Chiefs of Staff · Membership

You have built this document before. You should never build it again.

The working library of the Chief of Staff role. Board packs, comms cascades, decision logs, offsite runbooks, reorg plans — every artifact the job actually demands, written by two people who have run these rooms, kept current every month, and written at two depths: one for when you are new to the seat, one for the version of you that is established in it.

What it is

This is not a course. You already have the job.

There are no modules, no certificates, and nobody will call you a rockstar. The Vault assumes you are in the seat, the meeting is Thursday, and the document needs to exist by Wednesday night. Every playbook is built to be duplicated, filled in, and used the same day — and every one is maintained. When board expectations shift, when comms norms change, when the tooling moves, the library moves with them. You are paying for the curation and the updates, not a pile of PDFs from 2023.

Inside the Vault

Six shelves. The whole rotation.

The Chief of Staff job is a rotation of recurring artifacts. The Vault is organized the way the year actually happens.

Shelf 01 · 4 playbooks

Meeting operations

Agenda bank by meeting type, the decision log, the meeting audit worksheet, and the pre-read template your executives will actually read.

Shelf 02 · 5 playbooks

Executive communication

The weekly CEO update, the board pre-read pack, the all-hands script and slide skeleton, and the comms cascade planner.

Shelf 03 · 3 playbooks

Planning cadence

The annual planning runbook, the quarterly OKR reset, and the offsite agenda with the logistics checklist nobody thanks you for until it is missing.

Shelf 04 · 3 playbooks

People & onboarding

The executive onboarding runbook, the CoS role scorecard, and the interview loop kit that pairs with our free JD Architect tool.

Shelf 05 · 3 playbooks

Special situations

The reorg comms plan, the crisis comms one-pager, and the new-CoS first-year playbook. The shelf you hope to never need and will.

Shelf 06 · 3 playbooks + 1 tool

KPIs & measurement

The interactive KPI Builder, the decision velocity tracker, the executive time portfolio audit, and the surprise log. Proof of the value you create.

The depth toggle

Every playbook ships at two depths.

One switch, the whole library shifts — because the document you need in month two and the document you need in year three are not the same document.

New to the seat

Built for your first pass.

Full context on why the artifact exists, what good looks like, and where first-timers reliably go wrong. Annotated templates with worked examples, the mistakes that cost credibility named plainly, and what never to put in writing.

Established

Built for your hundredth.

Compressed, assumes fluency, and gets into what the basic versions never touch: political texture, edge cases, failure modes, and how to instrument each artifact so it feeds your KPIs.

Members only

The KPI Builder. Finally, numbers for an invisible job.

Four questions — your company stage, your executive’s top priorities, the shape of your mandate, and how long you have been in the seat — and it assembles a three-layer scorecard: the leverage you return to your executive, the operating machine you run, and the outcomes you influence but do not control, labeled honestly as exactly that. Every metric comes with a definition, a measurement method, a cadence, a target band, and a warning about how it gets gamed. Because a KPI without an instrument is a vibe.

Why it stays worth it

The library is alive.

2
New or refreshed monthly

Two playbooks added or substantially rebuilt every month, announced to members first. The changelog is public inside the Vault. Judge us by it.

4
Quarterly teardowns

Each quarter, an annotated real-world example — an actual board pack, cascade, or offsite plan, anonymized — with commentary on what worked and what nearly did not.

1
Diagnostic re-run per quarter

Membership includes one Operating Cadence Diagnostic re-run each quarter, so you can measure whether the machine you run is actually getting faster.

Membership

$495 a year. Less than one hour of the consultant you will not need.

The Vault is an annual membership — $495 a year, cancel anytime — sold at chiefofstaffvault.com, where the current rates, the founding-member terms, and three free sample playbooks (the pre-read template, the decision log, and the crisis comms one-pager — both depths included) live. They are the same quality as everything behind the gate. That is the point.

The Vault opens October 1, 2026. Until then, the fastest way to hear when the doors open is The Briefing.

The Playbook Vault

The meeting is Thursday. The document needs to exist by Wednesday night.

Twenty playbooks at launch, two added or refreshed every month, every one built to be duplicated and used the same day.