Chief of Staff

Knak is a mission-driven company Why? Because our time is limited, our competition is fierce, and our margin for error is small. For us to have the greatest impact on the world, we need to be laser focused on our core mission, which is... Empowering people to be creative. That’s why Knak exists. We are a world-class enterprise email and landing page creation platform with a focus on making successful and happy customers by providing them with an incredibly powerful, yet easy to use creation platform. Our industry leading SaaS solution is built by Marketers, for Marketers. We know that it’s the small things that make the biggest impact and that emails and landing pages are where the rubber hits the road when it comes to Marketing Automation. We change the way Marketers work by making them more efficient, while improving conversion rate of their campaigns and helping them stay on brand. Oh, and we have a bit of fun while doing it, too! The Role The Executive Business Partner will support the CEO across both business and personal priorities. This person will manage time, meetings, communications, follow-ups, travel, personal administration, key relationships, and the flow of information across the organization. The ideal candidate is highly organized, resourceful, proactive, and comfortable operating in a fast-moving environment where priorities shift quickly. They should be able to attend meetings, capture action items, follow up with leaders, prepare decision points, and 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 judgment, not just scheduling meetings, but understanding what deserves time and attention. Responsibilities include: Managing and optimizing the CEO’s calendar. Prioritizing meetings based on impact, urgency, and CEO involvement required. Protecting focus time and preventing unnecessary calendar creep. Ensuring the CEO is prepared with the right context, materials, and decision points. Identifying conflicts, gaps, risks, and scheduling issues before they become problems. Coordinating timing across meetings, travel, calls, and personal commitments. Proactively communicating schedule changes or delays. Inbox and Communication Management You will proactively manage the CEO’s inbox and reduce the amount of work requiring direct CEO involvement. Responsibilities include: Reviewing, organizing, and prioritizing email. Drafting responses and responding on behalf of the CEO where appropriate. Handling tasks that do not require CEO decision-making. Escalating only what truly needs attention. Tracking requests and ensuring follow-through. Summarizing long threads into clear actions, issues, or decisions. Reducing noise so the CEO can stay focused on high-value work. Meeting Support and Organizational Follow-Through This is one of the most important parts of the role. You will attend key meetings, capture decisions and action items, and ensure commitments turn into completed outcomes. Responsibilities include: Attending selected meetings with the CEO. Capturing notes, decisions, owners, deadlines, and next steps. Following up with leaders and team members on commitments. Maintaining a centralized tracker of CEO-related action items. Turning conversations into clear plans, owners, and outcomes. Attending meetings on behalf of the CEO when appropriate and bringing back concise recommendations. Ensuring the CEO is not chasing people for updates. A key part of the role is helping ensure information from customer, partner, investor, employee, and leadership conversations reaches the right people and turns into action. This includes: Routing important information to the appropriate teams. Understanding who needs context, ownership, or follow-up. Driving accountability and ensuring next steps happen. Maintaining systems for CEO meeting notes, follow-ups, and organizational action items. Closing the loop with the CEO once actions are underway. Executive Leverage and Decision Support You will help the CEO move faster by turning complexity into clarity. Responsibilities include: Preparing briefs and meeting prep. Summarizing long documents, conversations, and threads into key takeaways. Identifying what decisions are needed and what information is missing. Bringing recommendations, not just raw information. Following up on unresolved questions and open loops. Helping the CEO stay focused on the highest-impact priorities. Anticipating Needs and Removing Friction You should constantly be thinking several steps ahead. Responsibilities include: Anticipating scheduling conflicts and operational friction. Ensuring meetings, rooms, technology, and materials are fully prepared. Coordinating prep time, travel time, logistics, and transitions. Preventing avoidable confusion, delays, or technical issues. Making the CEO’s day feel smoother, calmer, and more controlled. Travel, Events, and Logistics You will own business and personal travel planning with a high level of detail and quality. Responsibilities include: Booking travel and managing itineraries. Coordinating flights, hotels, transportation, reservations, and meeting logistics. Managing changes calmly and proactively. Supporting company events, leadership meetings, board meetings, customer meetings, and offsites. Ensuring the CEO has the right materials, timing, transportation, and context for every trip or event. Personal Administration This role includes some personal support and administration around personal calendaring and tasks where it unlocks the CEO's time. What Success Looks Like In this role, success means the CEO feels a meaningful difference in day-to-day operations. You are successful if: The CEO gets significant time back. The calendar feels intentional, not reactive. Meetings are better prepared, better followed up on, and more accountable. Important information is routed quickly and turned into action. The CEO is not chasing people for updates. Action items do not fall through the cracks. Personal administration and logistics are handled proactively. Scheduling, travel, and operational issues are anticipated before they become problems. The CEO spends more time on strategy, leadership, customers, investors, product, and family. You become trusted enough to handle more independently over time. Who You Are You are not just an administrator. You are a high-judgment operator who creates order, leverage, and momentum. You are likely a strong fit if you are: Exceptionally organized, proactive, and resourceful. Comfortable operating in a fast-moving, high-performance environment. Strong at written communication and follow-through. Calm under pressure and highly detail-oriented. Comfortable holding senior leaders accountable. Able to anticipate needs before being asked. Service-oriented but not passive. Comfortable supporting both business and personal priorities. Able to take ambiguity or messy situations and turn them into clear plans. Trusted to handle confidential information with discretion and maturity. Persistent enough to ensure outcomes happen, not just reminders. Comfortable using judgment to route information and drive action independently. Qualifications 5+ years supporting a CEO, founder, executive, or senior leader. Experience in a fast-growing or entrepreneurial environment preferred. Strong calendar, inbox, travel, and meeting management skills. Excellent written and verbal communication. High discretion handling confidential business and personal matters. Strong project tracking and follow-through ability. Comfortable using AI tools, Google Workspace, Slack, project management tools, and business systems. Experience working with executives, boards, investors, or professional service providers is an asset. Working Style This role requires deep trust with the CEO. You will need to understand how the CEO thinks, what can be delegated, what requires escalation, and how to create leverage without adding complexity. The best person for this role takes ownership, communicates clearly, follows through relentlessly, and is energized by helping a CEO and company move faster. You should be comfortable operating with significant autonomy, making judgment calls, following up with senior leaders, and solving 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 where the CEO can have the greatest impact. The right person will make the CEO, leadership team, and company more effective by creating more clarity, stronger 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. What We Offer At Knak we have four foundational pillars. Culture, customers, product and growth. Culture is our number one pillar because we know that is at the core of building a strong company that can build amazing products and delight our customers. We do this with a laser focus on hiring the right people who are smart, positive and who want more than the typical nine-to-five offers. We offer an extremely rewarding, second to none work environment as acknowledged by Ottawa’s Best Places to Work 2025 ! We show our investment in our people through our competitive salaries, equity in the company, great benefits, paid vacation, Life leave days (because life happens), team lunches and off-sites, and most importantly our commitment to YOUR career growth. If this sounds like something you’re looking for, then we’d love to hear from you! If you don’t see yourself fully reflected in every job requirement listed on the posting above, we still encourage you to reach out and apply. Research has shown that women and underrepresented groups often only apply when they feel 100% qualified. We strongly encourage applicants of all genders, ages, ethnicities, cultures, abilities, sexual orientations, and life experiences to apply. Knak believes in creating an inclusive, barrier-free working environment. If you require ANY accommodation to the interview process please contact [email protected] . At Knak, our recruitment process includes AI screening for keywords and minimum qualifications as well as v ideo interviews which are transcribed with AI. Humans are still at the core of our decision making! Click here to view the Knak Privacy Policy