The technical version. Long, opinionated, and full of cadences, artifacts, and tools I actually use. Skim if you're curious. Read it if you're seriously thinking about hiring me, it'll save us both a discovery call. (probably)
Most engagements are one or the other. Some, usually early-stage teams with a small leadership group, are both at once, which works because the two jobs share an underlying skill: figuring out what matters and then making it actually happen.
Embedded in your leadership team. I run the operating system: cadence, decision flow, reporting, hiring loops, cross-team coordination, vendor management, and the unglamorous infrastructure that lets the rest of the org move fast without breaking.
The CEO's job gets easier. The next layer down stops drowning. The board update writes itself by Friday.
The most senior marketing person on your team. I own positioning, messaging, the content engine, the funnel, the analytics stack, and any paid acquisition that makes sense. Brand systems get built. The launch ships on time.
You stop guessing what your category is. The pipeline starts having a shape. Posts stop sounding like an intern wrote them at 4pm.
Here's what the opening month tends to look like. Specifics vary, Chief of Staff work has more 1:1s, marketing work has more docs, but the shape holds.
I talk to everyone who'll talk to me. Read every doc, deck, and dashboard. Look at six months of metrics. At the end of the week I write a "how I see it" memo, what's working, what's broken, what I'd change in 90 days, and what I'd leave alone. Honest, specific, and yours to push back on.
We agree on the three things that matter over the engagement. Not ten. I install the operating cadence, weekly sync, monthly memo, decision log, reporting rhythm, and the tooling to support it. Tools are picked to match your stack, not mine.
The work starts compounding. Decisions get logged, not re-litigated. The investor update writes itself. The marketing engine starts producing measurable output. By the end of month one, anyone looking from the outside should be able to feel the difference.
Five workflows I run on basically every CoS engagement. Each one has a cadence, a tangible artifact, and a tooling default, though I'll match whatever you're already on.
The drumbeat of the leadership team. Weekly sync with a real agenda (not "anything to discuss?"), monthly memo to the org or board, quarterly OKR planning that takes a half-day and not a two-week retreat. The cadence is the product.
Monthly investor updates that get read. Five-section format: highlights, metrics, asks, lowlights, what's next. KPI dashboard wired to live data so the numbers aren't pulled by hand. Board prep packages a week ahead, not the night before.
The seam between product, marketing, and sales. I write the sales↔marketing handoff doc, run launch readiness against a T-30/T-7/T-0 checklist, and close the loop from customer feedback back into the product roadmap. The launch ships when it's supposed to.
Job descriptions that filter for the right candidates instead of describing the wrong ones. Interview loops with a take-home + a working session (not a six-round death march). Compensation benchmarked to data, not gut. An onboarding pack that means day-one hires aren't waiting on IT and a Notion login.
The thing that prevents the same decision from being re-litigated three months later. Every meaningful call gets a decision doc: problem, options considered, decision, next steps, owner. Cross-team initiatives get a RACI. Postmortems happen without blame and produce one specific fix, not five vague "process improvements."
Five workflows that I'd run on a marketing engagement. Same idea, cadence, artifact, tooling, but the work is upstream of demand, not downstream of operations.
Before any campaign runs, the words need to be true. Eight to twelve jobs-to-be-done interviews with customers and lost prospects. A positioning canvas in the April Dunford shape, alternatives, unique value, target. A messaging house: one-line, paragraph, three proof points. The voice + tone guide so the next thing anyone writes sounds like the same company.
Launches are a 60-day exercise, not a launch day. The first 30 days: PR list, briefing doc, early-access customers, social pre-roll, email sequence drafted. Launch day: comms calendar locked, embargo lifts, partners coordinated. Post-launch: retro, feedback loop, queue the next thing. The launch is the input, not the win.
Three content pillars (not ten) tied to positioning. A distribution-first cadence, write where the audience actually reads, not where it's most fun to publish. LinkedIn ghostwriting framework for founder content with a real point of view. Editorial calendar in ClickUp that's planned a month ahead and reviewed weekly.
Meta, Google, and LinkedIn ads, but only when the org has signal on what converts, because pouring spend on top of bad copy is just faster losing. GA4 + Microsoft Clarity + Meta Pixel installed cleanly. UTM hygiene actually enforced. Windsor.ai pulls everything into one place so we stop arguing about which dashboard is the real one.
A brand book that covers color, type, voice, photo, and motion, not a 90-page PDF that nobody opens. A component library in Figma that ships into the actual product and site. Templates for deck, doc, social, and email so the team can produce on-brand work without me in the room. Assets indexed somewhere people can find them.
I default to these. I'll switch to whatever you're already on, fighting a tool migration is a great way to spend three months not shipping.
A week in a typical retainer. The shape varies, launches mess everything up, board meetings warp gravity for a couple of days, but most weeks look roughly like this.
Worth saying out loud so neither of us is surprised later.
40-slide strategy decks as the deliverable. The deliverable is the thing live and working. If a deck helps us decide along the way, fine, but the deck isn't the point.
"Discovery phases" longer than two weeks. Anyone who needs more than two weeks of paid observation before they can act is mostly stalling.
Hourly billing. It incentivizes the wrong things. Retainers and fixed-scope only.
Pretending to be senior in a domain I'm not. If you need a CFO, a designer, or an actual engineer, I'll tell you and point you to someone good.
Enterprise-procurement engagements. SOC 2 attestations, MSAs with eight redlines, and a pod of project managers between us isn't the model. That's a feature, not a bug.
Using AI to do the actual thinking. AI is a calculator. The judgment, the writing, the calls, those come from me. If anything you get from me feels generated, please tell me. I will be mortified.
Tell me what you're building, where you're stuck, and which mode you're after. I'll tell you honestly if I can help.
Let's Chat! or find me on LinkedIn, that works too