This is a remit rather than a task list. Most of what follows is work you are holding yourself at the moment, and what I am really offering is that you get to hand it over and know it is being looked after.
The work sits in three layers. Most clients start with the first, and the second and third tend to open up as I get to know the business.
I hold the inbox rather than sort it, which means replying where a reply is obvious, drafting where it is not, and bringing you the small number of things that genuinely need you. The calendar gets looked after the same way, with the meetings that do not need to exist quietly declined and the ones that matter given a bit of room either side.
Beforehand you get the context, the history, and a clear sense of what the meeting needs to produce. Afterwards the notes get written, the actions get assigned, and the follow up goes out while it is still warm. A lot of the value in a meeting quietly disappears in the two days after it, so this is the part I am most careful about.
Flights, accommodation, ground transport, and an itinerary that still makes sense when something changes. Working across Australian and Asia Pacific time zones usually means the rebooking has happened before you are awake to worry about it.
Proposals, agreements, onboarding documents, recurring reports, and the ordinary back and forth with your clients. Written in your voice, which I take the time to learn properly in the first month rather than approximate.
The day to day is usually the symptom. This layer is where the cause gets dealt with, and it is what makes a retainer feel different from a set of hours.
A CRM that reflects how you actually sell rather than how the software assumes you do. Stages named after real decisions, fields you will genuinely use, and a pipeline that tells you something useful on a Monday morning.
The sequences that come around again and again, onboarding, invoicing, reporting, handover, mapped once and then built so they run without anyone having to remember them.
Written so someone can actually follow them, with the judgment calls included rather than only the steps. This is what lets you hire later without the business quietly depending on any one person, including me.
Built around the work rather than around the tool. I have set up enough of these to know the most common failure is a beautiful workspace nobody opens, so I start with the smallest structure that holds and grow it from there with you.
Where a piece of work has a start, a finish, and enough moving parts that it will drift if nobody owns it, I am happy to take it and run it.
That covers scoping and planning, coordinating the people and vendors involved, keeping track of what is actually happening against what was meant to happen, and reporting back in a form you can read in two minutes. It also covers the part that usually gets skipped, which is the handover at the end so the thing keeps working after the project closes.
This is the work I did for a decade before this, across corporate, government, and global travel. Multi country implementations, technology builds and configuration, beta and QA testing, and full product launches. It is not an add on to the executive support. It is where I came from, and it is a large part of why the executive support looks the way it does.
I would rather be clear about this up front than have you find out three emails in.
If what you need sits in one of those, please say so anyway. I would much rather point you towards someone good than leave you looking.
Founders and small business leaders who are still the operational centre of the business, and who have reached the point where that has become the constraint rather than the advantage.
It works best when there is something to organise. A business with clients, deadlines and a few people in it gives me plenty to improve. A business still working out what it sells does not yet, and you would be paying me to wait alongside you.
I take on a small number of clients on monthly retainers, which is a deliberate choice. It is the only way I can know each business properly and keep the work at the level I want it to be.
Describe where the business is at and what is taking your time. I will come back with what I would take on and how I would structure it, and if I am not the right fit I will tell you that too.