Seat 02
The Chief of Staff.
Your senior operator
Ten-plus years of operating experience running your projects, your systems and your leadership rhythm — hired onto your payroll, found and tested by ours.
Published fee
25%
of first-year base salary · never total comp
$10,000–$15,000 initiation by level, credited against the fee and refundable if we have not produced a qualified slate within 90 days.
Not a senior assistant. An operator.
The two Seats get confused constantly, and the confusion is expensive in both directions. Here is the line.
A Right Hand owns
- Your calendar, your inbox, your follow-ups
- Travel, logistics, the family week
- Making sure nothing you send ever sits
A Chief of Staff owns
- Your projects, end to end, with dates attached
- The operating cadence — the meetings that actually decide things
- Cross-team accountability, including chasing your own leadership
The person running your leadership rhythm should never answer to someone else’s payroll.
We find them. You employ them.
Your Chief of Staff belongs on your payroll, in your culture, on your bonus plan, at your table. Not seconded from an agency, not renting a chair, not wondering who actually signs their review.
We do the work you cannot do yourself — the covert search, the vetting, the chemistry testing, the first ninety days — and then we get out of the way. You employ them from day one.
The ten-second version: a staffing firm marks up a salary every year you keep the person, which means they are paid most when you are least free. We are paid once, on a percentage of base, and then our incentive is that the hire holds.
Five stages, and none of them are a job board.
This is the part most firms will not describe, because describing it would show how little of it they do.
- 01
Role Visioning
A working session before anyone is approached. We define what the Seat actually owns in your company — not a job description copied off the internet, which is how most of these hires go wrong before the search even starts.
- 02
Covert Discovery
We approach operators who are not looking. The best Chiefs of Staff are running something right now and will never see your posting. Your competitors never learn that you are searching, and neither does your own team until you decide otherwise.
- 03
The Wiring Match
Finalists are tested against you, not against a generic profile of a good operator. How you decide, how you argue, what you do when you disagree. Competence is table stakes at this level; wiring is what actually breaks these hires.
- 04
Offer design
We build the offer with you — base, bonus, title, and the decision rights that come with the Seat. Get the decision rights wrong and you have hired an expensive coordinator.
- 05
The Installation
The first ninety days, designed rather than improvised: what they own from week one, what you hand over and when, and how the two of you make decisions. Our job ends when it is working, not when the offer is signed.
Real Chiefs of Staff earn $150,000–$250,000 base.
That is the market, not our opinion of it, and it is published on this site so you can check us against it rather than take our word.
If that number startles you, you probably need a Right Hand first — at roughly a third of the cost, and with none of the payroll.
We would rather tell you that here, before you have paid us anything, than take the bigger fee and watch a mis-levelled hire fail in eight months. Failed hires do not refer.
What the search costs.
One initiation, one fee, both published. Nothing recurring, and nothing that grows the longer you keep the person.
- By level, credited
- $10K–$15K initiation By level, credited Credited against the fee, and refundable if we have not produced a qualified slate within 90 days.
- Of first-year base salary
- 25% of base Of first-year base salary Never total comp. We do not earn more when your hire costs more.
- What that works out to
- $37.5–62.5K typical What that works out to On a $150K–$250K base hire, which is the real market for this Seat.
Worked example
$180,000
first-year base salary
$45,000
our fee, less the initiation you already paid
The initiation is not a fee. It is how we both prove we are serious — real work happens before you have paid us anything else, and it comes back if we miss the 90-day deadline.
What founders ask before they say yes.
Why don't you offer a guarantee?
Because guarantees in this business are mostly theater — fine print with a marketing budget.
Here's what we do instead: your initiation is refundable if we don't deliver — 45 days for a Right Hand match, 90 days for a Chief of Staff slate. After that, we keep you whole the operational way, not the contractual way.
We'd rather show you the machine than wave a certificate.
Where are your case studies and testimonials?
Two honest answers. First: we launched this firm recently, and we won't rent credibility — no fabricated logos, no "trusted by 10,000 leaders" from a company you've never heard of.
Second, and permanently: discretion is the product. The founders we serve don't want their names on a vendor's website, and ours never will be.
What we show you instead is everything the testimonial pages hide: our exact prices, our exact process, our comp benchmarks, and the questions on this page. Judge the machine.
Will you try to upsell me to the bigger seat?
The opposite, usually. The most common conversation we have is telling a founder who wants a "COO" that he needs a great Right Hand at a third of the cost — because a mis-leveled hire fails, and failed hires don't refer.
We publish the comp benchmarks so you can check our honesty against the market.
What if the Chief of Staff or Running Mate I hire doesn't work out?
Second-in-command hires fail far more often than anyone in this industry admits — and when they fail, it is almost never the résumé. It is chemistry and integration.
Our entire process is built backwards from that fact: the Wiring Match tests how you're wired together before you hire, and the Installation runs the first months of the partnership so it holds.
If it still breaks early, we don't hide behind a signature — we come back to the table and re-run the work. Ask us exactly how that conversation goes when we speak. You'll find we've thought about it harder than firms that wave a 90-day certificate.
Who's riding shotgun?
Get the systems out of your head.
Apply, and if the fit is real the next step is an intake call, then a Role Visioning session — the working meeting where we define the Seat before a single operator is approached.
When the Seat you need runs the whole company below you — that is a different Seat again. Meet The Running Mate