I’m Rachael Barclay. I build the systems that let people do human work.

I started on a restaurant floor. Server, bartender, then running the service team at L’Espalier in Boston. From there, 15 years in executive operations. Seven of those years were inside great rooms: private clubs in Philadelphia, San Jose, and Seattle, most recently the Columbia Tower Club, seventy six floors up, the best view in the city. I was the youngest executive there. I could run a hospitality operation blindfolded, and I loved it.

That work teaches you something you cannot learn in a classroom. Every touchpoint matters. Every system has to work. A single missed follow up costs real revenue and real trust. I got very, very good at it.

The tower closed in 2025. I took a senior role at another club company, and it turned toxic fast. That October a restructuring removed me from the org chart. And the thing I felt was not fear. It was relief. That surprised me enough that I had to sit with it, and sitting with it was the first time in my adult life I actually stopped and heard myself think. The relief made space. Vantage is what I built in the space.

Here is what I found in there. I had not been failing at the role. My identity had outgrown it. Mastery had quietly become a cage, and being excellent at the wrong thing is just a very impressive cage. The worst thing that happened to me came wrapped in garbage packaging, and inside it was a direction.

So I started building instead of climbing. I run The Savvy Digital Co., where we build brand strategy and digital systems for founders, executives, and growing brands. When the Columbia Tower Club closed, Seattle did not just lose a club, it lost connective tissue, so I built Vantage to be the layer between the city’s rooms instead of another room competing with them. And I host the You’re Allowed podcast, because the permission and the pathway should arrive in the same conversation.

I am not going to pretend I have this figured out. I used to hate being wrong, and I argued past the point of reason just to avoid the feeling. Changing my mind in public turned out to be the most useful thing I ever learned to do. Most problems people bring me are not talent problems or tool problems. They are clarity problems. The person who makes the complex feel obvious wins every room.

I live in a high rise in downtown Seattle with my partner Eleazar and our four year old daughter Luna, who narrates absolutely everything and is better at getting to the point than most adults I know. I have ADHD, which I have stopped apologizing for and started treating as what it is: a rapid pattern detector. I have more time with the two of them now than I ever did in corporate. I am teaching myself to dream again.