Chief of Staff

Overview

You work directly with Emil Dyrvig (CEO/GTM leader) at Laurel, handling whatever needs handling across strategy, operations, and execution. Laurel sells AI-powered time tracking and profitability analytics to law firms and accounting firms. You're not in one lane - you're shifting between strategic planning, operational firefighting, customer visits, board prep, and recruiting in the same week.

Role Snapshot

Company Context

Stage: Unknown (appears growth-stage based on 238 employees)

Size: 238 employees

Growth: Actively building "one of the fastest GTM orgs" - indicates aggressive hiring and scaling

Market Position: Selling into conservative, traditional industries (law, accounting) with an AI product - likely requires education and trust-building

What You'll Actually Do

Time Breakdown

Travel/External (30%) | Strategic Projects (25%) | Internal Ops (25%) | CEO Support (20%)

Key Activities

• Travel with CEO: You're on the road for customer meetings, partner dinners, industry events, and internal team visits. Pack for 1-2 trips per week minimum.
• Strategic project execution: CEO says "we need to figure out our partner strategy" or "our forecast model is broken" - you own driving it to completion, pulling in whoever you need.
• GTM operations troubleshooting: Deal stuck in legal? Sales comp plan causing issues? Territory conflicts? You get pulled in to unstick things that can't wait for the quarterly planning cycle.
• Meeting prep and follow-up: You're prepping board decks, customer presentations, and all-hands content. After meetings, you're tracking action items and making sure things actually happen.
• Hiring support: Sourcing candidates, doing initial screens, coordinating interview loops, and closing candidates for critical GTM roles.
• Cross-functional coordination: Sales needs something from Product. Marketing and Sales aren't aligned. Finance needs GTM data. You're often the person who makes sure these conversations happen.

The Honest Reality

What's Hard

• No predictable schedule: You can plan your week Sunday night and it'll be completely different by Tuesday. Fires will take priority over your project list.
• Ambiguous problems: Most things you work on don't have a clear answer. "Figure out why our win rate dropped" or "what should our partner strategy be" requires digging, analysis, and synthesizing input from multiple people who disagree.
• High travel burden: Emil explicitly warns you'll travel more than planned. Expect consistent disruption to personal routine, late nights in hotels, and living out of a carry-on.
• Work hours: Emil mentions "a lot of hours in the office and on the road." This isn't a 40-hour-week role. Expect 60+ regularly, more during key periods (board meetings, QBRs, big deals).
• Context switching: You'll be in a strategic planning session, then jump to debugging a sales comp issue, then get pulled into a customer escalation. Very little deep work time.
• Unclear success metrics: You're not carrying quota. Success is "did the CEO become more effective" and "did the GTM org scale smoothly" - both are hard to measure and involve a lot of intangibles.

What Success Looks Like

• CEO leverage multiplier: Emil can take on bigger strategic bets because you're handling execution and operations that would otherwise consume his time.
• GTM org scales without breaking: Hiring happens on time, comp plans work, territories are balanced, forecast is accurate, deals don't get stuck in internal process hell.
• Fast career acceleration: Emil promises this explicitly - you're getting exposure and reps that would take 3-5 years elsewhere, compressed into 18-24 months. Whether that's worth the hours and intensity is your call.

Who You're Working With

Direct Reports/Team:

• None - you're an individual contributor, though you'll coordinate across teams

Key Stakeholders:

• CEO (Emil): Your primary customer. His priorities are your priorities.
• GTM leadership: VP Sales, Marketing, CS, Rev Ops - you're in their business regularly
• Cross-functional execs: CFO, CPO, People - you coordinate across all of them
• External: Customers, partners, investors, board members - you're in these conversations often

Requirements

• Previous experience in high-intensity, fast-moving environments (startup, consulting, investment banking, or Chief of Staff role)
• Comfortable with ambiguity - ability to take a fuzzy problem and drive it to a clear outcome without step-by-step instructions
• Executive presence - you'll be in rooms with CEOs of law firms and on calls with investors
• Operational chops - you need to actually understand GTM metrics, sales processes, and business operations, not just coordinate meetings
• Willingness to travel 30-40% and work long hours
• Thick skin - you'll be in the middle of conflicts, difficult conversations, and high-pressure situations regularly
• No ego about task size - you'll go from working on board strategy to fixing a broken CRM report in the same day