Spend 90% of your week on what only you can do
She ran the role at Hugging Face. Her test is your calendar.
When you look at your to do list, what items could you delegate so that you become more focused on what you truly need to own? For some reason, you keep these on your own list anyway, partly because hiring feels premature and partly because explaining the task would take longer than finishing it yourself, right?
Clara Ma helps to create space for founders to focus on what truly needs their attention by finding the right chief of staff to take on the rest.
She joined Hugging Face as a chief of staff when the company was just ten people, stayed on for about a year and a half through the Series B and the run to forty five, then spent roughly two years running On Deck’s Chief of Staff Fellowship.
After taking a break, she started Ask A Chief of Staff from the road in October 2022.
Ask her when a founder is ready for that first hire and she reaches past headcount and funding stage. She asks what percent of your week goes to the work only you can do, if this percent is low, you are likely ready to hire a chief of staff.
Here are the five take aways from my conversation with Clara
1. Your calendar tells you when to hire.
Most founders are waiting for something outside themselves to say it is time, whether that is a round closing, the team getting big enough, or a revenue number that finally makes the hire easy to justify.
Clara suggests looking at how you’re spending your time instead.
She gets the question constantly from first-time founders, and her answer never starts with the org chart.
“I always say that the time to hire a chief of staff is when you are no longer spending time on the things that only you can do as a founder of this company.”
Then she puts a number on it. You are the founder because you carry something specific, whether that is domain expertise or the ability to sell the product, “and that’s where you should be spending like 85-90% of your time.” Below that line, you are spending founder hours on work that should be owned by someone else such as a chief of staff.
To Coach yourself:
Open last week’s calendar and mark the blocks that only you could have run. What percentage is that, honestly?
Here are some questions to reflect on:
What surprises you about how you spent the time?
What is the first thing you would delegate and what has stopped you from doing this already?
Who would you delegate to?
2. Know who the hire actually works for.
When asked the difference between an operations role and chief of staff, Clara separates them by asking who the person is accountable to.
“The main difference between just general operations role and a chief of staff role is that the chief of staff’s mandate is the principal. It’s the founder, the executive, the person that they work for.”
An operations leader is aimed at something wider. That role is “more focused on the general health of the company and how to make things run efficiently that way.” Her diagnostic puts the question back on you: “are you looking to be more organized as an individual, as a founder? If yes, like a chief of staff is probably the right person to bring on. Or are you looking to kind of operationalize more parts of the business?”
She is also willing to talk founders out of the hire entirely. Sometimes the honest answer is a functional hire first. Work out which one is drowning, you or the company.
To Coach yourself:
Are you trying to get your own week back, or trying to make the business run more efficiently?
What would each of those people take off your plate in their first month?
Which of those two lists would change more for you right now?
3. Bring in help before you can justify it.
Founders tend to wait until the pain is undeniable before adding support, and by the time it is undeniable the capacity to build the next thing is already spent.
Clara was three months into the business, running five to seven searches at once, when she made a hire to support her.
“About three months into starting Ask a Chief of Staff, I decided to bring on an EA because my inbox was getting crazy. And had I not brought on that EA, I would not have been able to start the community.”
The community became the second revenue line in the business, the one that grows steadily while placements arrive in spikes. Getting it off the ground took what she calls a two-month stretch of brainstorm and execution, and during that time, she needed the space to setup this next project. As she put it, she had to “free up like my own mental capacity and resources.”
This one decision gave her so much capacity to expand her business in ways that would not be possible without this addition to her team.
To Coach yourself:
What would you do with the time you get back and what area of the business would you focus on expanding?
What projects or initiatives would you put into action?
4. Ship the rough version and let people poke holes.
Not releasing something that feels completely ready for users seems like the right thing to do, however, building in isolation also means you’re not sure if you are actually building something users actually want.
Clara learned this as a chief of staff, where she was often the first person building a function or a process that had never existed.
“Get the first draft out as quickly as possible because if you try to figure it all out on your own, chances are you’re going to overlook a bunch of blind spots that you may not have anticipated.”
Her perspective: “done is better than perfect.” And the holes people find in a rough draft are rarely opposition. In her words, “it’s not always because like they disagree with you, but it’s because they don’t have all of the context that you have had as you’ve been building this thing out.” Every round of feedback helps you to get to a version that makes the process more efficient and effective.
A rough draft buys you two things: the blind spots you cannot see from inside your own head, and the buy-in you need from the people who will help make the changes successful.
To Coach yourself:
What are you still polishing that three people could react to tomorrow?
What is holding you back from sharing your first version?
Who are the three people you can share your version with and when will you sent it to them?
5. Your buyers are the ones who never comment.
Founders read their engagement numbers as a verdict on whether any of it is working. Clara has the data that complicates it, because she asks every new client how they found her.
“We ask them like, oh, how did you hear about us? And they’re like, oh, I read your stuff on LinkedIn or I saw your LinkedIn post, but they have never commented. They’ve never liked.”
These are people the business had no way of seeing. “There’s no way we would have known who they are,” she said, “but they have, like, there are those people and those are often your, like your biggest clients.” They have already decided about you. They are waiting on their own timing, a budget cycle, a departure, a quarter that finally has room to engage your service or product. Her one requirement for being there when that moment lands is consistency, which she calls the most over-heard piece of advice she still cannot stop giving.
So the take away here: Keep showing up because somebody is reading even during the weeks that look dead, and you have no idea when they might reach out.
To Coach yourself:
Think about the last few clients who came to you. What did they say when you asked how they found you, and did you ask?
How can you align your writing to speak directly to your buyers?
What is the one thing you will keep doing for the next month even if the impact might not be showing up in the metrics?
Resources Clara mentioned
Scaling People, by Claire Hughes Johnson, who used to work at Stripe. Clara recommends it for how tactical it is on culture, people management and working with other leaders as a company grows.
Built to Sell, recommended to her early on. Her read is that it helps you get out of the day to day and understand how the business survives without you as the only point of failure, whether or not you ever intend to sell.
Leaving you with this question: What percent of last week went to the work only you could do, and what would you have to let go of to raise it? Share it with me.
If anything in this article resonated with you, share it with one more person that could also use these insights.
Work with me
I’m Dar Patel, an ICF-certified executive coach (PCC), I have worked with founders and executives, and am the writer behind The Inner Game, the weekly newsletter of Little Pursuits.
My goal is to support founders, executives, and individuals doing one of the hardest things we can do: build and scale something from the ground up.
1:1 executive coaching: Book a 30-minute discovery call.
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