Chief of Staff

KEH•Smyrna, GA

17d

About The Position

Given KEH’s current size — over two hundred employees across operations, technology, merchandising, and commerce functions — and ongoing anticipated rapid growth, as well as its need to level-up its operating capabilities to meet the needs of its size and ambition, the Company’s go-forward performance depends on how well its operating system runs: the cadence of leadership meetings, the flow of decisions and information to and from the CEO, and the follow-through that turns priorities into completed work. To meet these needs, the CEO is planning to install a defined operating system — a weekly leadership rhythm with an owned scorecard, published decision rights with escalation thresholds, written decision memos, a weekly metrics review, structured visibility into the levels below the leadership team, and other elements. The Chief of Staff exists to make that system actually run, every week, without decay — and to multiply the CEO’s capacity by owning the connective work that today competes with the work only the CEO can do. The scope is the machinery of the Office of the CEO: the operating cadence and its artifacts (agendas, scorecard, one-pagers, metrics review), the integrity of the decision-rights system (memos routed to the right decider, escalation thresholds enforced, commitments tracked to closure), the preparation that makes the CEO effective in every meeting that remains on his calendar, and the integration across major cross-functional initiatives — including implementing and integrating AI, upgraded financial management through a new ERP, ongoing improvements across the technology stack as well as in IT infrastructure, continued up-leveling of pricing capabilities, extensive increases in analytics and reporting on key metrics, more sophisticated product information management, brand and others — where workstreams must connect but no single function can deliver the whole itself. This is a role of substantial influence and zero formal authority: it succeeds through judgment, preparation, trust, and follow-through. The right leader for this role is both strategic and hands-on who will develop and execute the strategies and leverage the resources/departments at the Company to assist in such. This is not an executive assistant role, and it is not a shadow chief operating officer. The Chief of Staff does not make the leadership team’s decisions and does not sit between the CEO and his direct reports as a gatekeeper. The role is an integrator and honest broker: it makes the organization’s information flow faster and truer, makes the CEO’s time compound, and makes the operating system impossible to quietly abandon.

Requirements

8–12+ years of professional experience, including 3+ years leading cross-functional programs, business operations, or strategy execution in an operating company — with a track record of making complex, multi-stakeholder work actually finish.
Direct experience building or running management operating rhythms: leadership meeting systems, KPI scorecards or weekly business reviews, and written decision or planning processes.
Exceptional structured written communication — this role produces decision memos, briefing packets, and meeting documentation that senior leaders act on without a second draft.
Demonstrated ability to influence senior leaders without formal authority, and the judgment to know what to elevate, what to broker, and what to leave alone.
Analytical fluency: comfortable owning a metrics review, interrogating a dashboard, and pressure-testing the numbers behind a recommendation.
Impeccable discretion and demonstrated trustworthiness with confidential executive, personnel, and investor matters.
Relentless follow-through: a visible system for tracking commitments, and a reputation for nothing falling through the cracks.

Nice To Haves

Experience in retail, e-commerce, consumer operations, or re-commerce/circular-economy businesses.
Exposure to a major systems transformation (ERP migration or comparable) or other transformative aspects of an operating company’s operations.
Prior chief of staff, business operations, or top-tier consulting experience serving C-level executives.
MBA or comparable advanced training in business operations or strategy.

Responsibilities

Run the mechanics of the weekly leadership meeting: own the scorecard’s integrity, build the agenda from exceptions and decisions needed, document outcomes and owners, and track every commitment to closure.
Produce the CEO’s briefing packets — context, prior commitments, open issues, and a recommended position — for board meetings, partner meetings, and key internal sessions.
Draft, route, and quality-control decision memos: ensure every retained decision arrives with options considered, a recommendation, reversibility classification, and a deadline.
Enforce the escalation thresholds in the decision-rights map, and execute the send-back rule — returning misrouted decisions to their owner with guidance rather than letting them accumulate at the top.
Stand up and run the monthly all-managers forum (the company’s ~20–35 managers) and coordinate the quarterly skip-level program, so the manager layer hears priorities first and unfiltered signal reaches the CEO.
Operate the weekly metrics review: standardized charts on controllable input metrics — buy-side intake, grading and refurbishment throughput, pricing realization, sell-through, conversion, KEH Certified return rates — with discussion reserved for exceptions.
Broker conflicts on cross-functional initiatives and projects at the working level, elevating only what genuinely requires the CEO or the leadership team.
Run the quarterly meeting audit: what decision or exception does each recurring meeting surface, and what can the one-pager, the metrics review, or an owner now cover instead.
Manage follow-through on board and D Cubed commitments, and support the CEO’s preparation for quarterly board meetings.
Serve as honest broker: carry unfiltered ground truth to the CEO — including bad news — and carry the CEO’s intent accurately into and across the organization.
Direct the CEO-office executive assistant capacity (calendar architecture, inbox triage, logistics) as it is established.