EP 05: What Does a Chief of Staff Actually Do? Our Day-by-Day Schedules

Show Notes

About This Episode

This is the conversation new Chiefs of Staff keep asking for: a real, hour-by-hour read on what the role looks like in practice. Ceci walks through her week as Chief of Staff at Seqera, the B2B bioinformatics platform with a US-heavy go-to-market team, before her move to PortalOne. Bea walks through her week at Praktika, the B2C consumer app with a Dubai-based founding team and an async-first culture. The point isn't to copy either schedule. The point is what changes when you compare them side by side.

The most useful line in the episode is also the simplest: same title, two genuinely different jobs. At Seqera, Ceci doesn't run her own to-do list, her to-do list is the CEO's to-do list, shared with him. At Praktika, Bea owns whole departments (finance, customer support, the community team) and runs them with her own priorities. One is the classic Chief of Staff. The other is a hybrid Chief of Staff and VP of Operations. Both are correct. The job is shaped by the company, not the title.

What We Cover in This Episode

The Daily 30-Minute CEO Sync

Ceci had a daily 30-minute call with her CEO at Seqera, scheduled for 10:30am so she could prep and the founder could clear his urgent morning calls first. It wasn't a status update. It was a working session, with a shared to-do list split into three buckets: quick ticks (under 5 minutes), tasks (5 to 30 minutes), and projects (over 30 minutes). Both added to it throughout the day. The 30 minutes was used for whatever needed it: splitting work, handing things off, working together on a larger project, or resetting when something urgent landed overnight. The cadence is the prioritisation engine. Without it, prioritisation moves into Slack, and you're always one step behind.

Async-First at Praktika

Bea runs the opposite cadence. One weekly CEO sync on Wednesday. Everything else is async by default. The Praktika rule: if it can be a written update, it shouldn't be a meeting. Every Slack channel is public. Every Notion page is public except the Business Ops page, which is shared only with the founders and C-level. Priorities are tracked on a priority and impact grid in Notion. Anything high priority and low impact gets handed to her operations assistant. High priority and high impact she keeps. Everything else gets reprioritised at the weekly sync. The result: nobody needs to chase Bea, because anyone who needs context can already see it.

Same Title, Different Jobs

The frame that runs through the whole episode. The Chief of Staff role is defined by the founder and the company, not by the title. Ceci's Chief of Staff role is the classic version: shared to-do list with the CEO, no separate function ownership, hours spent translating between leadership and execution. Bea's role is a hybrid: she owns finance, customer support, and the community team as P&L-ish surfaces, with department leads reporting to her. If you're interviewing for a Chief of Staff role, the most important question to ask is which version of the role this is, because the day-to-day is unrecognisable between the two.

Monday: The Reporting Reset

Both run Monday as a numbers day. Ceci spends the morning pulling go-to-market and cash data and writing a weekly narrative for the leadership team (she used to do the data pull manually, now Claude handles most of it). The afternoon is department kick-offs: the GNA team sync (Chief of Staff, CFO, head of legal, head of people), then her own BizOps team kick-off. Bea spends the morning on finance, every transaction in and out for the previous week, LTV/CAC, where they're overspending on tools, and ships a transparent weekly finance update to the C-level. Afternoon is the customer support and community sync, and then accountant time. Both agreed: starting the week looking at numbers gives you the rest of the week's rhythm for free.

Tuesday: Leadership Team Day

Same day at both companies. Both leadership team meetings moved from Monday to Tuesday and both hosts said it was the right call. Seqera's LT is 9 to 10 people and runs out of a structured Confluence page: north-star metrics at the top, sales updates, churn risk, partnerships, monthly priorities, status updates from each member. Praktika's LT is five people (three founders, Bea, and the chief product officer) and runs out of a single Slack channel. CEO posts the agenda, the group discusses, to-dos go in the same thread. The lesson is to fit the structure to the team size, not the other way around. Bea's line: "as long as everybody looks at those three metrics every single day, there's nothing else really to discuss."

Wednesday and Thursday: Calls Day vs Focus Day

Bea's Wednesday is her calls day, with seven 1:1s with direct reports plus external partners. Thursday is locked for deep focus work. Ceci's pattern is the exact inverse: Wednesday for deep project work, Thursday for 1:1s and investor calls and ad hoc syncs. Either pattern works. What doesn't work is alternating between calls and deep work in the same day, which both hosts learned the hard way.

Friday: Forecast Calls and the Outward Wind-Down

Ceci's Friday afternoon is the sales forecast call: the VP of Sales running through every active deal with the AEs. That data flows into her forecast model and the week wraps. Bea's Friday afternoon is admin wrap-up plus the company-wide rituals: town halls, product demos (Praktika ships every Friday), or user interview highlights. Both noted that ending the week looking outward, at customers and the market, is a better wrap than ending it looking inward at to-dos.

IC Days vs Manager Days

A practical tip both hosts converged on: separate the days where you do individual contributor work from the days where you're managing direct reports. Bea is explicit that her brain is monotask. Ceci agrees the multitasking myth doesn't survive contact with a real Chief of Staff workload. The deeper point: most Chief of Staff roles evolve from pure IC into people management without anyone formally redrawing the lines. If you don't protect the time, the IC work disappears under the management work.

Running 1:1s as Their Time

Bea runs her 1:1s completely unstructured. The 30 or 45 minutes belongs to her direct report, not to her. They use it for what they need: career questions, doubts, a coffee chat, or skipping the meeting entirely if there's nothing to discuss. The hardest skill she's built is sitting with the pause and the silence. Bea credits a coaching course called Leader as a Coach. Ceci notes that working in a 70% Eastern European team has taught her the same thing: not every silence needs filling.

Monthly Rhythm: Dashboard vs Deck

Praktika sends a monthly investor dashboard around the 10th. Accounts close on the 14th or 15th. Financial model updates on the 20th. Monthly board meetings have replaced quarterly board decks entirely. The dashboard does the metrics work, the founders bring a Google Doc with strategic topics to discuss, and that's it. Seqera ran the opposite end of the spectrum: a quarterly board deck that ran to 180 pages, recycled into the QBR deck. Ceci's defence is sharp: the board deck isn't really for the investors, it's the forcing function for the company to look at its own metrics on a quarterly basis. The most-read page is always the CEO memo, a one or two page narrative on what's top of mind, what changed, and what the company is going to do next.

Performance Reviews at the Cusp of Chaos

Praktika is anti-bureaucracy by design. Process gets added "at the cusp of chaos", not before. The exception Bea pushed for: performance reviews. A players get a 10% equity top-up every quarter (compounding through the year) plus an end-of-year salary bump. Underperformers get a couple of quarters of clear, supportive coaching with explicit deliverables. If nothing changes, both sides part ways. Ceci's frame: it isn't a fun conversation, but it removes the gray area that makes performance management messy at most startups.

Three Pieces of Advice for New Chiefs of Staff

Bea: protect focus time. Your calendar will fill up with meetings if you let it, and that's where the role quietly becomes a coordination function instead of a strategic one.
Ceci: build the cadence with your CEO first, daily, twice-weekly, or weekly. That cadence is the prioritisation engine. Everything else falls into place around it.
Both: split your IC days from your manager days, or one will eat the other.
Bonus from Bea, aimed at Ceci: close Slack.

Frequently Asked Questions

What does a Chief of Staff actually do day-to-day?

It depends entirely on the company. The episode walks through two real schedules side by side. Ceci's at Seqera is a B2B classic: daily 30-minute CEO sync, structured leadership team meeting in Confluence, weekly sales forecast call, quarterly board deck. Bea's at Praktika is async-first: weekly CEO sync, leadership team running out of a Slack channel, no board deck, monthly investor dashboard.

Should I have a daily sync with my CEO?

Both hosts converged on this: the cadence with your CEO is the single most important variable in how your week runs. Daily, twice a week, or weekly all work. What doesn't work is no cadence at all, because then prioritisation happens in Slack and you're always behind.

How do you protect focus time as a Chief of Staff?

Separate IC days from manager days. Bea protects Thursday as a no-calls day. Ceci protects Wednesday morning. Both made the mistake of trying to mix the two early in their roles and both watched the deep work disappear under the meetings.

Do you need a board deck if you run monthly board meetings?

Bea's answer is no: the monthly investor dashboard plus a one-page founder agenda is enough. Ceci's answer is yes, but it's for the company, not the investors. The forcing function of preparing the deck on a quarterly basis is the real value, and that gets reused for the QBR. Both views are defensible. Pick the one that matches your company's operating maturity.

How do you run 1:1s with direct reports?

Bea runs them completely unstructured. The time belongs to the direct report, not to her. She uses what she learned in a Leader as a Coach course about sitting with the pause and the silence, and lets the direct report set the agenda each week.

What's the single most important habit for a new Chief of Staff?

Build the cadence with your CEO first. Then protect the focus block. Then split the IC days from the manager days. Most of the rhythm follows from those three.

Full Transcript

Episode Transcript

Introduction

Ceci [00:06]

Welcome to Top of the Ops, the podcast where we have real conversations about what happens behind the scenes of startups. I'm Cecilia, ex-VC at Talis Capital and now FD at PortalOne. The Chief of Staff week I'll walk through today is from my two years at Seqera, before joining PortalOne.

Bea [00:18]

And I'm Bea, former VC at Lakestar and now Chief of Staff at Praktika.

Ceci [00:21]

Today we're talking about what Chiefs of Staff actually do, day by day. People always say Chiefs of Staff are generalists. That's true. It's a really fluid role that moves from project to project. But it's also a bit of a non-answer. If you ask me what I actually did last Tuesday, it gets specific very quickly.

Bea [00:45]

Exactly. We're generalists, but generalist doesn't mean random. There's a rhythm to it, a structure. Today we're getting into the real answer to that question. And honestly, I think some people on my own team still don't know what I do.

Ceci [01:03]

One hundred percent. We're going to compare notes from our weeks and see where we have similar rhythms and where we're completely different.

The Daily CEO Sync

Bea [01:10]

Let's start at the very foundation. You had a daily 30-minute check-in with your CEO at Seqera. Every single day. Why daily? What did you even discuss on a daily basis?

Ceci [01:24]

It seems like a lot, but it's a great daily ritual. Thirty minutes, we jump on a call, and we have a shared to-do list split into quick ticks (under 5 minutes), tasks (5 to 30 minutes), and projects (over 30 minutes). We both add to it throughout the day. On the call, we go through that list together. Sometimes we split tasks. Sometimes one of us says, can you take that over, I'll do this. Sometimes we use the time to actually work together on a larger project. Sometimes something urgent has landed overnight and we just reprioritise on the spot.

It's also a really nice way to get the attention of a CEO, get in front of him, get this signed, get that decided. It resets a lot of my day. It's not the first thing in the morning, I tend to have it at 10:30am, so I wake up, plan my day, figure out what's urgent, prep, and then the rest of the day shapes around what comes out of the 30 minutes. Did you have something like that at Praktika? Maybe not daily, maybe twice a week?

Bea [02:49]

One thing I'm quite happy about at Praktika is our way of working. If it can be a written update, it shouldn't be a meeting. We're pretty good at async collaboration and we keep our to-do lists open. We build in the open. Every channel on Slack is public, every Notion page is public, except my Business Ops page, which is shared with me, the founders, and the C-level. Everybody has instant access to what I do.

I sync with the CEO weekly, on a Wednesday. We go through priorities and say, here's my to-do list, here are the trade-offs, what should I prioritise first, what should we deprioritise. We use a priority and impact grid. Anything high priority and low impact goes to my operations assistant. High priority, high impact I do myself. Everything else takes second priority. Because everything is up to date all the time, we just look at it and reprioritise quickly.

I was curious, what actually happens in your 30 minutes? Is there a formal agenda or is it more flow of consciousness? And how do you keep on time? You could go on for three hours.

Ceci [04:22]

It's not structured at all. We kept it fixed at 30 minutes because both of us usually had something to jump on afterwards. But there were days where we had the 30 minutes in the morning and another three and a half hours after that. When we were working on a larger project, or there were times of the year I just needed to work closely with the CEO, we'd expand it and turn it into a working session.

Question for you: how much are you in charge of your own to-do list versus your CEO? Who puts what on it, how much do you find versus how much gets told to you?

Bea [05:04]

This is where we differ. I don't really have a look into the CEO's to-do list. That's probably what defines you as a traditional Chief of Staff: you're not just ticking off to-do lists for the team, you're literally looking into the CEO's brain and supporting him.

Ceci [05:32]

I didn't have a separate to-do list at Seqera. My to-do list was shared with the CEO.

Bea [05:37]

Yeah, it's very different for me, because I do have department oversight. I'm in charge of the to-do list for the finance function, for the customer support team. Execution happens with the team, we discuss strategy together. Then there are odd business development topics I share with the CEO. That's probably where we overlap the most, but he's not super involved, he's more delegating the project to me to find out if it's viable. So the definition of a Chief of Staff is widely different company to company. We caught the main difference: it's just a completely different process.

Ceci [06:27]

Absolutely. The title is the same. What you actually end up doing day-to-day is completely different.

Bea [06:33]

It would be interesting to see now, day by day, whether despite our to-do lists being different, we actually converge on some type of rhythm.

Monday: The Reporting Reset

Ceci [06:43]

Let's start with Monday, shall we?

Bea [06:45]

It's Monday, 9am, or whatever time you start. What does it look like when you sit down at your desk or kitchen table?

Ceci [06:55]

Kitchen table, 100%. Monday is split into two parts. Morning is a lot of reporting. We look at data week by week, especially myself and go-to-market on cash and revenue, making sure I have an oversight of what happened the previous week. At the beginning I used to pull this data manually. Then we discovered Claude can do a lot of it. Now it's about building the narrative, making sure I have a good understanding and good insights to share with the leadership team.

The afternoon is department kick-offs. As Chief of Staff I sit in the GNA department, so we'd have a weekly sync with the CFO, head of legal, head of people. Then I'd run my own BizOps team kick-off with the two other people on my team. Updates, blockers, anything material. Those are the core things that determine my Monday. The rest is ad hoc, jumping on whatever needs to happen.

Bea [08:10]

My Monday is fairly similar. Morning is the weekly finance update. I download everything that's gone in and out of the bank account and credit cards for the past week, look at trends, look at whether we can optimise somewhere. Maybe we're overspending on a software and we should look at an enterprise subscription or downgrade. Then LTV and CAC for the previous week, just to make sure marketing is efficient and whether we need to tune channels differently. All numbers on both an accrual and a cash basis. Then I send the weekly finance update to the C-level. Everybody has access. Typically I include some recommendations and to-dos.

That's the morning. Afternoon I have my weekly sync with the customer support team and the community manager, an hour or two where I work strategically on those departments if there's anything to decide. Then later in the evening I catch up with our accountants if there's anything to review on the financial model or accounts. Monday is a pretty good day for me. It gives me the overview of the previous week and a clear view of what needs to happen that specific week. My brain works really well on a Monday, which is weird. I used to hate Mondays. Now I quite like the type of work I do on them.

Ceci [09:59]

Starting the day with numbers is a nice way to get into the week's rhythm. I was quite lucky at Seqera, because the team was split between Europe and the US, but the go-to-market team was more US-heavy. Mornings were quiet, lots of deep focus time. Afternoons I'd jump on specific deals or specific things.

Bea [10:25]

For me it's a bit the opposite. A lot of the team is in Dubai. When I wake up there's a stack of messages on Slack and in email. But I've gotten better at closing Slack. People can wait a couple of hours. I put myself on a focused status and everyone knows I'm doing weekly updates. It's more of a self-imposed barrier than something other people impose on me. People are fine if I reply in a couple of hours.

Ceci [11:06]

I'm so bad at this. Monkey brain. There's a notification, I jump on it. I've had to train myself to ignore notifications.

Tuesday: Leadership Team Day

Bea [11:15]

Okay, Monday done. What about Tuesday?

Ceci [11:22]

I love Tuesdays. It's my happy day. We moved the leadership team weekly meeting from Monday to Tuesday in early 2025 and it was a really good move. On Tuesday I spend some time in the early afternoon getting set up for the leadership team meeting: making sure everybody's posted their updates, putting in mine, checking the monthly priorities and statuses, doing the admin around the meeting itself.

Outside of that, Tuesday has a big block after the CEO sync that's fairly free. I tend to work on urgent projects that came in between Friday and Tuesday morning. Sometimes it's end of month and I need to pull a lot of rev ops data. Tuesday is a nice day to do that because I can build on the Monday pull, prepare presentations, work on slides. How's your Tuesday? You didn't mention a leadership team meeting on Monday, so when do you tend to have it?

Bea [12:37]

I promise I'm not copying you, but our leadership meeting is also on Tuesday. It used to be 7:30am for me, but a new C-level joined and it got pushed later, which is okay. We run it in a very efficient way. The CEO preps the agenda, we go through my finance update first, then all the major strategic projects the company is working through. Everybody aligns on trade-offs, what's next, and prioritisation. Not just the CEO catch-up I have on business operations, which is across the whole company, but we make sure resources are aligned. We tend to over-repeat versus under-communicate. We want everybody on the same page. Very strategic conversations where everybody disagrees with each other, and nobody is afraid to disagree, which is productive.

I also have one-on-ones with all the founders and C-level execs, weekly or bi-weekly on Tuesday, sometimes monthly, sometimes we just skip if there's nothing to discuss. I also have my weekly meeting with the content creation team. Very important team for us, they hire a lot of micro-influencers, I make sure they're on budget because sometimes they go a little over. I try to keep mornings to 2pm for calls, then 2pm onwards free for deep work.

Ceci [14:41]

Quick question. How many people are on your leadership team and how do you run it? Do you have a shared Google Doc where everybody puts updates? Let's go concrete.

Bea [14:54]

We are, I would say, not super organised. We have a Slack channel. Three founders, me, the chief product officer. Everything's on there. Pretty much. To-dos, the CEO sends the agenda, and in the same thread we send the to-dos for the next week if there are any. We don't use Notion for it. How about you?

Ceci [15:23]

We went through many iterations. Used to be a shared Google Doc with the agenda and updates. We moved to Confluence last year. It's not an endorsement to Confluence. It's the furthest thing from an endorsement to Confluence.

What Confluence let us do was put metrics visually at the top of the page so you could see how we were doing week on week. Then we split it into sections: metrics, sales updates, churn risk or new deals that need help, product updates, partnerships, monthly priorities, the agenda. A separate page is status updates, where every LT member writes two or three bullet points. At Seqera we had a 9 to 10 person leadership team, so you do need some structure.

Bea [16:24]

I think the B2B versus B2C model is a big driver. There are more moving parts in a B2B company. Praktika is a pretty simple business. We have three or four metrics that really count: install to trial, trial to pay, renewal rate, and efficiency of marketing. Those are the north-star metrics. Everything else is a derivative. As long as everybody looks at those every single day, there's nothing else to discuss. Everybody's so deep in their expertise that they independently take action, and we just sync on the leadership meeting. Everybody's pretty autonomous, I never have to babysit anybody.

Wednesday and Thursday: Calls vs Focus

Bea [17:18]

So Wednesday. Does it sound more peaceful than Tuesday? Tuesday is your favourite day. What's happening on Wednesday?

Ceci [17:18]

Wednesday is also split in two. Morning is mostly kept free for deeper project work. Pricing model, board deck, a new process I'm developing, something with the BizOps team. Very free for deep work. In the afternoon we usually have company-wide meetings, either an all-hands, a CEO AMA, or a deals-and-demo session where members of the tech team demo new features and the AEs talk about latest deals signed.

Some of that time used to go into preparing those meetings, making sure each all-hands had a different topic, different people presenting. A lot of organising, sometimes MC'ing. How about you? Is Wednesday deep focus for you too?

Bea [18:16]

You know, I think we're swapped. Wednesday is my calls day. If I have to make calls, internal or external, they're on Wednesday. Thursday is my focus day, no calls. I very rarely break that promise to myself. Thursday is completely off calls, strategy work only. Wednesday is pretty rough.

Morning starts with my sync with the CEO, where we cover weekly topics and priorities. Then one-on-ones with all my direct reports, six or seven of them by now. I enjoy them because the time is theirs. I learned this from my previous boss at Lakestar. The 1:1 is your time. You can use it for existential doubts, you can cancel, you can grab a coffee with me. Not all of them are weekly, some are bi-weekly. The rest of the day fills out with external partners, vendors, partnerships. Overall it's quite draining because of the social energy. By the end I'm exhausted, but I enjoy it.

Ceci [19:51]

We totally swapped. My Thursday is your Wednesday. Thursday is my sync with the CEO, 1:1s with direct reports, ad hoc 1:1s with LT members, and weekly investor calls. The day goes by really quickly. You jump from one Zoom to the next. I find it energising, but at the end I'm always like, what did I actually do and what haven't I done yet.

Bea [20:22]

It's tough. Do you actually have weekly calls with investors?

Ceci [20:26]

Just one of our investors, and the calls are more strategic than check-ins. We don't have to present anything. We discuss the strategic direction we're thinking about going in. Do you know that person or company that could help us with this product decision? Hands-on stuff.

Bea [20:48]

That's actually pretty useful. I'm relieved you don't do 1:1s with all of your cap table every week, that would have been a lot.

Ceci [20:58]

One-on-ones with all of your cap table every week, where you're just presenting things, is a waste of time. What we did was, after sending the monthly investor reports, we'd have a call with maybe the lead investor, sometimes co-leads or seed and pre-seed investors, just to run through updates and give them a chance to ask questions or hear our asks. A chill 45 minutes once a month.

Friday: Forecast Calls and Wrap-Up

Bea [21:31]

What about Friday?

Ceci [21:37]

Friday is three things, mostly. Morning is finishing off any projects, and I have an end-of-week sync with the CFO and CEO. That's free time for major decisions that need to happen. Friday afternoon is the sales forecast call. Our VP of Sales goes through every active deal with our AEs. It's super important for me because deals get pushed out, value changes. I take that information and feed it into our forecast. It's also when I close off loose ends, ask if there's anything I can get my CEO to do, emails to send, end-of-week things. Do you have Friday rituals too?

Bea [22:35]

Morning is still external party calls, wrap up anything I couldn't fit on Wednesday. Afternoon is admin wrap-up. Almost every Friday we have one of three company-wide events: town hall, product demos, or highlights from user interviews. We release every Friday, so there's always something new on the demo. Or you look at users talking about us, positively or negatively. Nice way to wrap up the week, taking a step back to look at the whole company. So now I look at you and I look at my week and people might think, wow, that's so organised. What did it take to get here?

IC Work vs Manager Work

Ceci [23:33]

A lot of trial and error. You and I are personally quite different. You're a lot more organised, I'm a lot more scattered, a multitasker by default. What it took was spending a few months trying to start a project and then have a 1:1 and then do an investor call and then try to finish the project, to make me realise: I need predictability during the week, because I can't be the best version of myself, I can't spend a lot of time focusing deeply on something critical, if I have 1:1s and external calls in between. Trial and error. But it was easy to fall into this rhythm because it's directed by the needs of the company.

Bea [24:29]

We have different personalities. I can only do one thing at a time. My brain is actually pretty monotask, sad to admit, but the notion that women are good multitaskers just doesn't apply to me. To do good work I have to be focused on one thing at a time, otherwise it's a recipe for disaster.

Over time I changed a lot. When I started as Chief of Staff I was an IC, with a to-do list of processes to implement at the company. I went in priority order. As the function evolved and I took on more departments, it became clear there are days when I have to do strategic work or people management, and other days where I do IC tasks. Those can't be the same day. I have to separate them so my brain can be in one mode or the other.

Ceci [25:37]

I very much agree on IC versus manager work. As you progress as Chief of Staff, you go from IC to people manager, but most Chiefs of Staff never let go of the IC component. So you always juggle between the two.

Unstructured 1:1s

Ceci [25:37]

Quick question on your 1:1s. I love that you consider them time for your direct reports. I've studied a lot about 1:1s. There are very structured approaches and completely unstructured ones. I veer toward unstructured, because I want it to be a place where my direct reports can ask me questions. I write down a few bullet points through the week of things to remember to mention, but not much more. Do you have structure in your unstructuredness, or do you veer one way or the other?

Bea [26:36]

If something is urgent I just Slack them. Then if there are questions about priority versus other things, we discuss it in 1:1. But the 1:1 is unstructured. You might think it's a paradox for a structured person like me, but it really is their time. I did a course called Leader as a Coach, taught by a coach called Andrea. She made me realise the value of pauses and silence in meetings. If you pause and ask an open-ended question, something comes up from the other side, and you unbundle something deeper. It took me a while to get comfortable with the silence, but I try to use it as much as I can.

Ceci [27:41]

I find silence really awkward, especially on video calls. If I'm MC'ing an all-hands I'm yapping away. But I realised you can pause and there's depth that comes out of silence. I might steal that and try to apply it.

Bea [28:05]

Being in a company that's 70% Eastern European makes you appreciate pauses. We're both Italian, we tend to fill every gap with yapping. Most of Praktika is from Eastern Europe and they're perfectly comfortable not speaking. Cultural thing, but it taught me a lot.

Monthly Rhythm: Dashboard vs Deck

Ceci [28:29]

Moving from the week to the month. Does your week change at end of month, or do you have different rituals on a monthly basis?

Bea [28:42]

A little bit. I have strategic focus moments scattered through the week where the end-of-month and end-of-quarter pieces fall in. We've automated a lot of it. Monthly investor dashboard around the 10th, because we close metrics around the 7th or 8th. Accounts close on the 14th or 15th. Financial model updates on the 20th. Routine cadence. We don't do quarterly board meetings. Only monthly board meetings. We use the same dashboard that goes to investors, and the founders have a Google Doc with priority items to discuss. No board deck.

Ceci [29:40]

Oh god. 180-page board deck on this side.

Bea [29:43]

Do you think that's useful? I wonder. I think keeping the board meeting topic by topic, without having to explain anything because the investors already have all the dashboards and metrics, you just jump into the strategic discussion directly.

Ceci [30:05]

The board deck should be for you, not for the investors. If the board deck is the ritual that makes somebody at the company spend time collecting the metrics, looking at them, doing analysis, and the leadership team takes that and changes the strategy, it's great. Sometimes you need an external reason to go deep, on a broad basis. For us the board deck was very much that. A lot of what I put together, investors might just skim, but it was a good checkpoint for us, to have the information and the data points staring at us. To be fair, our QBRs ran on a deck very similar to the board deck. We recycled a lot.

Bea [30:52]

So you recycle a lot of the material.

Ceci [30:53]

We recycled a lot. We'd go through a lot of what we collected for the board deck as part of the QBRs. Talk about it: why are we churning here, win rate, AE quotas. It's a forcing mechanism for the good. I do think sometimes things spiral. Investors might ask for a specific view, and maybe that's not helpful for the company. You always need an honest conversation: do we need this, do we not? Most investors are open-minded about what to put in the board deck. The most important thing for us was the CEO memo, a one or two page document. Some commentary on how the quarter went, what's top of mind, what's the strategy or decision we need to make.

Bea [31:48]

If it's a 100+ page board deck, that's a massive document. How did you keep it useful? Did you guide people into certain sections? How did you avoid it spiralling?

Ceci [32:02]

A fair number of pages are the same finance tables we put in every investor update, and the ARR overview that's in the investor update, and OKRs. Then we go deep into rev ops. New logos signed, logos per industry, trends in win rate, actuals versus forecast. One page each, but quick once you have the infrastructure. I'd create that and work with the VP of Sales. Then KPI indicators for new projects, also quick. Then a few pages for core departments: two or three pages of marketing for top of funnel, two or three pages for CX on services and support, product. Each leader coordinated their pages with me. Split this way, it's not that huge a piece of work.

Bea [33:14]

Double-clicking on the CEO memo. Were you supporting him on that? How?

Ceci [33:22]

On the pragmatic side, I'd fill in all the actual data points. Then brainstorm with him on the two most important things to talk about. The board deck has an exec summary, but the memo goes deeper. He wrote most of it himself.

Bea [33:43]

I do wonder, as a percentage, how often Chiefs of Staff actually ghostwrite for their principal. I haven't really done it. At most I send blurbs or paragraphs.

Ceci [34:04]

It used to happen more before AI. I did it a few times. I don't think it's that necessary anymore. What I'd do now is condense in a few bullet points what he was trying to say, so he could use that as a starting point. I know what we're talking about, I know the context, here are three points to remember, now you can have the conversation or write the email.

If you do monthly board meetings, is there anything different at the end of the quarter compared to the end of the month?

Bea [34:39]

Absolutely nothing. Same thing every month. We try to keep it simple. We keep internal operations as smooth as possible because we don't want to be slowed by internal processes. We're fairly anti-bureaucracy. We put processes and routines only at the cusp of chaos. If things start to spiral, we add process. Praktika is still a small team, 45 people, hyper-charged with AI. We're not big enough to need heavy internal processes. We barely have performance reviews, which I pushed for and were very helpful.

Performance Reviews at the Cusp of Chaos

Ceci [35:23]

How do you know when something is about to spiral into chaos?

Bea [35:27]

If people don't know what to do, or if you see skepticism or confusion on Slack, that's when we put some process in place. Before performance reviews, people were a little scared. They didn't know where they stood. Am I doing well? Am I not? After we introduced reviews with a clear incentive structure, A performers get this, underperformers get a couple of quarters of explicit support and if nothing changes we part ways, people knew exactly where they stood and what they had to improve. At least we have that conversation every quarter.

Ceci [36:08]

I don't know how many companies are this open and direct. If you're a performer, this is what you're getting. If you're not, here's how we'll help, here's how long we can support you, and if nothing changes it's better to part ways. Not the easiest conversation to have, but it takes away the gray area around performance reviews and performance-based layoffs. Gives people clarity on where they stand.

Bea [36:42]

We're extremely generous with A performers and maybe a little too transparent with underperformers. A players get a 10% equity top-up every single quarter, so you end up with a lot of options at the end of the year, and it compounds. Plus a salary incentive at the end of the year. Underperformers get a couple of quarters. As long as you're very clear on where someone is underperforming and what they have to get better on (deliverables and hard skills), everybody's aligned. We try to be as supportive as possible. Sometimes you're not aligned with the values and culture: maybe it's a mis-hire, maybe something's going on in that person's life. That's fine. If we're not aligned, both parties deserve better.

Rapid Fire

Ceci [37:43]

Is it time for our rapid fire?

Bea [37:46]

Rapid fire, let's do it.

Ceci [37:48]

Bea, one piece of advice for a new Chief of Staff building their weekly cadence?

Bea [37:57]

Set aside time for focus work. You won't do anything productive if you fill your schedule with meetings. Your calendar will be full of time-wasters. Focus work is the single variable that determines your success in the job, because it's how you get things done. Same question to you.

Ceci [38:16]

Build the cadence of your CEO syncs. Daily like I did, twice a week, or weekly. That's what runs your prioritisation and how you move your blocks around. Second lesson, which we both figured out: split your IC days from your manager days.

Bea [38:40]

One more. Don't be afraid to close Slack. This one's for you, Ceci.

Ceci [38:49]

Yes, yes, yes. I should do it.

Ceci [38:51]

This has been Top of the Ops.

Bea [38:54]

Real conversations about what happens behind the scenes.

Ceci [38:57]

Find us on Spotify and YouTube.

Bea [38:59]

See you next time.