The Chief of Staff role: Dan Hodgson @ Expert360

“You’re dealing with lots of uncertainty and your time is scarce. It’s important not to over-engineer things”

The Chief of Staff (CoS) role is rapidly gaining momentum in startups. But what is it exactly? And what does it take to be successful? Rather than coming up with our own definition we decided to hear directly from people that are in this role.

This interview is part of a series focused on the role of Chief of Staff. In this post, Dan Hodgson will share the frameworks and processes that are used to build high performing teams at Expert360.

About Expert360

Expert360 helps you assemble fewer, better people around your projects to deliver business outcomes faster and cost-effectively.

Company size: 135

Website: https://expert360.com 

Summary

About the role

• The Chief of Staff at Expert360 executes the CEO’s top priorities, enabling the CEO to focus on strategic relationships and product vision.
• Weekly tasks vary based on business needs, from closing deals to collaborating with product teams, guided by evolving priorities.
• Success requires tying goals to the annual plan, frequent and honest communication with the CEO, and effective collaboration with all parts of the business.

Lessons learned

• Avoid over-engineering solutions – simplicity is key in a fast-paced startup environment with high uncertainty.
• Clearly define the Chief of Staff role upfront to ensure alignment on responsibilities and expectations as the role evolves.
• Prioritise tasks that directly support the CEO’s highest-impact areas.

The interview

Q: How would you describe your role?

I’m the Chief of Staff at Expert360, APAC’s leading destination for elite on-demand talent. I pitched the role to our Founder/CEO, Bridget Loudon, about 12 months ago and we scoped out the job description together. To this day, that job description is still evolving.

In a nutshell, I’m responsible for carrying out the CEO’s top 2-3 priorities (or ensuring they’re carried out). Success in the role allows Bridget to focus her time on areas where she can get the highest ROI, such as strategic relationships, deals and product vision.

Q: What does a typical week look like for you?

Without trying to sound clichéd, no two weeks are the same! It all really depends on the business’ priorities. One week could be helping our sales leaders close a major deal, the next could be working with product & engineering to commercialise new tech we’ve built.

Sometimes my role is very in the weeds (building decks and models), other times it’s more general (acting as a sounding board or second set of eyes).

Q: Do you have a process in place to plan quarters and align the org?

Our quarterly goals stem from our annual plan, which sets out the goals and budget for each division. Divisional goals cascade to each individual, such as sales targets, product metrics or SLAs with key accounts. We’re obsessed with our annual plan, so tying everything back to this is really important. Everyone has a part to play.

Our Founder is ex-Bain so we use the RAPIDs decision framework pretty heavily. We also use a combination of DRIs and OKRs to add rigour to personal, team and company goals.

Q: What processes and frameworks does your company rely on to help teams perform at their best during the quarter?

We come together as a global team once a month at our company town halls. Here we celebrate wins, share market insights and measure progress against our annual plan. This forum keeps us accountable to the goals we’ve set. Week-to-week, our global teams run more tactical meetings according to their work styles. For example, our product & engineering team is fully-remote whereas our sales teams are mostly office-based. So we entrust our divisional leaders to set rituals and reporting tools that get the best out of their teams.

Q: What’s a lesson that you had to learn the hard way as the company grew?

False precision. Coming into startups from consulting, my natural tendency was to dive into the details: complex models, large datasets, etc. I received some good advice that multibillion dollar deals are done on the back of an envelope.

As Chief of Staff at a startup, you’re dealing with lots of uncertainty and your time is scarce. It’s important not to over-engineer things.

Q: What’s your advice for an org that is about to introduce the Chief of Staff role?

Spend the time upfront to clearly scope out the role. It can be a blurry job description (which is part of the appeal for many!) but organisations need to be clear on what the Chief of Staff does and doesn’t do, in particular the principal to whom they report.

The role will likely evolve over time, but it’s important to be aligned at the outset.