The first ninety days framework was never built for the Chief of Staff role. It was imported from general executive onboarding advice and applied to a job that operates on completely different terms.
The CoS role takes a full year to inhabit well, and often closer to eighteen months to do with real authority. The reason isn't capability. It's that trust, influence, and strategic standing are things you build, not things you're given. They accumulate through consistency, transparency, and clear communication over time.
That process has a methodology. Most first-year CoS professionals are left to discover it the hard way. This engagement exists so you don't have to.
This is the organizing structure the entire engagement is built around. Until you understand all three, and how to operate across them simultaneously, you will keep getting pulled toward whichever one is loudest.
You are the steward of the most constrained resource in the organization. This role requires you to defend it, allocate it strategically, and make every hour count more, before anyone else asks you to do anything else.
The C-suite needs to be aligned, on target, and moving together. Your job is to surface misalignment early, close communication gaps, and hold the connective tissue of the organization, before dysfunction becomes entrenched.
You are often the most credible voice for the people who cannot speak directly to power. Learning to carry that responsibility, without losing your positioning or your access, is one of the hardest things this role asks of you.
Most first-year CoS professionals treat trust as something that builds naturally if you do good work. It doesn't. It builds through specific, legible behaviors, and it breaks down in specific, diagnosable ways.
Every authority problem you will face in the first year traces back to one of three gaps. Misdiagnosing which one you're dealing with, and responding to the wrong one, makes things worse, not better.
This isn't a leadership development program with a CoS chapter. It was built specifically for this role, this timeline, and the particular difficulties of the first year. Four areas, sequenced deliberately.
We work through the three trust gaps specific to your relationships, mapping where you actually stand with each key stakeholder and building a concrete plan to close the right gap the right way.
We build a defined approach to leadership meetings, 1:1s, and cross-functional sessions, what your role is in each one, what you should be listening for, and how your follow-up compounds credibility over time.
We develop your diagnostic instincts, the ability to see beneath what's presenting as a problem to what's actually producing it. This is the difference between being reactive and being genuinely useful to the organization.
We map the arc of your first year explicitly, what to do in each phase, how to move through tactical work without getting trapped in it, and precisely when and how to shift toward strategic authority.
Every session produces something usable. By the end of the engagement, you will have a set of working documents, built around your specific executive, your specific organization, and the specific gaps you came in with. Not adapted from a template. Built from scratch, for you.
Between sessions, you have direct access to both Rachael and Suzi, not a ticketing system, not a community forum. When something comes up between calls, you have somewhere to take it.
This engagement was designed for the specific difficulty of the first year. It doesn't address the CoS role generically, it addresses the particular challenges of the person who is new to it: building authority without formal power, navigating an executive relationship that's still forming, and learning which of the hundred things in front of you actually matter.
Rachael and Suzi bring two perspectives that almost never appear in the same room: direct operating experience inside the CoS role at the highest levels, and the diagnostic architecture that determines whether that role succeeds or fails. Together, they offer something no single practitioner can.
Most executive coaching programs offer a practitioner who has studied the CoS role. This one offers two practitioners who have lived it, one from inside the White House, the Gates Foundation, and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau; one from the center of British government as Chief of Staff to a Deputy Prime Minister and Lord Chancellor.
That depth of operating experience, built into a program designed specifically for the first year, doesn't exist anywhere else. It is why this engagement produces concrete deliverables rather than general advice, and why those deliverables are built around your specific situation rather than adapted from a template.
Sessions are 50 minutes, scheduled at your cadence. Every session fee covers the session itself, preparation and follow-up on our end, and any supporting materials or deliverables the work produces. Fees are paid in two equal installments: half at signing, half after the third session (6-session) or sixth session (12-session).
We ask every prospective client five questions before we get on a call. It takes about ten minutes. Rachael and Suzi both read every application. We respond within two business days, and if it's a fit, we'll come to the call prepared to use the time well.
Answer honestly. These aren't qualifying hurdles, they're the starting point for the work.