Amanda Northcutt (00:01)
Hello, you're listening to the Level Up Creators podcast. Amanda Northcutt here, founder and CEO. Welcome to a very special series of the Level Up Creators podcast where we're featuring participants from the MRR Accelerator cohort number two. Today, I'm thrilled to welcome my very special guest, Clara Ma. Clara is the founder and CEO of Ask a Chief of Staff, the go-to resource for chiefs of staff to land high impact roles and thrive once they're in them through a... there we go.

Through a 450 member community, she and her team have supported hundreds of successful placements, helping executives hire smarter and giving chiefs of staff the tools, network and ongoing support to be wildly successful. Clara also brings a LinkedIn following of over 60,000 professionals into the conversation, making her one of the most visible voices in the space.

Previously, she was a chief of staff to the CEO of Hugging Face, helping scale the Unicorn AI startup from series A to series B and later led Ondex Chief of Staff Fellowship, growing it from 80 to over 400 members. Now through the accelerator, she's building a community powered MRR engine with massive momentum. Welcome, Clara.

Clara (01:08)
Thank you so much for having me, Amanda.

Amanda Northcutt (01:10)
It's quite a resume. I'm so excited to have this conversation with you, even more thrilled to have you in our accelerator program. We have been just absolutely honored to get to know you and your business and see your long-term vision and help you help all of the people in your network, which is massive. And your community has grown very quickly. You're pacing to hit about 600 members by the end of this year. We're recording this in August of 2025. So.

Let's peel back the curtain a little bit. How did we get here? How in the world did you come up with this idea? I'd love to hear a little bit of your career backstory and how you became an entrepreneur.

Clara (01:44)
Yeah, absolutely. Well, I always like to tell everybody that I grew up in the quote, unquote, original Silicon Valley group in the Bay Area in California. And my dad was a electrical engineer. So chip design. So really truly working with silicon chips. And so I was always surrounded by this sort of air of entrepreneurship, kind of working around people who were interested in building things themselves. My dad was in

I believe one of the earliest employees at his company and he stayed with that company for over 30 years. And so I really got to learn about his journey and kind of see him taking a risk on an early stage company and then it growing into something super successful in the future. And so always in the back of my head was this idea of entrepreneurship, even though I didn't know how I was going to get there. Eventually I started my career in recruiting.

I was recruiting software engineers and designers for early stage startups. And again, always felt like I was on the outside looking in. I was like, this is so exciting that these engineers are working on such exciting products. They get to be, you know, the 15th engineer or the 20th engineer. And they got to see this company build from the ground up. But always with that, again, window on the outside. it wasn't until I ended up joining a Bollywood dance fitness startup that I became employee number four.

And that was really my first foray into the startup world and understanding what it really takes to build a company from the ground up. Since then, I've worked at a variety of different startups. You mentioned Hugging Face. Before Hugging Face, I was at

Angel List, working on their talent team, working specifically in operations. And as I was growing my skillset, I realized I had this really wide breadth of skills that kind of cater to a bunch of different parts of the business. And I wanted to figure out how I could take that skillset to the next level. And that is how I came across the Chief of Staff role.

The Chief Staff role was an opportunity for me to step into more of a leadership position. I was in the room where decisions were being made and working alongside my CEO. And he was running every aspect of the business from product to marketing, sales, finance, HR, but he couldn't do it alone. And that's why he brought me on. There was really no task too small. And I really got to see building a company from series A through to series B.

but I always say that the Chief of Staff role was the most impactful and transformational role in my career, but also the most challenging. There's no blueprint for how to do it, especially at my company, and I realized that I needed help. And that is really kind of the inkling of what started this entire Ask a Chief of Staff journey. So I'll pause there. I know it's a lot, but want to dig into all the different parts with you.

Amanda Northcutt (04:28)
That's great. So you've wanted to be a builder and I think you've known that you are a builder for a long time. I you don't hear too many people who are ambitious enough and have the risk tolerance to go in and be that early, you know, on in the company and like really, really seek that out, much less step out and then start something on their own that many would perceive as really high risk. So let's back up a couple of steps though. When you got your first chief of staff role, did you have much of a...

understanding of what a chief of staff did at that time. I mean, I know one of the biggest things that you clarify through Ask a Chief of Staff is what the heck the role is and what it should and shouldn't be and what's okay and what's not okay. So what did you go in thinking that you were going to do in that role?

Clara (05:13)
To be completely honest, I didn't have a super clear mandate of what that role was. All I wanted to do was help the CEO. And I think that is the kind of main thing that I always hear that great chiefs of staff want to do. They want to support a principal. They want to help them focus on their zone of genius. And you'll do whatever it takes to get them there. And if there's one thing that I always want to leave behind when I talk to friends, to other colleagues, things like that is this.

feeling of helpfulness is that I want to leave them feeling like they are better off than when we first met.

And so I think I really try to embody that in my professional career as well and just really try to be helpful in whatever way possible. think that that can translate into being a builder, right? Because you're unafraid to go and do the thing to help set up whatever it is that you need to do. One story I like to tell is that in my very first role, even though I was in recruiting, I was also the youngest person at the company. So I was tasked with tech support. And so anytime we had a new employee join, I was responsible.

for getting their laptop set up with Outlook and everything that they needed. And it obviously wasn't part of my job description, but I was just happy to do it. And I think a lot of now what I do whenever I try to work with anybody in any capacity, I just try to be helpful in whatever capacity possible. So all that to say, I didn't really know what a chief of staff did. I just knew it was a step up from my of broad operations role.

Of course, I'd watched the West Wing, so I was kind of aware of what the political chief of staff did. And so I kind of took a little bit of that persona and then tried to translate it over into this tech startup world that I was now in.

Amanda Northcutt (06:55)
Amazing. Okay. The phrase that Mr. Rogers says comes to mind here. Look for the helpers. So you're a helper and a builder. That's a, that's a lot of like special sauce. And that's a very interesting, probably on point description of, you know, archetypical chief of staff. Like you're going to be, you're more likely to be successful if that's kind of like the, the ethos that you're bringing to the role. Is that correct?

Clara (07:01)
⁓

Yeah, absolutely. always tell people chief of staff is more of a mentality than it is a specific skill set. You so many people ask me now that the chief of staff role has become wildly popular in so many different capacities and settings like, what should I do? Should I get an MBA? Should I become a management consultant? Should I take this intense Excel sequel course to really up my skill set in order to become a chief of staff? And I always tell them, of course, if you want to go.

and learn those things if you want to get an MBA. I'm never going to discourage you from doing that. But ultimately, it's not about kind of all those skill sets that you have on your resume. Ultimately, it's about this framework and mindset that you have that you want to go and support a principal. You want to be that right-hand person. And that can look so different across so many different companies.

where I was at a Series A, it was all about setting up the foundational work for our company to be able to then scale to our Series B and beyond. So one particular story that comes to mind is that day two of my role as a chief of staff is that one of our employees came up to us and said, hey, my wife had a baby last week. What's our parental leave policy? And I just kind of stared back at him and I was like, I don't know, but give me 48 hours and I'm gonna figure it out. I'm gonna instill something here that hopefully is going to set up.

Amanda Northcutt (08:30)
Bye.

Clara (08:31)
what's to come in the future. I'm not saying that this is going to be the perfect thing for us, but it's at least going to get us off on the right foot, right? And those things I would never have had on my resume. You know, this is not, I'm not in HR, I'm not in people, but this is just something that got thrown on my plate and there's no way I could have anticipated that. So there's a bit of this kind of rolling with the punches mindset that you need, you know, no task too small. You're just there to step in wherever somebody needs you. And that is what's going to make a really successful chief of staff.

Amanda Northcutt (09:01)
That is so interesting. So Swiss Army Knife, problem solver, growth mindset, helper, builder. Sounds like there's some humility involved there. said no task too small. And so like being willing to step up to the plate and do whatever is required. Wow. And then, yeah, very, a different type of Swiss Army Knife depending on the executive or the principal that you're going to work for. And that must be a very interesting matchmaking process. And I know that you...

Clara (09:15)
Mm-hmm.

Amanda Northcutt (09:30)
have a background in recruiting, obviously, and then we've got the Ask a Chief of Staff community, and then you also have a recruiting arm. So you kind of have some ecosystem ownership going on this Ask a Chief of Staff space. So tell me a little bit about how your experience as a recruiter has played into your ability to spin off this like recruiting arm of Ask a Chief of Staff and tell me a little bit about your process, because that matchmaking sounds very difficult.

Clara (09:54)
Yeah, I always like to liken recruiting in general to matchmaking, like dating. Everybody is looking for someone, but the person that you look for and the person that I look for could be very different. And I think when it comes to the chief of staff and principal dynamic, it's even more so because this is such a personal relationship that's so different than any other kind of manager direct report that you're going to see within any sort of company. So even though I started my

career off in recruiting, is a very different kind of matching process. Of course, there are things that I've learned about reading resumes and kind of understanding the tech landscape, if you will, that are still relevant here. But every Chief of Staff search we run is so personalized to the principle that we're working with. And so sometimes it can feel like we're running 20 different searches that are all vastly different from each other, which is what makes it fun, but can also make it challenging because everybody comes from a such a different background.

So what we really look for is kind of working style and understanding what the principle really needs. We look at, know, are they looking for a force multiplier? So kind of a body double, somebody who can step in for them in the room, or are they looking for more of a compliment? There are certain things that they're less interested in doing, or maybe it's not the best use of their time. And so they're looking for that missing puzzle piece so that they can kind of help even out and balance out their skill set overall. Usually it's a combination of the two, whether it's 80, 20, or 60, 40 of

of the force multiplier versus the complement, but we're trying to get a gauge of how much of each of those skill sets that they're looking for so that we can find them the right person.

Amanda Northcutt (11:29)
Hmm, that makes a lot of sense, but that does sound like totally atypical. mean, it's not just like placing a salesperson at a SaaS company, right? This is very, very specialized, hyper-personalized and not that many people do this. So it's really helpful that you've amassed this massive community around you you have a big LinkedIn following and a big microphone basically. Tell me a little bit more about the beginning of Ask A Chief of Staff and at what point did you feel

Clara (11:47)
Mm-hmm.

Amanda Northcutt (11:56)
comfortable kind of going out on your own and feeling like okay, this is a risk that I'm up for taking.

Clara (12:02)
Yeah, I always tell people I kind of stumbled into entrepreneurship. Yes, I always had a dream that I would get to work for myself, but I really didn't feel like I had any big ideas. And I think, again, it was because I grew up in Silicon Valley, I felt like in order to start a company, you had to have a billion dollar idea. That every single time that you went into entrepreneurship, you had to have this idea that was going to serve the masses.

I really just felt like, I don't have any of those. I don't have the next Uber for XYZ or the Netflix of whatever else it was. And so my journey into entrepreneurship really started from burnout, which I know sounds maybe counterintuitive to a lot of folks because, you know, working as an entrepreneur, you're probably working many hours, but, know, I'm sure Amanda, you can speak to this as well. There's a difference between, you know, working for yourself and working for somebody else and the kind of time and energy that you put in. So.

Amanda Northcutt (12:39)
Mm-hmm.

Clara (12:52)
I'll take you back to June of 2022. I was just kind of coming off my time at OnDeck and I knew I was burned out and I knew that whenever my journey with OnDeck ended, I was going to take some time for myself. I just knew that, you know, I'd been working in startups for almost a decade at that point, maybe a little bit more. And I knew that I had been kind of putting my nose to the grindstone so long that it felt like, you know, I didn't, couldn't even like see the forest for the trees anymore.

So I had made this promise to myself that when my journey at On Deck ended, I would take a couple of months for myself to just try to reset and figure out where I wanted to take my career next and kind of that next chapter and then figure it out and hopefully then apply to the kinds of roles that I would be interested in. So gave myself, you know, kind of three months of runway to figure that out. I did a lot of travel during that time, was walking around specifically Spain. And I will say that

Having no Wi-Fi on planes, I think, is the best time to do some very emotional processing. You know, get nothing else to distract you other than your own thoughts. And then, I guess, an added, I don't know if this is considered a cherry on top, but as I landed in Spain two days later, the person that I was dating broke up with me. And so not only was I going through, you know, a career transition at the time,

But let me tell you, tapas for one is one of the saddest things that you can experience, but it's also, you know, a character building moment. you know, that was kind of the start of my, let's call it mini sabbatical. And I did find that I discovered a lot of myself in that time, kind of rediscovered, if you will. It's all these things that I forgot that I enjoy doing because I was so close to work, you know, just being able to walk around to different museums and just take in scenery and...

Amanda Northcutt (14:17)
Clara.

Clara (14:38)
explore a new country, learn a new language, all of these different things that I had kind of stopped myself from doing just because I was so focused on my career. And I find that during that time I just kept coming back to Chief of Staff stuff. Like I know it may sound silly or cliche or weird, but I just had this feeling that my work in the space just wasn't quite done yet and I wanted to continue to support these folks because

Chief of Staff had supported me so much in my early Chief of Staff journey. And I knew that there was better resources that could be provided for this group of people. So when I first started Ask a Chief of Staff, I was really trying to extend my own runway. I had traveled for three months. It was now October. I was like, I'm having such a great time. I'm not ready to go back to a full-time nine to five. What can I do so that I can keep traveling for the end?

till the end of the year, and then come the new year, that's when I'll start applying for jobs. People are gonna stop hiring anyway, which is the true irony of the situation because then I was like, you what I'm gonna do? I'm gonna recruit for chiefs of staff. I'm going to find people for these chief of staff roles and just try to extend my personal runway a little bit. So I reached out on LinkedIn. I think I did one post that said something like, if you're a CEO and you're looking for a chief of staff, talk to me. I'd love to find you this person.

I kind of gathered a spreadsheet full of maybe five or six different principals who were looking for Chiefs of Staff from seed stage all the way to Series C. And I was like, look, if I can make one placement by the end of the year, I can kind of extend my vacation travel capital for another three months. And then, you know, who knows? Lo and behold, I make three placements by the end of the year. I was like, what is happening? I didn't.

Amanda Northcutt (16:21)
Hahaha

Clara (16:24)
You know, my own biases were like, the holidays are going to slow down hiring. Absolutely not. People need to the staff and they need them three months ago. And I was like, you know what? I think this could be a business. I think this is the pathway for me to work for myself. you know, incorporate the business just so I could protect myself, make sure that, you know, my business money was separate from my personal money, make sure I wasn't liable for anything there. And so...

From there, I figured, okay, I think this recruiting thing actually has some legs. People need this, people want it, and I have so many people coming to me wanting to become a chief of staff, and now I have these roles that I can place them in. I think that this might be my path forward and my step into entrepreneurship.

Amanda Northcutt (17:06)
Wow. Okay, one thing I want to point out here, because we talk, I guess I talk a lot in my content about kind of like guru bullshit marketing around, create a course, create a course, create a course and sell it for $99 or 129 or whatever the case may be. Okay, so you have a community that is lower ticket, but you started with really high ticket. So I think that's really, really important because placing placement fees are two thumbs up. They're high ticket. This is a high ticket service.

Clara (17:20)
Mm-hmm.

Amanda Northcutt (17:34)
So you started with that, you got some cash runaway under your belt and then you worked on the lower ticket offering that is now scaling quite quickly and you're doing very well with it. But tell me about your thought process around getting the money piece taken care of first. You felt like, think you identified this as like your highest leverage potential opportunity to get money in the bank on your own schedule. So I guess, yeah, take us back to just kind of your thought process around that and then the progression to the community and then the...

Clara (17:53)
Mm-hmm.

Amanda Northcutt (18:01)
massive, you you've achieved massive lift off with the community.

Clara (18:04)
Yeah, absolutely. So like I said, we started off as recruiting and I really enjoyed doing it. You know, it's still something that I'm very involved with today and I love talking to CEOs, understanding what it is that they need. The kind of very natural follow up after you place somebody is twofold. The CEO then asks you,

how can I get my chief of staff up to speed? Are there any resources? Are there any onboarding? Is there something like a course that my chief of staff should go through so that I can really make sure they are getting onboarded as quickly as possible? And then the unspoken part for I think what many chiefs of staff experience, which is something I went through as well, was like, I don't know if I'm doing a good job. This is not a typical role where you have the same kind of metrics or sales quotas or kind of.

metrics that you can measure your role by and so there's a lot of kind of figuring it out on the fly and trying to figure out, okay, I think I'm doing a good enough job. My CEO seems happy, you they seem like they're working on the things that they want to work on, but it's sometimes a little bit hard to quantify. And so I just I kept hearing these things. I was doing a lot of career chats with chiefs staff as well, you know.

folks reaching out to me on LinkedIn, just asking, hey, can I get 30 minutes of your time? I would love to like talk you through what it is that I'm working on. Is it right? Is it wrong? And I had actually done probably a hundred of these kinds of calls myself when I was a chief of staff. You I started in February of 2020. And so I was in office with my CEO for just a month before we became fully remote. And so I lost a lot of that FaceTime that I thought I was going to get. So I kind of took it upon myself to reach out to chiefs of staff on LinkedIn to

Amanda Northcutt (19:25)
Wow.

Clara (19:39)
through virtual coffee chats and understand how they were approaching their roles and trying to translate that back to myself. So I was happy to pay it forward in that way, but I also knew I'm just one person and I'm just one perspective. I don't know everything about being a Chief of Staff. I have this very specific experience going from series A to series B. And so...

One motto that I often like to say in our community is that nobody knows everything, but everybody knows something. And that really became the ethos of what became our community was that I was listening to folks who are in the space, who are chiefs of staff. They were really looking for somewhere that they could learn from each other, share best practices. And we were well positioned to create something like that because we had a big following on LinkedIn already. And I wanted to be able to provide more personal rights.

personalized resources. I wanted to be able to create workshops for these folks. so creating the community was a very natural next step and kind of an interlocking puzzle piece to the recruiting side of the business that we had already built out.

Amanda Northcutt (20:41)
That's incredible. And I just love, I love your MO. I love your approach to business and your business is just all about helping people. That's it. You're helping so many people and you figure out how to create leverage so that you can do that at scale and infinitely really. And that's a really special and unique thing. Not that many people approach business with that level of altruism and you're just constantly like sending the elevator back down, pulling people up the ladder, whatever analogy you want to use.

So I think there's something very special and unique in the culture that you've built around Ask a Chief of Staff. And my goodness, you guys are responsible for hundreds and hundreds of job placements at this point. And that's got to feel really, really, really good because the last couple of years in the economy haven't exactly been smooth sailing. so tell me about kind of like your personal satisfaction, you as you have stepped into this role of principal as founder and CEO and knowing that you're responsible for

hundreds of jobs and you are helping people be successful and yeah, what's that like?

Clara (21:43)
I mean, it's really incredible feeling. Just last week, have, I do community calls, right, with our members and anybody is always welcome to schedule time with me just to chat through, you know, anything they're going through, challenges, personal, professional, whatever it is. And just last week, one of our members got on the call with me, I was fully expecting them to have, you know, some talents that they were going through with their job search or whatever it is, and they just opened the call with I have great news and I

couldn't, I couldn't, I was like, tell me, like, I was like, what happened? And they said, I followed your advice. I've been posting on LinkedIn. We can talk about LinkedIn and all its merits and things like that. And he said, I'm pretty sure that I was applying for this role. And the reason the recruiter even reached out to me is because I followed your advice and I posted on LinkedIn and I posted about something that I learned about being a Chief of Staff. And it's stories like that that I think bring me the most

enthusiasm, kind of energy to continue to move forward and build what we are building because yes, we do placements. Yes, we put people in roles, but we also are able to influence people to take a new perspective on their own careers and take those journeys into their own control. And, you you talk about helpers and helping people.

And I think that there are not enough spaces in the world where we help the helpers. I know that sounds very kind of convoluted and circular, but you know, there are so many people and I think chiefs of staff in themselves are such servant leaders. They are so willing to help others that sometimes they forget how to help themselves and to be able to create a community space where we are able to help the helpers just truly brings me so much joy and so much energy into going to build this business every day.

Amanda Northcutt (23:27)
Yeah. Okay. You're putting a lot of good out into the world and you're really setting the tone for this entire industry. You're building the whole industry. mean, you are the trendsetter here, Clara, for this entire niche. And people have taken notice, right? You have received many awards. You're doing many speaking gigs, traveling all over the place to speak and share about what you're doing and the value that chiefs of staffs

You speak to PE firms, you speak to VCs, and you're also a Tori Birch Fellow this year, which huge congratulations again on that. That's a big award. So tell us a little bit more about things going over on the side here, the PR piece and speaking engagements and how that's contributing to the Ask a Chief of Staff business.

Clara (24:02)
Thank you.

Yeah, I would say that marketing is marketing. It's always good to get more eyes on your business and get more folks who are interested in this space as well. I think one thing that we really hit well with the, let's call it founding of Ask a Chief of Staff is that the Chief of Staff role has been growing in popularity and I would say in kind of prominence over the last five to seven years. I mean, when I was a Chief of Staff in 2020,

Nobody else I knew was a Chief of Staff. I had to really try to explain to people over and over again what I did as my job. And nowadays, you you walk into a room and you tell people you're a Chief of Staff, there's at least kind of more of an understanding. Maybe they don't know the nuances, but they've at least heard of the title in the corporate world nowadays. So all that to say, I think that we had a twofold opportunity. One, obviously, to build a business around the Chief of Staff space, but also

continue to provide education on what the chief of staff role is. There's still a lot of ambiguity around the role. There's still a lot of clarification that we try to provide. And so when we are able to do speaking engagements, when we are able to publish in Fast Company earlier this year, we're able to help spread more knowledge and education about the chief of staff role and help.

employers like CEOs, other companies make better hiring decisions overall. So it's an entire ecosystem that we're really trying to fulfill here. You know, we do our part through recruiting and the community, but when we're able to speak with VCs, when we're able to help amplify the voices within our community through different publications,

that really helps to bring even more light to the chief of staff role. you know, our thesis is that every single executive could use a chief of staff. So in order for us to get to that point in the world, every executive has to know more about the chief of staff role.

Amanda Northcutt (26:06)
Yes. Well, you're the right person for the job and people walk into a room and know what a chief of staff is now because of you. ⁓ I mean, the West Wing too, that was obviously very helpful. It's also really unusual. feel like, I mean, the chief of staffing, this came from the political world, right? That seems like a very unusual, normally it goes the other way, right? Like the business, the politicians will take things from the business world and that's great, but it's a very interesting transition. Who was the first chief of staff in the business world? Do you know?

Clara (26:12)
you ⁓

Mm-hmm.

I don't know if I can name one specific person. I can probably name a couple of big names that are out there. But I think what this role has always been, it's always been there, right? And it's always been this kind of glue slash helper role. Even when I was in recruiting my very first job, but I was doing tech support, that kind of person has always existed. This kind of like persona of person who is willing to fill in the gaps, who is kind of

moving throughout the organization and just kind of helping throughout different parts and different initiatives. And so I think that the Chief of Staff role is more of a, the title itself, let's call it, is more of a symptom of trying to name these people. Like these people have always existed. They've always done some variation of this job. And I can't tell you how many Chiefs of Staff I've spoken to who...

they say, well, I mean, I just took the Chief of Staff title because it finally felt like it described what I was doing for my company. I was always in like operations or like first business hire or strategy kind of as like an overarching bucket, but it didn't really truly encapsulate all of the different things that they were doing. And then especially when you add on this principal aspect of it, you you're really supporting this one person at the top of the company.

Chief of Staff became a better moniker for this type of person, as opposed to a lot of the different creative titles that I'm sure many of us have taken on in our roles. So while I would say, yes, the Chief of Staff role has existed in politics, in government, in military, for a very, very long time, there are definitely differences in the role when it has now ported over to the corporate world. And I would say it's more so

a kind of understanding of titled change now that people have embraced a lot more.

Amanda Northcutt (28:22)
Interesting. Thank you. One thing I really appreciate about you as a founder and CEO, having come off of burnout from being in the startup world for over a decade, is your commitment to lifestyle architecture. at Level Up, we're really big on four things in particular, and those are building business toward the end of generational wealth, lifestyle architecture, legacy, and impact. And from our first conversation, you made it very clear that your lifestyle considerations were non-negotiable and really important.

So how have you built your business as a very successful founder and CEO around your lifestyle and how have you avoided burnout in your very high growth business?

Clara (29:02)
Yeah, so I would say that, you know, when I had my time off and I took that kind of mini sabbatical, let's call it, the thing that I valued the most during that time was having control of every single hour of my day. And I had not had that kind of freedom. think like, gosh, since I was maybe five years old, you know, you have school, you know, you have after school activities, like you really once you start going to school, you kind of lose.

Amanda Northcutt (29:21)
Yeah.

Clara (29:27)
that freedom of time. And it's not a bad thing necessarily. I think we should have structure in our lives. But at the same time, you you forget what you would do if you were truly in control of all 24 hours of your life. So I realized how much that helped shape me, right? Having that much control over your time, you're able to indulge in the hobbies that you like more, read more books, watch more television, you know, walk around and just, you know, not have a

Every single minute of your day scheduled and so when I started my business and I was kind of really starting to say okay This thing is a real business now. I'm going to start hiring people I'm gonna start putting you know my 40 hours a week into this full time How can I still maintain that sense of freedom or that sense of? Control over my time and not give that up and so a couple of things I did very early on was I actually created two no meeting days for myself

So I know very typical for a lot of companies to have one no meeting day for me, was like, I'm gonna go to, you know, why not? This is my company, I can do whatever I want, right? And then also very early on, I tried to figure out where I could automate and delegate as quickly as possible. So while I wasn't looking for full-time hires in the very beginning of my business, I did hire on a no code automation expert who I'd worked with in the past to start automating the things that I found myself doing more than five times a week.

Amanda Northcutt (30:27)
That's right, yes.

Clara (30:47)
anything that was past that threshold, was like, okay, let's build a system around it. It doesn't have to be beautiful. It doesn't have to be completely perfect. But if I can at least automate some parts of our business early on, that's going to set me up to then start to explore other things. And I think very clearly without that automation process in the first six months, I would not have been able to start the community portion of our business so quickly after incorporating the recruiting side. So

First and foremost, I was looking at automation. within, I would say, less than six months of starting my business as well, I hired on an incredible EA. know, somebody who could help me with the backend admin parts of my work. I still travel a lot. I do still love traveling. And so things like Calendly were not a great solution for me because my time zones changed every other week. And so I know I needed somebody who to come in to like do scheduling things for me, but also help me with

you know, my inbox management, Cal rendering, there are parts of our business that couldn't quite be automated yet that were still a little bit manual and I could delegate all of those things to her. So I know that a lot of people start their businesses and they're like, I'm going to grind for the first year and I'm really going to just like do everything myself. And I think there is merit to understanding every single part of your business, of course, but I do think that most people wait too long to start to hire help or delegate or automate and

That was something that I was very aware of day one in order to keep as much time for myself.

Amanda Northcutt (32:15)
Nice. Would you be willing to share maybe top three automations, time-saving automations in the beginning?

Clara (32:22)
Yeah, I would say we built out a pretty, I would say call it a basic ATS, if you will, of all the candidates that we had coming in for the different roles that we were hiring for. You know, I am a big believer of letting people know that you are not a fit for a job or, you know, getting some sort of response when you apply to something. But I could not write, you know, X number of emails to.

let people know that we are no longer considering them. So building out that automation through we use Airtable on our backend to do that was one of the biggest automations we built out first and foremost. We did a lot of Slack connections as well, right? Just connecting, for example, Stripe to Slack to make sure that we were getting notifications of payments and things that were coming in so that we could track everything relatively quickly. And then I would say the last one...

is probably also around Airtable and just being able to sort and manage and know when the last time we contacted one of our clients was so that we could stay on top of it and I wasn't doing a manual search every time like, when did I last contact this person? Do we need to check in with them? When was the last time we submit candidates and things like that?

Amanda Northcutt (33:35)
Nice, okay, thank you. All right, well let's talk about, you and I started talking, I guess back in March, March or April of this year, and you're in the May 2025 cohort here. What led you to the accelerator?

Clara (33:45)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah, I would definitely say that, you know, our business has been growing over the last two and a half years. Gosh, I can't believe we're coming up on three years this year. And a lot of it has been through kind of intuition and like gut feeling of like the experiences that I've gone through. Right. I've been at startups, I've kind of seen foundational parts of businesses being built. I've followed a lot of creators and entrepreneurs online. And so I felt like

foundationally I had a pretty good sense of what I needed to do to get our business to the next level. And I would also say in your first year or two of business, a lot of it is just grit and time, right? It's just like, how hard are you willing to work? How much are you willing to put yourself out there to find the clients, to recruit the people for our community, whatever that is. And, you know, one thing that Amanda and I know you and I have talked about is that like I...

will outwork everybody under the table. Like that is something that my immigrant's parents have instilled in me from an early age. And they're like, if you just put enough elbow grease, like you can get out ahead, right? Like, yes, talent is something, but like hard work outweighs talent any time of day. I figured, look, I wanna, you know, maintain the kind of schedule that I've built for myself. But like, if I work really hard in the hours that I put in and just like make sure I optimize every single minute and delegate,

Amanda Northcutt (35:01)
Mm-hmm.

Clara (35:13)
our business is going to get to a good place. And it did. It definitely did. It grew to, you know, with 400 plus members. We've made, you know, 20, 30 placements in the last two years that we've been around. We've influenced, you know, hundreds of other Chiefs of Staff in their communities and roles and things like that. But I was hitting a kind of tipping point of like, okay, I'm not sure what else I can do. I don't know what levers I can pull now in order to get our business to the next level. And while I'm not looking to build a billion dollar

business, I would love to be a million, multimillion dollar business. And I knew that just scaling myself was no longer the answer. I couldn't just like put in more hours and expect output. We needed to think about other forms of revenue. We need to think about scale and all of those types of things. And that's where I felt like I really could use some additional help. I didn't think this was going to be a one person hire. didn't think that this was like one person who'd come in to give us a growth plan, but really was a

looking for a partner to help us holistically look at the business and figure out what we could do better overall so that we could take our business to the next level. And so I think I came across the accelerator through a newsletter that I follow and I was very interested because of the guarantee of the multiple of the MRR that was guaranteed.

And so I figured, know, let me have a conversation. Let me see if this is where we might want to go, you know, evaluating a couple other entrepreneurial groups, courses, that kind of stuff. And was really looking for essentially a thought partner in how to build the business to the next level.

Amanda Northcutt (36:50)
What feels like the craziest part of the accelerator?

Clara (36:52)
Gosh, the craziest part I think is that I was expecting to spend a lot more time, like I was fully invested. was like, look, I'm going to put in every single hour that I need here to make sure that I get the most out of it and that we're doing everything. But honestly, it's been very manageable. It's been very kind of piece by piece, brick by brick in a way that feels very intuitive. It doesn't feel like, why are we doing this thing? And why is it completely out of, you know, the kind of scope of what it is that we're trying to accomplish here? I'd say like,

just in terms of time spent, it feels like time well spent and it also doesn't feel like it's so additive to the number of hours that I need to work and it's taking away from, again, what my kind of ideal lifestyle scheduling looks like. And then I would say kind of responsiveness has just been incredible, is that any time I have any sort of proposal or idea, you know, I'm able to kind of drop it into our Slack channel and...

there's always somebody who's on the other side ready to give me input or another opinion or even put together a deck so that we can continue to move the business forward.

Amanda Northcutt (37:56)
Yeah, well, thank you. And I think that's a really important piece of this that no one's ever given me that exact answer before. So that was really that's interesting for me to kind of contemplate. But, you know, everybody's eager to make money, more money as quickly as possible. And, you know, we guarantee crazy outcomes in a seven month period. it's like, man, I can't.

Clara (37:57)
you

Amanda Northcutt (38:14)
can't get us there any faster than that. If I could, the accelerator would be shorter and I would be doing some kind of like black magic behind the scenes. Like I don't know how to do this any faster than we're already doing it. Cause it's a, you know, business building is a Herculean effort. It's a huge lift as you're saying. And I totally agree with that work ethic situation and just being able to work anybody under the table and that, that work ethic and dedication to problem solving and having a growth mindset wins every time.

every time over talent and brilliance. If you're willing to keep your nose to the grindstone and go for it, then you can do pretty amazing things. But anyways, back to, we wanna make money as quickly as possible. And we also have this MRR method, right? This process that is this A to Z process that is linear. is like Legos. It's very modular and additive and peeling the layer of the onion. But.

we are also your team of advisors and we're your full fractional team. I mean, the accelerator, we're installing a full fractional team into your business. We get to know you very, very quickly. You we start with an audit and then the next deliverable is where you want to be in five to 10 years. And then we're trying to bridge that gap as quickly as possible throughout the entire seven months period. But everybody's got, you know, deal flow and proposals and opportunities and speaking engagements they want to apply for have been offered or book deals or like there's all manner of stuff going on because we can't just pause live.

and build our business the exact perfect way that we want to. And so we kind of think of the accelerator in these two like parallel tracks. We're doing the MRR method. We're doing the Lego brick modular linear process, but then there's stuff flying at us all the time. And so yeah, having that thought partnership and someone who's in your corner and, you know, team of advisors and team of people who can execute, you know, work ad hoc on, you know, pretty quick turnaround. That is a really interesting thing that

I think more and more of our accelerator clients are identifying as an area of importance. And that's been like a big difference maker is just the advisory piece of that. So, I mean, tell me about that a little bit more from your experience and being a founder and CEO, you don't have a board, obviously, you don't have advisory board or anything like that. And so what does that felt like to go from the buck? mean, the buck still does stop with you ultimately at your business, but having someone in a team that you can kind of like.

Clara (40:10)
Mm-hmm.

Amanda Northcutt (40:28)
lean on? How does that change your experience as a CEO?

Clara (40:33)
Yeah, I would say that, you know, I'm sure many CEOs say this, like being a CEO is lonely, right? Especially when you are like a solo preneur or, you know, for me, I don't have anybody in my immediate family who is also a business owner or has started their own business before. So there's not a ton of people that I can talk to about what it's like to build a business. And even though I'm sometimes like bringing certain things that I'm like thinking about to people, they don't have the entire context to help.

give me some sort of solution or like advice. Like a lot of the time I'm going to my friends for more like emotional support than like true business support, which is also important, but sometimes like is not what I need at any given time. having the accelerator, think the thing that I like best is that while you function as consultants, right, you're giving me suggestions on things to do, you're also delivering on a lot of the work too. Like I have worked with consultants in the past, right? I know consultants and they're like, Hey, here's like our proposed

solution for you, like you go and figure out how to do this and like it's up to you whether or not you decide you want to do this. with the accelerator, you're actually kind of coming to the table with deliverables, you're actually helping me work through certain things and providing actual outcomes and execution. And so it's really kind of that combination of both strategy and execution that really appealed to me. And I would say like,

in some ways it feels sort of like I have a chief of staff to myself, which is always the biggest question I get for myself is like, when are you gonna hire a chief of staff? And I'm like, well, you know, it is something that I would consider, but you know, the kind of scope of work that I'm looking for right now is kind of wildly varied and I want to have more foundational pieces in mind or at the bottom first before I make that potentially very crucial hire. So that's what I would say has been.

really helpful for me and why I ultimately decided to go with Accelerator program is that I knew that even while we go through this, your business is still running, right? Your business is still functioning. There's like still all the things that you are doing day to day and hopefully new opportunities coming in too. kind of being able to build the foundational playbook and audit and all of that in the background while helping me with the challenges that I'm currently facing has been a really good balance.

Amanda Northcutt (42:46)
Nice, thanks. And you said you were considering other courses, programs, maybe coaches as you were evaluating your next moves here back in Q1, Q2. What ultimately made your decision, how did you ultimately make the decision to go with the accelerator over and above other things? And there's no doubt that we were the most expensive of the options you were considering, right? Yeah.

Clara (42:52)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah, absolutely.

Like I said, it's the guarantee, right? think like any other program that I was considering or even like a business coach, for example, there was not necessarily like a tangible outcome or deliverable that they could give me at the end of the day. I know that many people have business coaches and they've found them very helpful and very, very effective.

But I needed somebody who was going to come in and do the work with me as well. It's like somebody who is going to help me write the playbook or help me. You know, one of the things that we did very early on was I needed to hire another team member and you were willing to.

to help me create like an SOP doc and help me with the final round interviews and things like that. So not only was I looking for somebody who was gonna give me kind of business sense and strategy, but I was also looking for kind of like a teammate, if you will. And with the accelerator, like you said, I get a whole fractional team. get like a CTO and a COO and a strategist and a consultant and a writer and like all of these different things that individually hiring, excuse me.

individually hiring for would have taken me well over a year. Not to mention that I don't have full-time work for each of these individual functions, but I do have a lot of part-time piecemeal work that all of them need to do together.

Amanda Northcutt (44:27)
Cool, awesome. And then what would you tell someone who's considering joining the accelerator? What's advice for them?

Clara (44:34)
Yeah, my advice for them would be, you know, get ready to invest both in yourself and in the accelerator. With anything, this goes for the community that we've built as well. People always ask me, how do you get the most out of this? And I say, the amount of time that you put in is the amount of stuff you will get back, right? If you just sit and you don't do any of the work and you don't read the things that you're supposed to read, and you just show up to the meeting every week, you're probably not going to get a lot of results. And that's purely on you.

And so I, you know, made a commitment to myself that I would spend the three to five hours or whatever I needed depending on the week to make sure that I completed all of the things that I needed to do and check off all the things that I need to provide so that you have enough context and the accelerator folks have enough context to actually deliver, you know, whether that's

And one thing that I think is really great is that you're open to a written slack or you're open to an audio note. Sometimes I need to do like an audio ramble for you and you're all very receptive to all those different inputs. And so as much context and as much information you can give to the accelerator folks, the better they are going to be able to help you get your business to where you want it to be. I think a lot of entrepreneurs can be cagey sometimes about what it is that's going on or maybe they're

afraid to share some things that aren't going super well within their business. But Amanda and her team are here to help you. And so if you don't give them all the information they need, then they cannot come up with solutions for you. So make sure you're investing the time. I feel like time is a very constant thread throughout our conversation today. It's truly, I think, like it's a...

Amanda Northcutt (46:05)
You

Clara (46:10)
what I call a non-renewable resource, right? Like you cannot get more of it. There is a very finite amount and we don't even know how much we have of it. know, as woo-woo as that sounds, like we don't know when our time here is going to end. so, you know, making sure that you are being the most efficient and the most, I guess, you're using your time in the way that you want. And so if you're going to invest in this accelerator, invest the time you need in order to get to the outcomes that you want.

Amanda Northcutt (46:38)
Thank you. Well said. I strongly agree. Okay, last accelerator question. What is the experience of the cohorts been like? Because it's not just you and me and my team. It's you and me and my team and your cohort members. How do you like the cohort model?

Clara (46:48)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah, I love the cohort model. mean, like I said, I'm big into building community. So I think it only makes sense that I'm always here for a cohort. I'm here for a community. I think it's super important to have other people who are going through what it is that you're going through so that you can share both the wins and the challenges. And so one thing that I really appreciated is that

I think you are very intentional about who you bring to the cohort so that we can be synergistic in some sense. I'm always a little bit wary. I've joined other entrepreneurial groups before, and sometimes there can feel like there's a sense of competition, especially if your businesses are in similar spaces or you're going after the same audience or whatever it is. I feel very fortunate that our business is quite niche.

for example, and on the other entrepreneur group I'm in, there's like 15 accountants and they're all trying to vie for the same kind of accounting business, right? So what I appreciate about the accelerator is that you keep the cohorts small so that obviously you can focus on each of us individually, but you also pair us together with folks where our

skill sets and also our businesses might work together synergistically as well. I know that you've already connected me with a couple of folks from Cohort One and we've been discussing, you know, different ways we can collaborate and work together. And that I think is a really

undersold opportunity within the accelerator as well is just like, like not only are you going through this with somebody else, but you can also partner up with them. And you can both get to your MRO goals together through different collaborations or partnerships or whatever that is. So I've also had the chance to meet one of my cohort members in person that was so wonderful and lovely to just like have another friend in the business building space. And even though we

Amanda Northcutt (48:27)
Yeah.

Clara (48:32)
come from completely different backgrounds and different businesses, it was still really lovely to get to say hi to them and just talk through how their accelerator experience is going and what are the things that we're both doing and what are the things that we're not doing and offer suggestions on that part too.

Amanda Northcutt (48:48)
Yeah, I'm so jealous that you got to meet Amber. So jealous you guys got to spend time together. I met Eduardo back in April and then John is going to meet us in Cleveland in a couple of weeks at a conference my team's attending and I'm speaking at, but yeah, we've got to find a way to meet Clara.

Clara (49:03)
Yeah, definitely,

definitely.

Amanda Northcutt (49:06)
All right, well, I super appreciate your time today. I would love just a quick parting shot for you on kind of the future of Ask a Chief of Staff. You know, where are you taking this Titanic?

Clara (49:15)
Yeah, so Ask a Chief of Staff, we want to be the premier go-to resource for all things Chief of Staff related. So my dream and our North Star is that whenever anybody thinks of a Chief of Staff, they think of Ask a Chief of Staff. Whether you're hiring for a Chief of Staff, whether you are Chief of Staff, whether you want to become a Chief of Staff, or just anything Chief of Staff related, you know to come to us. So that's what we're working towards. If you know anybody that fits in those three buckets, please send them our way.

Check us out at [askachiefofstaff.com](http://askachiefofstaff.com/) and we're so excited to continue building this journey.

Amanda Northcutt (49:47)
Lovely. Thank you so much. I really appreciate the time together, Clara. Thank you. And thank you to our listeners. We know that time is precious and we appreciate you sharing yours with us. If you're a subject matter expert looking to build a fully customized business in a box with a five figure MRR guarantee, head over to [MRRAccelerator.com](http://mrraccelerator.com/) to learn more. Thank you and we'll see you next time on the Level Up Creators podcast.