Founder's Chief of Staff / Studio Operations Lead

Role Overview We are seeking a highly capable, emotionally intelligent, and organized Founder’s Chief of Staff / Studio Operations Lead to work closely with the founder of a fast-moving creative agency. This is not a traditional administrative role. It is a hybrid position combining founder support, project oversight, client coordination, internal team management, operational follow-through, and practical decision-making. The right candidate will help translate the founder’s creative direction, business instincts, and client priorities into clear next steps for the team. They will keep projects moving, protect the founder’s time, organize communication, and make sure ideas become action without everything needing to run through the founder directly. This person must be comfortable working with a creative, fast-paced, entrepreneurial founder who thinks quickly, communicates in shorthand, and often works through verbal direction, texts, voice notes, and rapid idea development. The ideal candidate is steady, practical, humble, sharp, trustworthy, and able to bring calm structure to creative momentum.

 

Key Responsibilities

Founder Support and Communication

• Serve as a close operational partner to the founder.

• Capture founder direction from conversations, texts, voice notes, and meetings.

• Translate loose ideas into clear action items, owners, timelines, and follow-ups.

• Identify which decisions truly require the founder and which can be handled independently.

• Protect the founder from unnecessary interruptions while ensuring important items are escalated.

• Provide concise updates and decision summaries.

• Follow up on founder commitments, open loops, client promises, and internal priorities.

Studio Operations

• Maintain a clear view of active projects, deadlines, deliverables, client needs, and team workload.

• Help ensure the project management system is current, simple, and actually used.

• Create and maintain operating rhythms, including weekly priorities, status updates, and follow-up lists.

• Keep decisions, approvals, files, deadlines, and responsibilities organized outside of WhatsApp/text threads.

• Help reduce bottlenecks caused by missing information, unclear ownership, or delayed approvals.

Project and Team Coordination

• Coordinate with designers, copywriters, video editors, animators, vendors, freelancers, and internal staff.

• Assign tasks clearly and follow up until completion.

• Make sure creative teams have the information, files, context, and approvals they need.

• Identify when a project is drifting, blocked, over-scoped, or at risk of becoming a last-minute scramble.

• Support production timelines for branding, campaigns, media placements, video, print, digital, and client deliverables.

Client and Account Support

• Help manage communication with clients, vendors, media partners, and collaborators.

• Clarify client requests and translate them into internal next steps.

• Support proposals, estimates, deposits, timelines, project scopes, and client follow-ups.

• Help maintain professional client communication while protecting the agency from unclear expectations or unpaid work.

• Know when to involve the founder in sensitive client conversations.

Financial and Administrative Coordination

• Track deposits, invoices, vendor bills, media expenses, commissions, client balances, and payment status.

• Coordinate with bookkeepers or finance staff to ensure bills are reviewed and payments are aligned with client collections.

• Help create visibility around what is owed, what is open, and what needs follow-up.

• Support practical financial discipline without needing to be a full finance director.

Ideal Candidate Profile

The ideal candidate is:

• Highly organized but not rigid.

• Emotionally steady and not easily rattled.

• Able to work with creative personalities and entrepreneurial ambiguity.

• Comfortable asking smart questions, but not dependent on constant approval.

• Humble, generous, service-oriented, and low-ego.

• Confident enough to make practical decisions.

• Strong at follow-up and closing loops.

• Able to communicate clearly and briefly.

• Trustworthy with sensitive business, financial, and client information.

• Comfortable being behind the scenes while playing a highly important role.

Required Skills and Experience

Experience and skills

• Experience in a creative agency, production studio, marketing firm, nonprofit campaign office, or founder-led business is strongly preferred.

• Strong project management and follow-up skills.

• Excellent written and verbal communication.

• Ability to manage multiple projects and priorities at once.

• Comfort with client communication and internal team coordination.

• Basic financial/admin understanding, including invoices, deposits, vendor bills, and budgets.

• Comfort with project management tools, Google Workspace, spreadsheets, shared drives, and communication platforms.

• Ability to document decisions and create simple systems.

Personality Fit

Best fit

• This role is best for someone who can work closely with a visionary founder without needing the founder to slow down completely.

• They should appreciate creative intensity but bring order to it.

• Helpful traits: service-oriented, practical, loyal, calm under pressure, emotionally intelligent, discreet, resourceful, detail-aware, and comfortable with nuance.

• Possible Enneagram fit: healthy Type 2, 6, 1, or 9 with strong executive function.

• Possible Myers-Briggs fit: ISFJ, ESFJ, ESTJ, INFJ, or ENFJ, depending on maturity and operational strength.

What Success Looks Like

Outcomes

• The founder is less interrupted by small decisions.

• Projects move without constant founder involvement.

• The team knows what to do and by when.

• Client follow-up becomes more consistent.

• Invoices, deposits, and vendor bills are more visible.

• WhatsApp/text communication gets translated into a real operating system.

• The founder’s creative value is protected instead of diluted by administration.

• The company feels calmer, clearer, and more organized.

Recruiter Note

Positioning

• This is the stronger senior-operator profile. It is best for a candidate who can carry founder-adjacent judgment, not just task management.

• The most important traits are judgment, follow-through, humility, communication, discretion, and the ability to work with a creative founder without needing everything to be perfectly linear.