than $100M in new business directly, leading capture and proposal strategy on competitive government and donor bids, and I have built the strategies that followed: market positioning, multi-year strategic plans, and board-level strategy for organizations deciding what to become next.

My standards were formed earlier. I worked in the flagship stores of Hermès and Louis Vuitton in Paris, then spent fourteen years as General Manager of a $34M private estate portfolio, with full operational and financial accountability across properties in Virginia, New York, and Scotland. That environment was complex and standards-driven, with no tolerance for imprecision. The scale changed. The discipline did not.

I am bilingual in French and English and have worked across Africa, Asia, and Europe. That fluency is not only linguistic. It shapes how I read an organization, how I build teams, and how I navigate decisions among people who do not start from the same assumptions.

I hold an MBA in International Business and an MA in European, Russian, and Eurasian Studies from The George Washington University, and a BA in Foreign Affairs from the University of Virginia. VLC Advisory is based in Durham, North Carolina.