Executive Business Partner to the CEO

About Knak

Knak is a fast-growing B2B SaaS company helping enterprise marketing teams create beautiful, on-brand, production-ready campaigns faster. We work with some of the world’s leading brands and are building the future of marketing production in an AI-first world.

As CEO, I am looking for an exceptional Executive Business Partner who can help me operate at a higher level by giving me back time, increasing follow-through across the company, and ensuring that important personal and professional priorities do not fall through the cracks.

This is not a traditional administrative EA role. Calendar, inbox, travel, and meeting coordination are important, but they are only the foundation.

This role is about creating leverage for the CEO. That means protecting time, anticipating needs, owning follow-through, reducing friction, routing information to the right people, and ensuring that commitments across the organization actually turn into completed outcomes.

The right person will act as a true extension of the CEO: proactive, organized, trusted, discreet, and capable of driving things forward without waiting to be told exactly what to do.

The Role

The Executive Business Partner will support the CEO across both business and personal priorities. This person will help manage the CEO’s time, meetings, communications, follow-ups, travel, personal administration, key relationships, and the flow of important information across the organization.

The ideal candidate is highly organized, resourceful, proactive, and comfortable operating in a fast-paced environment where priorities can shift quickly. They should be able to attend meetings, capture action items, follow up with leaders, prepare decision points, and help ensure the CEO is spending time only where he is truly needed.

The goal of this role is simple: help the CEO get time back and operate with more leverage.

What You’ll Own

CEO Time, Calendar, and Prioritization

You will manage the CEO’s calendar with a high level of judgment, not just by booking meetings, but by understanding what deserves time and what does not.

Responsibilities include:

• Managing and optimizing the CEO’s calendar.
• Prioritizing meetings based on business impact, urgency, and CEO involvement required.
• Protecting focus time and preventing unnecessary calendar creep.
• Ensuring the CEO is prepared for meetings with the right context, materials, and decision points.
• Helping determine which meetings the CEO should attend, delegate, shorten, or skip.
• Proactively flagging conflicts, gaps, risks, and opportunities in the schedule.
• Looking ahead to identify scheduling issues before they become problems.
• Ensuring there is enough time between meetings, travel, calls, and personal commitments.
• Proactively informing people when the CEO is running late or when timing needs to shift.

Inbox and Communication Management

You will manage the CEO’s inbox in a proactive way. Sorting emails is not enough. The expectation is that you will help reduce the number of things that require the CEO’s direct involvement.

Responsibilities include:

• Reviewing, organizing, and prioritizing the CEO’s inbox.
• Identifying emails that can be handled without CEO involvement.
• Drafting replies for review.
• Responding on behalf of the CEO where appropriate.
• Proactively completing tasks that do not require CEO decision-making.
• Escalating only what truly needs the CEO’s attention.
• Tracking outstanding requests and ensuring follow-through.
• Summarizing long threads and surfacing only the key decision, issue, or action required.
• Reducing email noise and helping the CEO focus on what matters most.

Meeting Support and Action-Item Ownership

This is one of the most important parts of the role. You will attend key meetings with the CEO, capture decisions and action items, and ensure commitments are followed up on.

Responsibilities include:

• Attending selected meetings with the CEO.
• Taking clear notes and capturing decisions, owners, deadlines, and next steps.
• Following up with team members on commitments.
• Holding people accountable for the things they said they would do.
• Maintaining a centralized tracker of CEO-related action items.
• Preparing short summaries of what happened, what matters, and what needs the CEO’s decision.
• Attending some meetings on behalf of the CEO when appropriate, gathering context and bringing back concise recommendations or decision points.
• Ensuring the CEO is not the one chasing people for updates.
• Turning messy conversations into clear next steps, owners, and outcomes.

Information Routing and Organizational Follow-Through

A key part of this role is helping ensure that important information from the CEO gets to the right people and turns into the right action.

The CEO frequently meets with customers, partners, investors, prospects, employees, and external stakeholders. These conversations often create important insights, decisions, risks, follow-ups, and opportunities. The Executive Business Partner needs to help capture that information, understand who in the organization needs to know about it, and ensure the right outcome happens.

This role is not just about taking notes and filing them away. It is about understanding the organization well enough to know:

• Who needs to know this?
• What action should come from it?
• Who owns the next step?
• What context do they need?
• What deadline or urgency is attached to it?
• What needs to be tracked until completion?
• What needs to come back to the CEO for a decision?

Responsibilities include:

• Capturing notes from CEO meetings with customers, partners, investors, prospects, employees, and other stakeholders.
• Turning raw notes into clear summaries, action items, owners, and next steps.
• Routing relevant information to the right people across the organization.
• Tagging or notifying the appropriate team members in Google Docs, Slack, email, or the relevant system.
• Understanding which leaders or teams need specific information based on the topic, customer, issue, opportunity, or risk.
• Following up to ensure the information was received, understood, and acted on.
• Driving action from meeting notes instead of simply documenting them.
• Helping ensure customer feedback, product insights, sales opportunities, risks, and executive decisions do not get lost.
• Maintaining a clear system of record for CEO meeting notes, follow-ups, and organizational action items.
• Closing the loop with the CEO once the right people have been informed and the right next steps are underway.

The right person will not just ask, “Where should I put these notes?” They will think, “Who needs this information, what needs to happen next, and how do I make sure it gets done?”

Executive Follow-Through and Accountability

A major part of this role is ensuring that commitments made to the CEO actually get completed.

This person cannot simply ask once, remind people, and then escalate back to the CEO when things are not done. They need to own the outcome, follow through with persistence, and be comfortable directing senior leaders and executives on what is needed, by when, and why it matters.

Responsibilities include:

• Following up with executives and team members on commitments made in meetings.
• Clearly communicating owners, deadlines, expectations, and required outcomes.
• Pushing for completion when tasks are late or unclear.
• Escalating thoughtfully only when necessary, not as the default.
• Helping remove blockers instead of simply reporting that something is blocked.
• Maintaining a clear action-item tracker across CEO meetings and priorities.
• Ensuring the CEO is not the one chasing people for updates.
• Being confident and professional when holding senior leaders accountable.
• Knowing when to nudge, when to push, when to clarify, and when something truly needs to be escalated.

The right person will understand that success is not “I asked them.” Success is “the thing got done.”

Executive Leverage and Decision Support

The right person will help the CEO move faster by turning complexity into clarity.

Responsibilities include:

• Preparing briefs before important meetings.
• Summarizing long email threads, documents, or conversations into clear takeaways.
• Identifying what decision is needed and what information is missing.
• Bringing forward recommendations, not just raw information.
• Helping the CEO stay focused on the highest-impact priorities.
• Acting as connective tissue between the CEO and leadership team.
• Following up on open loops and unresolved questions.
• Helping the CEO make faster, better decisions by reducing the amount of context he has to personally gather.

Anticipating Needs and Removing Friction

You are constantly looking ahead and thinking two or three steps in front of the CEO.

Responsibilities include:

• Noticing calendar conflicts before they become stressful.
• Proactively adjusting meetings when timing does not work.
• Telling people in advance if the CEO is running late.
• Making sure meeting rooms, video calls, documents, and materials are ready before the CEO arrives.
• Ensuring rooms are booked, technology works, screens are ready, and the right people are present.
• Knowing when the CEO needs prep time, travel time, context, or a decision brief.
• Spotting friction points and solving them without waiting to be asked.
• Making the CEO’s day feel smoother, calmer, and more controlled.
• Preventing the CEO from walking into avoidable confusion, delays, missing materials, or technical issues.

The CEO should not be walking into a room and wondering whether the screen works, whether the right people are there, whether the materials are ready, or whether there is enough time to get to the next meeting. You own those details.

Travel, Events, and Logistics

You will own travel planning and logistics with a high standard of quality and attention to detail.

Responsibilities include:

• Booking business and personal travel.
• Creating detailed itineraries.
• Coordinating flights, hotels, transportation, restaurant reservations, and meeting logistics.
• Anticipating travel needs and preferences.
• Handling changes quickly and calmly.
• Supporting company events, leadership meetings, board meetings, customer meetings, and offsites as needed.
• Ensuring the CEO has the right materials, timing, transportation, and context for every trip or event.
• Proactively managing details so travel and events feel smooth, efficient, and well thought out.

Personal Administration and Family/Household Support

This role includes personal support. The CEO is looking for someone who can help manage important personal administration and coordination so that fewer things fall on his plate.

Responsibilities may include:

• Coordinating with accountants, tax advisors, Deloitte, lawyers, bankers, financial advisors, insurance providers, and other professional service providers.
• Helping manage personal appointments and family schedule coordination.
• Tracking important personal deadlines, renewals, documents, and follow-ups.
• Coordinating household, travel, and personal logistics.
• Handling confidential personal matters with discretion and maturity.
• Ensuring personal administrative tasks are completed without repeated CEO involvement.
• Organizing personal documents, scheduling, family logistics, and professional service follow-ups.
• Helping the CEO stay on top of personal commitments without having to personally manage every detail.

What Success Looks Like

In this role, success means the CEO feels a meaningful difference in his day-to-day life.

You are successful if:

• The CEO gets significant time back.
• The inbox feels under control.
• The calendar feels intentional, not reactive.
• Meetings are better prepared, better followed up on, and more accountable.
• Important information from CEO meetings is quickly routed to the right people and turned into action without the CEO having to manually document, tag, and follow up.
• The CEO is not chasing people for updates.
• Executives and team members complete the commitments they make.
• Action items do not fall through the cracks.
• Personal admin is handled proactively.
• Scheduling, meeting-room, travel, and logistics issues are anticipated before they become problems.
• The CEO spends less time on low-value tasks and more time on strategy, leadership, customers, investors, product, and family.
• You become trusted enough to handle more and more without needing step-by-step direction.

Who You Are

You are not just an administrator. You are a high-judgment operator who takes pride in creating order, leverage, and momentum.

You are likely a strong fit if you are:

• Exceptionally organized.
• Proactive and resourceful.
• Comfortable following up with senior leaders.
• Able to manage confidential information with discretion.
• Strong at written communication.
• Calm under pressure.
• Detail-oriented without losing sight of the bigger picture.
• Comfortable working in a fast-moving, high-performance environment.
• Able to anticipate needs before being asked.
• Confident enough to push for clarity and accountability.
• Service-oriented, but not passive.
• Comfortable supporting both business and personal priorities.
• Able to take a messy situation and turn it into a clear plan.
• Comfortable directing executives and senior leaders in a professional way.
• Persistent enough to ensure outcomes happen, not just reminders.
• Trusted enough to represent the CEO with maturity, judgment, and confidence.
• Able to understand how information moves through an organization and quickly learn who needs to know what.
• Able to turn a messy set of meeting notes into clear follow-ups, owners, and outcomes.
• Comfortable using judgment to route information to the right people without needing the CEO to spell it out every time.

What We Are Not Looking For

This role is not for someone who only wants to manage a calendar, book travel, and sort email.

We are not looking for someone who:

• Waits to be told what to do.
• Only forwards things back to the CEO instead of solving them.
• Is uncomfortable holding people accountable.
• Thinks their job is done once they have sent a reminder.
• Comes back to the CEO with “I asked them, but they didn’t do it” as the final answer.
• Is uncomfortable directing executives or senior leaders.
• Struggles with ambiguity.
• Needs every task fully defined.
• Avoids personal administration.
• Sees the role as purely administrative.
• Lets details slip.
• Waits for problems to happen instead of anticipating them.
• Lets the CEO walk into preventable friction, confusion, or logistics issues.
• Needs the CEO to notice and solve scheduling, room, travel, or meeting setup problems.
• Simply documents notes without understanding what action should come from them.
• Relies on the CEO to identify every person who needs to be tagged or followed up with.
• Lets valuable customer, product, sales, or strategic insights sit in a document without driving them into the organization.
• Gets overwhelmed by a fast-moving executive environment.

Qualifications

• 5+ years of experience supporting a CEO, founder, executive, or senior leader.
• Experience in a fast-growing company or entrepreneurial environment preferred.
• Strong calendar, inbox, travel, and meeting management skills.
• Excellent written and verbal communication skills.
• High discretion and comfort handling confidential business and personal matters.
• Strong follow-through and project-tracking ability.
• Experience supporting both business and personal executive priorities is a strong asset.
• Comfortable using modern productivity tools, AI tools, Google Workspace, Slack, project management tools, and CRM or business systems as needed.
• Experience working with senior executives, leadership teams, board members, investors, professional service providers, or high-net-worth individuals is an asset.

Working Style

This role requires someone who can build deep trust with the CEO. You will need to learn how the CEO thinks, what matters most, what can be delegated, what requires escalation, and how to create leverage without adding complexity.

The best person for this role will be someone who takes ownership, communicates clearly, and is energized by helping a CEO and company move faster.

You should be comfortable operating with a high degree of trust and autonomy. You will often need to make judgment calls, ask smart questions, follow up with senior people, and solve problems before they reach the CEO.

Why This Role Matters

The CEO’s time is one of the company’s most valuable resources. This role exists to help protect that time and ensure it is spent on the areas where the CEO can have the greatest impact.

The right person will make the CEO, the leadership team, and the company more effective by creating more clarity, better follow-through, fewer dropped balls, and less unnecessary friction.

This is a high-trust, high-impact role for someone who wants to be much more than an assistant. It is for someone who wants to be a true partner in helping a CEO operate at his best.

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