# Clara Ma

Clara Ma leads Ask a Chief of Staff, a community and recruiting resource for Chiefs of Staff. Her work includes sharing practical guidance for the role, connecting candidates with executive positions, and organizing peer events.

- Profile: https://b2binfluencer.marketing/creators/clara-ma/
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/clarama
- LinkedIn followers: 64,114
- Median of last 7 posts: 62 reactions, 26 comments (checked 2026-11-02)
- Topics: startup, recruiting
- Based on 8 dated posts, latest 2026-09-30

## Summary

Useful for practical Chief of Staff content, peer community, and recruiting resources for executive roles.

- Best for: A B2B executive coaching or productivity platform co-producing content on executive time allocation and delegation.
- Not for: Recruiting or HR tech vendors seeking performance-priced lead campaigns to HR directors.
- Check first: Confirm audience demographics, recent post results, and sponsorship process before contacting them.

### Takeaways

- Two-chart exercise compares executive time now with desired time to define Chief of Staff work.
- Recruiting workload fell from 50% to 25% in a month.
- Chief of Staff should build a process and then hand it off, not run it forever.

## Main ideas

- **The gap between how an executive spends time and wants to spend it is the chief of staff's mandate**: Ma argues that a new chief of staff should start by making the principal's time allocation visible: have them draw two pie charts, one for how they spend their time today and one for how they want to spend it. The difference between the two charts is where the role's impact lives, and the slice the chief of staff can credibly take over is usually the one matching their own background. The instruction is to redraw both charts every quarter, especially when the principal's priorities or the role changes, so the gap stays current and the absorbed work is documented when review season arrives.
- **A chief of staff should build a process and then hand it off, not run it forever**: Ma argues that a chief of staff creates value by getting out of work they have built. Processes that stay with their builder consume the week and leave the next priority whatever time remains. The recommended question is: what am I still running that someone else could own now? The answer becomes the job description of a future executive assistant. The same logic applies at team scale, where delegation is framed as advice Ma had given to chiefs of staff and then had to take personally as the organisation grew, and where shared, repeatable playbooks are what let anyone on the team step in when someone is out.
- **Pay for the same chief of staff title varies so widely that anonymous market data is the only useful negotiating baseline**: Ma argues that most people negotiating a chief of staff offer work from a sample size of one, their own, because the same title covers very different scope and compensation. The response is an annual anonymous compensation survey, framed as a data asset for the community and sized so results can be broken down by company stage, location, years of experience, and who the respondent reports to.
- **Ma curates the outside canon for the role and updates it as the public conversation changes**: Alongside original advice, Ma maintains an annotated reading list aimed at both chiefs of staff and CEOs deciding whether they need one, giving a short reason for each pick rather than a bare set of links. The framing is explicitly iterative: the first version was assembled in 2022, and the list was rebuilt because the wider conversation about the role had shifted.
- **The community runs on peer problem-solving in small groups, not keynote instruction**: Ma argues that chief of staff work regularly produces situations with no clear playbook, from competing priorities to a stuck project to a difficult dynamic with a leadership team, so the useful resource is other people who have already been there. The event format reflects that: small facilitated groups working on real problems people bring from their own roles, with an approval-based list so groups can be composed in advance.
- **Sponsor work leads with the operational problem, then places the product briefly**: In commercial posts, Ma argues from a failure the audience recognises, shows the fix that worked before any product existed, and only then draws the parallel to the vendor. The sponsored post labels itself a paid partnership, which sets the expectation that the problem narrative carries the piece and the product occupies a short close. A second post takes a lighter promotional tone and does not state any terms, so payment should not be assumed from it.
- **Recruiting infrastructure is treated as a product, not a side service**: Ma's team treats matching chiefs of staff with principals as core work rather than a favour to the community, and runs it with published openings, listed salary ranges for full-time roles, and a candidate pool for future matches. The stated reason for hiring a partnerships lead is the same logic Ma gives chiefs of staff about delegation: the work had outgrown one person.

## Work to read

- [The Two Pie Charts Exercise](https://www.linkedin.com/posts/clarama_in-my-first-month-as-a-chief-of-staff-activity-7511055119111610369-Giio)
- [Five articles every chief of staff should read](https://www.linkedin.com/posts/clarama_5-articles-every-chief-of-staff-should-activity-7521201975682588673-qyMC)
- [The Replit partnership post on version chaos and shared playbooks](https://www.linkedin.com/posts/clarama_replitpartner-activity-7523022454122930177-Rm_z)
- [Hiring a Partnerships Lead, and what that reveals about the business](https://www.linkedin.com/posts/clarama_were-hiring-for-a-partnerships-lead-at-activity-7510330169241427968-GMTL)
- [NYC Mastermind, a small-group event format](https://www.linkedin.com/posts/clarama_nyc-chiefs-of-staff-join-us-for-ask-a-activity-7521564177900118016-taml)
- [What an executive assistant changes about the chief of staff job](https://www.linkedin.com/posts/clarama_when-i-joined-hugging-face-as-chief-of-activity-7520477033341112320-9nds)
- [The 2026 chief of staff compensation survey](https://www.linkedin.com/posts/clarama_1-5-0-chiefs-of-staff-have-already-activity-7519386111391997973-zzvp)

## Brand relationships

- **Ask a Chief of Staff** (owned_business)
- **Replit** (sponsor)
- **ABS Partners Real Estate** (disclosed_partnership)
- **Pebl** (disclosed_partnership)
- **Oceans Talent** (disclosed_partnership)
- **Hugging Face** (employment)
- **Notion** (mention)
- **Gamma** (mention)
- **Offsite** (mention)

## Partnerships

Clara Ma's partnership evidence centers on Ask a Chief of Staff, the community and recruiting resource Clara Ma leads. One disclosed paid partnership is a LinkedIn post for Replit, marked #ReplitPartner. Ask a Chief of Staff has also named ABS Partners Real Estate as a partner for an in-person NYC mastermind, and a hiring post for a Partnerships Lead describes sponsorship sales across newsletter, podcast, events, media, or a membership community, with Notion, Gamma, and Offsite given as examples. A separate post points executives to Oceans Talent without disclosing payment. The supplied material does not include a public sponsor policy, rate card, audience specification, or official sponsorship inquiry route, so a buyer should request current inventory and terms directly.

## Alternatives

- Erin Howe: A better choice when the piece should argue about what the Chief of Staff role is and where it ends, rather than teach a time-allocation exercise. Howe's posts treat the title as the naming of work that already existed — fixers and connective tissue who manage through influence, set an operating rhythm, and carry a candid view of the state of the business — and draw the line where revenue operations stops supporting sales leaders and starts doing their job. That is material for a live discussion or a small-group peer session with sitting operators, which fits a coaching or productivity platform's event slot more closely than a worksheet-led webinar. Howe speaks from a scaling sales organisation, so a platform whose audience is go-to-market leaders gets a specific, credible point of view rather than a general role explainer.
- Ed Erickson: A better choice when the buyer shifts from corporate executives to the owners and principals of professional-services firms, and the problem shifts from how an executive spends a week to how a firm keeps client work coming in. Erickson describes the feast-famine pattern directly — when delivery peaks, marketing stops, and the pipeline reflects that three to six months later — and argues that a prospect cannot try a consulting service before the call, so published content becomes the product sample. For a productivity or coaching offer sold to firm owners who must decide what to keep doing themselves, that is a closer problem statement than delegation inside a company, and it supports a co-published article on what a firm principal should own personally.
- Katie Jones: A better choice when the campaign is aimed at staffing and recruiting agencies and the deliverable is an owned-media build rather than a webinar exercise. Jones describes launching The Full Desk Experience podcast with no audience, handling interview questions, editing, and the promotion around it, and reports a 50% reduction in customer acquisition cost and a 400% increase in average contract value from content work at a recruiting software company. A platform that wants a podcast series or article programme carried into that industry, run by someone who already knows its buyers, language, and sales cycle, gets that experience here.

---
AI-assisted summary of public posts. Audience demographics are not available. Engagement appears only where we checked recent posts. Method: https://b2binfluencer.marketing/methodology/