Chief of Staff

THE ROLE

Given KEH’s current size — over two hundred employees across operations, technology, merchandising, and commerce functions — and ongoing anticipated rapid growth, as well as its need to level-up its operating capabilities to meet the needs of its size and ambition, the Company’s go-forward performance depends on how well its operating system runs: the cadence of leadership meetings, the flow of decisions and information to and from the CEO, and the follow-through that turns priorities into completed work.

To meet these needs, the CEO is planning to install a defined operating system — a weekly leadership rhythm with an owned scorecard, published decision rights with escalation thresholds, written decision memos, a weekly metrics review, structured visibility into the levels below the leadership team, and other elements. The Chief of Staff exists to make that system actually run, every week, without decay — and to multiply the CEO’s capacity by owning the connective work that today competes with the work only the CEO can do.

The scope is the machinery of the Office of the CEO: the operating cadence and its artifacts (agendas, scorecard, one-pagers, metrics review), the integrity of the decision-rights system (memos routed to the right decider, escalation thresholds enforced, commitments tracked to closure), the preparation that makes the CEO effective in every meeting that remains on his calendar, and the integration across major cross-functional initiatives — including implementing and integrating AI, upgraded financial management through a new ERP, ongoing improvements across the technology stack as well as in IT infrastructure, continued up-leveling of pricing capabilities, extensive increases in analytics and reporting on key metrics, more sophisticated product information management, brand and others — where work streams must connect but no single function can deliver the whole itself.

This is a role of substantial influence and zero formal authority: it succeeds through judgment, preparation, trust, and follow-through. The right leader for this role is both strategic and hands‑on who will develop and execute the strategies and leverage the resources/departments at the Company to assist in such.

This is not an executive assistant role, and it is not a shadow chief operating officer. The Chief of Staff does not make the leadership team’s decisions and does not sit between the CEO and his direct reports as a gatekeeper. The role is an integrator and honest broker: it makes the organization’s information flow faster and truer, makes the CEO’s time compound, and makes the operating system impossible to quietly abandon.

• The operating cadence. The weekly leadership tactical meeting, monthly strategic meeting, quarterly off‑site, monthly all‑managers forum, and quarterly skip‑level program run on schedule, with agendas, pre‑work, and outcomes documented — and their quality is audited quarterly rather than allowed to decay.
• The information architecture. Friday one‑pagers from the leadership team arrive on time in a fixed format; the weekly metrics review runs on standardized, exception‑flagged input metrics; the CEO’s briefing packets make him the most prepared person in every meeting he attends.
• The decision system. The published decision‑rights map is enforced in practice: decisions the CEO retains arrive as written memos with recommendations; escalations respect thresholds; send‑backs are routed to the right owner; commitments made in any forum are tracked to closure.
• Cross‑functional integration of CEO priorities. The handful of initiatives that span functions — including the initiatives mentioned above — stay connected: dependencies surfaced early, conflicts brokered at the working level, and only genuine gate decisions elevated.
• CEO leverage. Leveraging the executive‑assistant capacity, the CEO’s calendar reflects his stated priorities — meeting defaults enforced, think blocks protected, and the reactive share of his week measurably reduced.

• Run the mechanics of the weekly leadership meeting: own the scorecard’s integrity, build the agenda from exceptions…