A founder who runs a services firm of twenty staff and bills well above seven figures often has no one whose job it is to manage their diary. They field scheduling requests directly, chase their own meeting actions, and confirm travel that should have been delegated two levels down. By the time they get to what actually needed their thinking, the morning is largely gone.
The firm grew. The infrastructure around the founder did not.
What is a right-hand person to the CEO?
A right-hand person to the CEO is a senior support role whose primary job is to protect and amplify the founder’s time. On UK job boards the title sits somewhere between a senior executive assistant and a chief of staff, handling diary management, stakeholder communication, and follow-through on key meetings, while acting as a gatekeeper for what actually gets into the founder’s day. The title varies; the function stays consistent.
Job adverts in the UK use a cluster of overlapping labels: “Executive Assistant to CEO”, “Right-Hand EA to CEO and Founder”, “EA and Strategic Right Hand”, and occasionally “Chief of Staff” for more senior variants. What they consistently describe is someone who manages a complex, constantly shifting diary; coordinates internal and external meetings, prepares agendas, and tracks what was agreed; handles domestic and international travel at short notice; and acts as a first point of contact for clients and investors, triaging what the founder sees and when.
In services firms of five to fifty staff, the role often includes a personal dimension too. Coordination of family diaries alongside business commitments, and personal travel and household bookings, appear in job specifications that are otherwise fully business-facing. For a founder whose work and personal life are closely intertwined, this is a practical feature rather than an imposition.
Why does this role matter for a growing services firm?
The founder’s time is the firm’s most expensive resource, and it is often managed least systematically. Gallup’s research on small business owners finds that many spend only around 30% of their working hours on growth activities, with the rest absorbed by operations and coordination. When that pattern takes hold, revenue tends to plateau. Usually the bottleneck is the founder’s capacity rather than market conditions.
The arithmetic for this hire is more direct than founders usually expect. If your effective hourly value to the business is around £150, and you are spending ten to fifteen hours a week on admin, coordination, and scheduling, that represents £75,000 to £117,000 of founder time each year. Senior right-hand roles in London are currently advertised at £60,000 to £70,000 for investment firm contexts and £80,000 to £100,000 for founder-led businesses at higher complexity. At those numbers, a well-executed hire can pay for itself within months, not years.
One data point worth holding: a London wellness brand only created this role after twenty years of building the business without dedicated support. The evidence from the job market suggests these hires typically happen reactively, once founders feel overwhelmed, rather than proactively before they do. The founders who move earlier tend to create more room for growth before the situation reaches a crisis.
Where will you actually find this role?
In the UK, the right-hand title now has a recognisable presence on job boards. Indeed lists over 150 “right hand to the CEO” roles in London alone, and Glassdoor shows more than 230 across the UK as of early 2026. Adverts use a cluster of overlapping titles, but they consistently describe the same function: controlling the founder’s diary and information flow, and owning the follow-through that the founder cannot chase personally.
The titles you will encounter include “Executive Assistant to CEO”, “Executive PA to CEO”, “Chief of Staff to the CEO”, and “EA and Strategic Right Hand.” What matters for hiring is the actual remit in the job specification rather than the label. The range goes from roles that are predominantly diary and inbox management with some stakeholder coordination, through to roles with genuine responsibility for business reviews, cross-team project ownership, and investor relations support.
AI fluency is now appearing explicitly in these job specifications. One London wellness brand role asks for a candidate who is “confident and forward-thinking in their use of AI”, comfortable using AI tools to improve efficiency and output. If you are writing a job specification, it is worth being clear about which tools are approved, what data the role can process through them, and what the oversight expectations are. Under UK GDPR and the Data Protection Act 2018, any processing of personal data through third-party AI tools creates data protection obligations for your business, including a controller-processor agreement with the AI provider and potentially a Data Protection Impact Assessment.
The NCSC also flags business email compromise and CEO fraud as significant threats to SMEs. A right-hand role with full access to the founder’s email, calendar, and authority to act on their behalf is a high-value target for that type of attack. Any AI or automation used in the role should sit inside your security and access-control policies from the start.
When does hiring one make sense, and when doesn’t it?
The clearest trigger is when the founder’s time has become the firm’s primary growth bottleneck. Decisions stall because no one is managing the pipeline behind them. Strategic conversations keep getting pushed because the diary fills from the wrong end. If you are regularly finishing coordination tasks in the evening to keep the next day workable, that pattern is worth quantifying before you dismiss the idea of a hire.
A useful first step is to audit two to four weeks of your calendar and inbox: total hours in meetings, hours spent on scheduling and chasing, and how often that spills into evenings and weekends. Compare that figure against your effective hourly value to the business. The arithmetic is the same one firms use to justify the hire, and it tends to be persuasive once you do it honestly.
The counterpoints are equally worth naming. The role produces little if the founder cannot genuinely delegate. Job specifications consistently describe a “high-trust” relationship and growing autonomy over time; without that, you get expensive administration rather than genuine capacity. The hire is also unlikely to help if your firm’s core processes are broken, since a right-hand amplifies the system you already have. Below five staff, shared admin support or a virtual assistant often makes more sense than a full-time senior hire.
How does this differ from a chief of staff or an operations director?
The distinction matters when you are deciding what gap you are actually trying to fill. A right-hand person, even at the senior end, is primarily an amplifier for the CEO, controlling what gets in and what gets actioned, without direct reports or P&L responsibility. A chief of staff sits higher and often has some strategic decision-making authority. An operations director takes on people management and financial accountability alongside that.
For many founders in the fifteen to fifty staff range, a strong right-hand person covers the gap before they are ready for a full chief of staff. The right-hand does not need to understand the business at a strategic level; they need to understand the founder’s patterns, priorities, and communication style well enough to act confidently on their behalf.
The useful diagnostic question is whether the problem you are solving is time management and execution, in which case a right-hand or senior EA is the right shape, or whether the problem is genuinely strategic capacity and organisational leadership, in which case you may be looking at a different hire entirely. Many founders conflate the two when what they actually need is for the tactical weight to lift first.
The practical starting point is the same one described in the job specifications: quantify your time problem first. Track two to four weeks, count the hours, put your effective rate against them, and look at what the gap costs you. If the number is significant and the appetite for delegation is genuine, the case for a right-hand person usually makes itself.
