With the rise of the Chief of Staff position at growth stage companies there are a lot of questions about what this role should look like. And while it’s clear that no two Chief of Staff roles are ever exactly the same, one common thread is the alignment between the Chief of Staff and the CEO. 

However, to understand this alignment, a Chief of Staff needs to first identify what exactly is needed in the role to best serve the company and the CEO. As tempting as it might be to just jump right in and start taking on projects, success in this role often comes from intentionality and understanding. 

That’s why we were excited to sit down Zeke Fraint, who recently joined Clearcover as the Chief of Staff to help scale the company following their $200M Series D Round of funding. 

Zeke wasn’t the first Chief of Staff at Clearcover, so before even joining the team, he wanted to sit down with the Clearcover’s CEO, Kyle Nakatsuji, to understand what the company needed as they entered this next phase of the business. From serving as a sounding board with an unbiased perspective to understanding his primary orientation in serving the CEO, the executive team, and the company, Zeke outlines how he went about setting his role up for long-term success to help scale Clearcover through their hyper-growth stage.  

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Our Takeaway

In building the Chief of Staff role, it’s clear that Zeke’s focus from the beginning was figuring out how he could 10x his CEO across the business. 

As Zeke puts it so well, the CEO can do fewer and fewer things as the company grows. So it’s important that the Chief of Staff is able to increase the CEO’s range and reach without insulating them from what’s happening in the business. 

We’ve used the phrase many times before on Aspiring Ops, but the Chief of Staff is the connective tissue between the company and the executive team. Zeke uses this example to reference how his ability to serve as a deep generalist allows him to flex into different situations that the CEO might have previously served in at an earlier stage of the business. 

For strategy and ops leaders, the ability to build trust throughout the organization and surface information in a way that brings resolution for challenges facing employees is critical in how we multiply the presence of the CEO or other members of the leadership team. 

Interested in learning more about Clearcover? Check out their site here. 

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