Job Title: Chief of Staff
Employment Type: Full-time
Location: Based in Johannesburg, South Africa, and partly remote
Industry: Family Office in Private Equity
Reports To: CEO
The Role
We are a private Family Office seeking an exceptionally organized, detail-oriented Chief of Staff to provide high-calibre support to the CEO. The CEO oversees a diversified portfolio across multiple sectors, including FMCG, Technology, Entertainment, Agriculture, Oil & Gas, and Real Estate.
The mandate is to ensure his daily workflow runs seamlessly. This individual will manage critical information flows, oversee business correspondence, and ensure that key priorities are executed with absolute precision, enabling the CEO to focus on core business objectives. The CoS is the CEO’s right-hand person, providing updates, insights, and counsel with regard to ongoing business and opportunities like a confidential counselor, commercial strategist, and executive proxy.
Key Responsibilities
1. Executive Administration & Communication
- Communication Hub & Correspondence Management: Manage the CEO’s email, filtering noise, drafting professional responses for review, and surfacing urgent matters to verify that important communication is never missed.
- Coordinate Schedule Management: You will work closely with the CEO’s Personal Assistant to optimize his schedule, avoid conflicts, and ensure efficient time use. Plan agendas, run key meetings, and ensure action items are completed.
- Information Flow: Ensure the CEO receives timely context, inputs, and documents for meetings and decisions.
- Gatekeeping: Managing the CEO's calendar, prioritizing correspondence, and filtering inquiries to protect their time.
2. Meeting Support & Documentation
- Meeting Preparation: Ensure the CEO is fully briefed before engagements. Collate agendas, print or format necessary documents, and ensure he has the relevant context, whether it be bios or previous notes, before the call starts.
- Minutes & Action Items: Attend certain business meetings through which you would extract action items and follow up with the relevant parties to ensure tasks are completed on time.
- Document Control: Format, proofread, organize, and share business documents, presentations, and investment memos with the CEO to a professional standard.
3. Business Operations & Advisory Support
- Business Advice: Provide objective business advice and feedback to the CEO. Review deal memos, , or reports, offering a sanity check and commercial input to assist his decision-making process.
- Project Tracking: Assist in maintaining the deal trackers and project logs. Ensure that status updates are accurate and up-to-date for the CEO’s review.
- Operating Investments Liaison: Act as a helpful administrative resource for the team. Available to assist the operating businesses where necessary, helping to log requests and ensuring that follow-ups are tracked to support the overall workflow. Help set goals for these entities, track performance metrics, and align teams with the executive's vision. Take initiative and develop workflows, fix broken processes, and manage high-priority special projects.
- Ad-Hoc Research: Conduct research or background checks on companies and individuals as requested.
4. Right-hand
- Travel: Attend meetings internationally with the CEO
- Strategic Proxy: Attend high-level meetings on behalf of the CEO, make secondary decisions, and ensure the execution of executive directives. Operational, personal, or security issues across global jurisdictions.
- Crisis Management: Serve as the first line of defense for urgent matters
Success Metrics (KPIs)
- Extremely Detail-Oriented: Pre-empt, identify gaps and opportunities
- Time Management: Prioritize and discern between projects, tasks, and critical deadlines
- Collaborative Efficiency: Successfully work in tandem with the Personal Assistant to ensure the CEO’s schedule is optimized, conflict-free, and practically executable.
- Responsiveness: Ensure that key stakeholders receive prompt, professional replies, whether drafting on behalf of the CEO or facilitating his direct response.
- Accuracy: Documents, action items, and notes from meetings are correct and capture all relevant information, ensuring the CEO can rely on them for effective decision-making.
- Decision Support: Provide sound and professional business advice and context, enabling the CEO to make decisions more quickly and confidently.
- Organization: Oversee document management, so that files, emails, and project trackers are structured, easy to find, and up-to-date.
- Integration: Build strong, positive relationships with the existing team, viewing your role as a support function that helps everyone succeed.
- Relational credibility: Build good rapport with external stakeholders, clients, investors, and the like.
Our DNA & Culture
We are a Family Office, not a corporate institution.
- Service Mindset: This is a support role. We value humility and a lack of ego. We are looking for someone who takes pride in executing tasks with excellence and discretion.
- Ambitious: This role, when successfully fulfilled, is a stepping stone to heading one of the Business Units. It requires that one hold themselves to a high standard and have a big vision for themselves and the business.
- Self-Motivated: We work mostly remotely, and a lot of autonomy is provided. The individual must be able to treat their objectives as urgent priorities, operating with speed, agility, and precision.
- Direct Communication: This role requires timely, clear, and direct communication
- Self-Accountability: If you make a mistake, own it, fix it, report it, and move on.
- Availability & Responsiveness: We respect boundaries, but deals don't always happen 9-5. If a critical issue hits on a Thursday night, the expectation is that you are available to assist.
The Fine Print
- Confidentiality: You will handle highly sensitive financial and personal information. Absolute discretion is non-negotiable.
- Tools: Advanced proficiency in Microsoft Office and AI productivity tools.
- High Commercial Acumen: Ability to analyze financial statements, understand complex corporate structures, and interface confidently with private bankers and tax lawyers.
- Anticipatory Thinking: Solve problems before they impact the CEO, mapping out scenarios, and preparing solutions rather than just reporting issues.
- Travel: Occasional travel may be required for meetings or team alignment.
Qualifications & Requirements
- Experience: 5+ years in a Senior Analyst or Chief of Staff role. Experience in a high-performance environment (Private Equity, Business Operations, Management Consulting, Executive Leadership, Finance, or Law) is a requirement.
- Business Acumen: Financially literate and business-savvy. The agility to grasp a tech startup's financials one moment and understand an industrial supply chain or real estate asset the next.
- Education: A relevant degree or diploma is preferred.
- Mindset: Proactive. Resilient. Persevering. Solutions-oriented. Confident. Deliberate. High Emotional Intelligence.
Pay: R300 000,00 - R480 000,00 per year
Work Location: Hybrid remote in Johannesburg, Gauteng
