What are the responsibilities and job description for the Chief of Staff position at 71 West?
Location: Boston (hybrid) | Type: Full-time | Reports to: Founders
71 West is a boutique content agency for luxury brands. We work exclusively with national and global leaders, including The Ritz-Carlton, EDITION, W Hotels, and St. Regis. No small local clients. Our work powers the world's most aspirational brands.
The company runs remote-first with high autonomy and real ownership at every level. This role is the exception: it requires Boston-based presence (hybrid) given how closely you'll work with the founders.
Be the operational backbone for two founders who generate more ideas than any human should reasonably be asked to execute, and make sure the best ones actually ship.
We have more momentum than bandwidth. Ideas, partnerships, product experiments, AI systems, content bets. They pile up faster than we can close them out.
We're hiring the person who closes them out.
You'll sit between the two of us and everything that needs to happen next. One hour you're in a strategy call with a CMO of a luxury brand. The next you're cleaning up a Notion doc, pulling the three action items out of a meeting transcript, and chasing a vendor who hasn't replied in four days. Both matter. The job is doing both well.
Make our ideas real. We'll spin up a concept on a Tuesday. By Friday you've scoped it, identified what's needed to test it, and either it's moving or it's killed with a clear reason. No idea dies in a thread on your watch.
Run the operating cadence. Weekly priorities, follow-ups, decision logs, meeting prep, meeting debriefs. You own the rhythm. We show up sharp because you made sure we would.
Be in the room. Exec meetings with CEOs, CMOs, brand directors at major luxury houses. You take notes, you spot what we missed, you follow up the same day. Over time you start running pieces of these relationships yourself.
Do the unglamorous work. Calendar triage. Inbox management. Reviewing 90-minute meeting transcripts and pulling the five things that matter. Booking travel. Cleaning up CRM data. None of this is beneath the role. It IS the role, alongside the strategic work. We do that work, so do you. If you think "Chief of Staff" means avoiding ops work, this isn't for you.
Run point on internal projects. New service lines, hiring sprints, systems builds, partnership pipelines. You'll own end-to-end execution on things that would otherwise sit in our heads for six months or be our 10th simultaneous project.
Push us. If we're dropping a ball, you tell us. If something we said two weeks ago hasn't happened, you raise it. We need someone whose job is partly to make sure WE follow through.
Who you areYou finish things. This is the single biggest filter. You have a track record, real and demonstrable, of starting things and completing them. Not 80%. Done. If you can't point to five projects you've shipped end-to-end in the last 12 months, this won't work.
You have an unbreakable internal locus of control. Nothing is "not your job." Nothing is someone else's problem to chase. If it's stuck, you unstick it.
You are a power user of LLMs. You already use Claude, ChatGPT, or Gemini daily. You build custom GPTs, you automate workflows, you know what these tools can and can't do. You don't need us to teach you prompt engineering. If we mention an AI workflow, your instinct is to go build it, not ask how.
You are 10/10 proactive. You don't wait for tasks. You hunt for them. Every week you should be surfacing 3 to 5 things we didn't ask you to look at. Opportunities, risks, processes that are broken, follow-ups we forgot. The role fails if you become reactive.
You have founder energy. You want to be in the arena, you want exposure to everything, you want to learn how a business gets built. But you're built differently than us. Where we get bored, you get focused. Where we hand things off, you pick them up. We need a complement, not a clone.This is a "wake up wanting to push the company forward" role.
You write well and think clearly. You can summarize a chaotic meeting in three bullets. You can draft an email to a CMO that sounds like us. You're allergic to fluff.
You're discreet. You'll see financials, client dynamics, partnership negotiations, and our unfiltered opinions. That stays in the room.
- Not a glorified EA role. The ops work is real, but so is the strategic surface area.
- Not a "learn by watching" role. You'll be thrown in fast.
- Not a 9-to-5. Not 80-hour weeks either. It's whatever the work requires that week.
- Not remote-first. You need to be in Boston or willing to relocate. Hybrid is fine.
- Direct access to two operators building across agency. You'll see all of it.
- A seat in rooms most people never sit in.
- A rising place at an INC 5000 fast growing company.
- Comp: $80,000 - $90,000 base performance upside.
Send to cos@71west.com:
- One paragraph: a recent project you finished that you're proud of, and why it was hard to finish.
- One paragraph: the most useful AI workflow you've built or use daily (and why it’s cool or helpful)
- One thing about 71 West (look us up) that you'd push us on.
- A link to your LinkedIn.
- A resume.
No cover letters.
Salary : $80,000 - $90,000