Launching Right Hand
Why I started a Chief of Staff search firm
Hi folks! This post is a bit off-topic from the usual spiritual stuff you’ve become accustomed to reading on Musings on Awareness, but I thought I’d share a big life update as I look to maintain presence, peace, and awareness throughout this next phase of my journey :)
If you follow me on LinkedIn, you may have already seen my announcement: I just launched Right Hand Talent! It’s a search firm for Chiefs of Staff where I’m focused on exclusively placing world-class talent for the C-suite.
I’ve always had an entrepreneurial bent and interest, having lived at the intersection of venture capital and startups throughout most of my career. After doing the MBA and VC/finance thing for a few years, I landed a Chief of Staff role and couldn’t have been more pumped — ever since I had the opportunity to incubate a start-up at the venture firm, I had been interested in transitioning from capital allocator to Chief of Staff where I could really get in the weeds with founders and do it all over again.
I named the search firm Right Hand because the Chief of Staff is typically exactly that: the right hand to their Principal, be it the Founder/CEO or another executive. A CoS helps their Principal scale themselves because they think and act like an executive, and can take on many different challenges, roles, situations, and initiatives — and do them well. They usually manage the rhythm of the business (strategic planning), organizational health, and special projects. I call them force multipliers because they work strategically across the leadership team and cross-functionally to take projects from 0-1+ and drive communication, collaboration, alignment, and decision-making velocity across the executive team.
Last summer, I saw a real opportunity in the Chief of Staff world. There wasn’t really a single place that someone could go to learn more about what it takes to be a CoS. Sure, there were dozens if not hundreds of articles out there on all the nuances of the role and some great organizations as well, but nothing was easily accessible or frankly just introductory that someone could reference to understand the fundamentals about the role. That’s when I had the idea to launch a Udemy course, and I decided to call it Chief of Staff 101.
To be transparent, Chief of Staff stuff is rather niche, so I didn’t do this with the goal or even expectation to make a boatload of money. I was doing it more because I saw an opportunity to help people, creating content was something that I was good at and enjoyed, and it was on a topic that I knew a lot about and loved talking about. I launched the course in October, and fast forward to today, I’ve had 1200+ learners sign up and the course was accepted into Udemy Business, a curated selection of high-quality Udemy courses that companies can share with their employees. Only 3% of all courses are chosen for Udemy Business, so I thought that was pretty neat! :)
But just because I was doing something for fun doesn’t mean I was going to let the opportunity to test a top of funnel acquisition strategy go to waste. At the end of the course, I asked learners to submit their resume for consideration for Chief of Staff roles. This was the beginning of my candidate pipeline for the CoS recruiting business that I had been mulling over.
In the meantime, I was considering a couple of other career paths:
Find a full-time job working for someone else (meh)
Continue consulting and build out that business (personally, I see this more as complementary and a gap-fill while you’re in between things, so not too appealing)
Start a venture-backed business (a bit of soul-searching later and I realized this wasn’t the path for me)
Start a CPG lifestyle business (has merit, but I’m not a huge fan of inventory and widgets)
Become a Twitch streamer (I love gaming; I play ranked League of Legends and I’m pretty good lol; I tried this for a month or so but wasn’t that crazy about it)
Eventually I came back around to my original idea: launch a Chief of Staff recruiting firm. The role itself is becoming increasingly more important and popular within tech, and more and more companies are hiring for it. That coupled with the fact that I had insider experience and a network from both sides of the table (investor & CoS at startups) meant that I could build a business that I could really niche down in. Launching and building a search firm takes as much effort as getting anything else off the ground, but you eat what you kill and the ROI on your effort is well-rewarded.
So here we are today! 😊 I’m excited to build Right Hand and for this next phase of being a matchmaker between awesome Chief of Staff candidates and great companies. If you’re looking to hire a Chief of Staff, want to get placed, or know a great candidate, please reach out! You can DM me on LinkedIn or submit a contact form on our website. Also, from now on I’ll be writing about all things Chief of Staff on the official Right Hand Substack, so subscribe there if you want to stay up to date on the latest.
As always, I’m grateful for your readership and support! If you liked reading this, feel free to click the ❤️ button on this post so more people can discover it on Substack. 🙏
Until next time! 👋
Congrats babe! So proud of you and such a needed service!