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🧠 Unfiltered: How Do Chiefs Of Staff Measure Success?

🧠 Unfiltered: How Do Chiefs Of Staff Measure Success?

Chiefs of Staff give us the juicy inside scoop on their success criteria. 🌟

Bill Kerr
September 05, 2024

Firstly, welcome to the crew who joined this week! 🎉 You are now part of a cult of folks helping to ideate and grow their tech startups together.

ICYMI 📚

If you are new here or just plain missed some of our previous sends, here is your quick catch up section.

How Companies Are Owning Emojis. How to transform your brand by claiming your own emoji.
A Guide To Crafting Your Brand Voice. A step-by-step guide on creating a tone & identity your audience will love.
The Four Types Of Managers & How To Manage Them. A leadership performance matrix to assess your team.

PARTNERS 🎯

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All interactions - including your emails, calls, and meetings - are presented to you in a way that makes sense for your business.

This could be your new CRM, and it’s what Attio is building towards.

Read more of Attio’s vision for the future of CRM.

THE DEEP DIVE 👀

How Do You Measure Success In Your Role As Chief Of Staff?

After the bunch of comments and praise we received on last week’s edition: So, What Does A Chief Of Staff Actually Do, we decided to do a unfiltered version of one of questions in the interview. We're keeping it real this round, going straight to the Chiefs of Staff for the uncut version of how they measure success in their roles. Here’s what they told us.

When you say ‘everything’…?

Max Kausman - COS at Chronicle

For me, success hinges on three main factors. The amount of 'founders' time' saved, enabling them to concentrate on their 'Zone of Genius'—for example, designing the product vision—instead of spending time on other topics.

Maximus Decimus Kausmanius.

And finally, achieving operational excellence, where various operational topics on finance, legal, people & culture etc. are set to 'on autopilot' and do not require the founders' attention.

Next is the number of critical mistakes avoided by remaining focused and preemptive.

During our product build, a lot of unquantifiable impact comes from staying focused, foreseeing potential issues, and avoiding critical mistakes that may arise in our approach.

The ‘Zone of Genius’.

And finally, achieving operational excellence, where various operational topics on finance, legal, people & culture etc. are set to 'on autopilot' and do not require the founders' attention.

Albert Patajo - COS at Nexl

My measure of success is broadly the same measures that the company is measured on—value creation across growth and profitability. When I joined Nexl, I had the ultimate baptism by fire and was tasked to lead and manage our Series A fundraise. In one of the hardest fundraising environments too! We managed to close a Series A with two great Australian investors—Shearwater and EVP—who have just incredible conviction in the problem space we’re playing in and the platform we’ve built.

As soon as I joined, I was building performance dashboards, looking through all our contract data to build MRR schedules, working closely with the CEO and Board to create the right narrative and pulling together all the relevant data, building models and collating our data room. We managed to pull of a great fundraise with supportive investors which I’m incredibly proud to have helped achieve.

Mt Patajo.

Katie Noonan - COS at Forage

Measuring success in the Chief of Staff role can be difficult and ultimately is often down to perception of the principal that you work with. It can be measured through the successful and seamless delivery of projects, the incisive advice or direct feedback you provide to your principal and executive team and your ability to navigate challenging and ambiguous situations with limited supervision.

Katie Noonan.

One of the achievements I'm proud of is that in challenging macro-economic conditions we have maintained a strong internal culture. Our annual engagement survey results showed significant improvement in our focus areas of collaboration and innovation which I focused on throughout the year.

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Beatriz Guevara - COS at Athyna

We don't have specific metrics designed to measure my success. It's all about being dependable and providing day-to-day support. A big win for me is seeing the projects I've been involved in, like OKR implementation and regular departmental reporting, become integral parts of our workflow. Also, I'm really proud for being key on shaping our asynchronous work policies from the ground up.

Bea—my wingwoman.

At the end of the day, success in my role is about making impact and being a trusted ally to my CEO and my team.

Belen Wagaw - ex-COS at SAP

I’m most proud of giving my executive ‘thinking time’. When they don’t have to respond to that e-mail, join that steering committee call or make that organization decision, I’ve done a good job.

I measured success by how many fires I could fight for my executive in the background.

Belen Wagaw

And that's it! You can also go ahead and read our previous edition on the role of Chief of Staff here

TWEET WRAP 🐣

founder mode is literally just doing the opposite of what HBS grads say
— Rahul Chhabra (@rahulchhabra07)
9:30 PM • Sep 1, 2024

We launched @withdefault 10 months ago after building in stealth for nearly 2 years. We’ve raised $11m and have built multiple products (a-la-compound startup) for revenue teams.
Here’s everything I learned about GTM over the last 10 months:
— nico (@nicoaferr)
2:19 PM • Aug 30, 2024

Btw this is not a new idea. James Burnham wrote about it in 1941
— tobi lutke (@tobi)
11:02 PM • Sep 1, 2024

TOOLS WE USE 🛠️

Every week we highlight tools we actually use inside of our business and give them an honest review. Today we are highlighting Attio—powerful, flexible and data-driven, the exact CRM your business needs.

PostHog: We use PostHog product analytics, A/B testing and more.
Apollo: We use Apollo to automate a large part of our 1.2M weekly outbound emails.
Taplio: We use Taplio to grow and manage my online presence.

See the full set of tools we use inside of Athyna & Open Source CEO here.

HOW I CAN HELP👋

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That’s it from me. See you next week, Doc 🫡

_{P.P.S. Let’s connect on}_LinkedIn_and_Twitter_.

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