Executive Business Partner to the CEO

Knak

10d•Hybrid

About The Position

Knak is a fast-growing B2B SaaS company helping enterprise marketing teams create beautiful, on-brand, production-ready campaigns faster. We work with some of the world’s leading brands and are building the future of marketing production in an AI-first world. The CEO is looking for an exceptional Executive Business Partner who can help him operate at a higher level by giving him back time, increasing follow-through across the company, and ensuring that important personal and professional priorities do not fall through the cracks. This role is about creating leverage for the CEO, which means protecting time, anticipating needs, owning follow-through, reducing friction, routing information to the right people, and ensuring that commitments across the organization actually turn into completed outcomes. The right person will act as a true extension of the CEO: proactive, organized, trusted, discreet, and capable of driving things forward without waiting to be told exactly what to do.

Requirements

5+ years of experience supporting a CEO, founder, executive, or senior leader.
Experience in a fast-growing company or entrepreneurial environment preferred.
Strong calendar, inbox, travel, and meeting management skills.
Excellent written and verbal communication skills.
High discretion and comfort handling confidential business and personal matters.
Strong follow-through and project-tracking ability.
Experience supporting both business and personal executive priorities is a strong asset.
Comfortable using modern productivity tools, AI tools, Google Workspace, Slack, project management tools, and CRM or business systems as needed.
Experience working with senior executives, leadership teams, board members, investors, professional service providers, or high-net-worth individuals is an asset.
Ability to build deep trust with the CEO.
Ability to learn how the CEO thinks, what matters most, what can be delegated, what requires escalation, and how to create leverage without adding complexity.
Takes ownership, communicates clearly, and is energized by helping a CEO and company move faster.
Comfortable operating with a high degree of trust and autonomy.
Ability to make judgment calls, ask smart questions, follow up with senior people, and solve problems before they reach the CEO.
Ability to understand how information moves through an organization and quickly learn who needs to know what.
Ability to turn a messy set of meeting notes into clear follow-ups, owners, and outcomes.
Comfortable using judgment to route information to the right people without needing the CEO to spell it out every time.
Exceptional organization.
Proactive and resourceful.
Comfortable following up with senior leaders.
Calm under pressure.
Detail-oriented without losing sight of the bigger picture.
Comfortable working in a fast-moving, high-performance environment.
Able to anticipate needs before being asked.
Confident enough to push for clarity and accountability.
Service-oriented, but not passive.
Comfortable supporting both business and personal priorities.
Able to take a messy situation and turn it into a clear plan.
Comfortable directing executives and senior leaders in a professional way.
Persistent enough to ensure outcomes happen, not just reminders.
Trusted enough to represent the CEO with maturity, judgment, and confidence.

Nice To Haves

Experience in a fast-growing company or entrepreneurial environment.
Experience supporting both business and personal executive priorities.
Experience working with senior executives, leadership teams, board members, investors, professional service providers, or high-net-worth individuals.

Responsibilities

Manage and optimize the CEO’s calendar, prioritizing meetings based on business impact, urgency, and CEO involvement required.
Protect focus time and prevent unnecessary calendar creep.
Ensure the CEO is prepared for meetings with the right context, materials, and decision points.
Help determine which meetings the CEO should attend, delegate, shorten, or skip.
Proactively flag conflicts, gaps, risks, and opportunities in the schedule.
Look ahead to identify scheduling issues before they become problems.
Ensure there is enough time between meetings, travel, calls, and personal commitments.
Proactively inform people when the CEO is running late or when timing needs to shift.
Review, organize, and prioritize the CEO’s inbox, identifying emails that can be handled without CEO involvement.
Draft replies for review and respond on behalf of the CEO where appropriate.
Proactively complete tasks that do not require CEO decision-making.
Escalate only what truly needs the CEO’s attention.
Track outstanding requests and ensure follow-through.
Summarize long threads and surface only the key decision, issue, or action required.
Reduce email noise and help the CEO focus on what matters most.
Attend selected meetings with the CEO, taking clear notes and capturing decisions, owners, deadlines, and next steps.
Follow up with team members on commitments and hold people accountable for what they said they would do.
Maintain a centralized tracker of CEO-related action items.
Prepare short summaries of what happened, what matters, and what needs the CEO’s decision.
Attend some meetings on behalf of the CEO when appropriate, gathering context and bringing back concise recommendations or decision points.
Ensure the CEO is not the one chasing people for updates.
Turn messy conversations into clear next steps, owners, and outcomes.
Capture notes from CEO meetings with customers, partners, investors, prospects, employees, and other stakeholders.
Turn raw notes into clear summaries, action items, owners, and next steps.
Route relevant information to the right people across the organization.
Tag or notify the appropriate team members in Google Docs, Slack, email, or the relevant system.
Understand which leaders or teams need specific information based on the topic, customer, issue, opportunity, or risk.
Follow up to ensure the information was received, understood, and acted on.
Drive action from meeting notes instead of simply documenting them.
Help ensure customer feedback, product insights, sales opportunities, risks, and executive decisions do not get lost.
Maintain a clear system of record for CEO meeting notes, follow-ups, and organizational action items.
Close the loop with the CEO once the right people have been informed and the right next steps are underway.
Follow up with executives and team members on commitments made in meetings.
Clearly communicate owners, deadlines, expectations, and required outcomes.
Push for completion when tasks are late or unclear.
Escalate thoughtfully only when necessary, not as the default.
Help remove blockers instead of simply reporting that something is blocked.
Maintain a clear action-item tracker across CEO meetings and priorities.
Be confident and professional when holding senior leaders accountable.
Prepare briefs before important meetings.
Summarize long email threads, documents, or conversations into clear takeaways.
Identify what decision is needed and what information is missing.
Bring forward recommendations, not just raw information.
Help the CEO stay focused on the highest-impact priorities.
Act as connective tissue between the CEO and leadership team.
Follow up on open loops and unresolved questions.
Help the CEO make faster, better decisions by reducing the amount of context he has to personally gather.
Notice calendar conflicts before they become stressful.
Proactively adjust meetings when timing does not work.
Tell people in advance if the CEO is running late.
Make sure meeting rooms, video calls, documents, and materials are ready before the CEO arrives.
Ensure rooms are booked, technology works, screens are ready, and the right people are present.
Know when the CEO needs prep time, travel time, context, or a decision brief.
Spot friction points and solve them without waiting to be asked.
Make the CEO’s day feel smoother, calmer, and more controlled.
Prevent the CEO from walking into avoidable confusion, delays, missing materials, or technical issues.
Book business and personal travel.
Create detailed itineraries.
Coordinate flights, hotels, transportation, restaurant reservations, and meeting logistics.
Anticipate travel needs and preferences.
Handle changes quickly and calmly.
Support company events, leadership meetings, board meetings, customer meetings, and offsites as needed.
Ensure the CEO has the right materials, timing, transportation, and context for every trip or event.
Proactively manage details so travel and events feel smooth, efficient, and well thought out.
Coordinate with accountants, tax advisors, Deloitte, lawyers, bankers, financial advisors, insurance providers, and other professional service providers.
Help manage personal appointments and family schedule coordination.
Track important personal deadlines, renewals, documents, and follow-ups.
Coordinate household, travel, and personal logistics.
Handle confidential personal matters with discretion and maturity.
Ensure personal administrative tasks are completed without repeated CEO involvement.
Organize personal documents, scheduling, family logistics, and professional service follow-ups.
Help the CEO stay on top of personal commitments without having to personally manage every detail.