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.
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.
Key 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.
Check first: Confirm audience demographics, recent post results, and sponsorship process before contacting them.
Main ideas
The gap between how an executive spends time and wants to spend it is the chief of staff's mandate · A chief of staff should build a process and then hand it off, not run it forever · Pay for the same chief of staff title varies so widely that anonymous market data is the only useful negotiating baseline
Disclosed paid LinkedIn partnership · Event partnership for Ask a Chief of Staff community events · Sponsorship inventory across Ask a Chief of Staff channels
Clara Ma leads Ask a Chief of Staff, a community and recruiting resource for Chiefs of Staff.
Her posts combine practical guidance for the role with resources that help people find jobs, compare compensation, and learn from peers.
A useful starting point is her two-chart exercise: compare how an executive spends time now with how they want to spend it, then identify work the Chief of Staff can take on.
Ma illustrates the method with a recruiting workload that fell from 50% to 25% in a month, and recommends revisiting the charts as priorities change.
Her posts also show the community side of the work, through peer problem-solving events and an annotated reading list.
The available material supports this picture of her work, but does not establish a fuller account of her public career or signature work beyond these posts.
Ma makes the Chief of Staff role concrete through tools, examples, and useful questions rather than relying only on broad advice.
The two-chart exercise gives a new Chief of Staff and their executive a way to agree on priorities and see whether delegation is changing the executive’s workload.
Other posts extend that practical approach: she asks what processes a Chief of Staff could hand off, points readers to resources about the role, and creates settings where peers can discuss live problems.
Her work also includes recruiting and compensation information, connecting day-to-day guidance with the realities of finding a role and understanding its scope.
The reviewed posts include a clearly labeled paid Replit partnership, which uses a specific onboarding problem to introduce the product; this is one example of sponsored content, not a basis for generalizing about all her partnerships.
Clara Ma's ideas center on making the chief of staff role legible and measurable: turn an executive's time allocation into an explicit gap to close, treat handing off finished work as the core discipline, and publish original pay data because the same title covers wildly different scope and compensation.
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Around that sits a second priority, building the community as an operating business with recruiting infrastructure, curated external reading, peer problem-solving events, and sponsor content that leads with the operational problem rather than the product.
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.
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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.
In the worked example, recruiting and hiring took 50% of the principal's time against a desired 25%, general operations 35% against 10%, forward-looking strategy 10% against 35%, and flex or thinking time 5% against 30%. Recruiting was Ma's own background, so that was the slice taken over; the post says it fell from 50% to 25% within a month, which built trust and gave a clear lane to own.
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.
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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.
At Hugging Face in 2020, the CEO already had an executive assistant who knew the CEO's rhythms, owned the calendar, and later absorbed administrative work, which is what allowed each new process to be handed off before moving to the next problem. In a separate post, Ma describes four separate versions of member onboarding emails with no way to tell which was current, and the fix of one repository as source of truth, onboarding emails moved inside the onboarding playbook, and repeatable playbooks anyone could run.
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.
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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.
The call for the 2026 edition reports more than 150 responses at the time of posting, an under-five-minute anonymous form, a closing date of Friday 20 November, and results promised in a December issue of the Substack. The post notes that the previous year's results were featured in Forbes, and the reading-list post cites the 2025 survey inside a Forbes explainer of the role.
The survey is described as a five-year tracking effort, and the reading-list post calls the current market the most competitive in those five years, which presents the project as a continuing dataset rather than a one-off poll.
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.
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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 current list picks Dan Ciampa's Harvard Business Review piece as the one to hand a CEO considering the role for the first time; a New York Times article on why so many CEOs are hiring a chief of staff, in which Ma says they were quoted; a Forbes explainer that draws on the 2025 compensation survey; a First Round Review piece quoting Ma from the Hugging Face period, "Give yourself time to do nothing but think and chew on a problem; not every hour needs to be productive"; and a guest piece by Eric Nehrlich, a former chief of staff to Google's Search Ads team, on getting aligned with your principal on what outrageous success looks like.
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.
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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.
The first in-person NYC Mastermind, announced for 18 November, runs breakfast and networking at 8:00, small-group mastermind discussions at 8:30, and group reflections and wrap-up at 9:30, with registration through a Luma page because sign-up is approval-based. The post says the same format was the top-rated session at that year's NYC Summit and credits ABS Partners Real Estate as event partner.
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.
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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.
The paid post opens on four separate versions of member onboarding emails and nobody able to say which was current, then lists three fixes: one repository as source of truth, emails moved into the onboarding playbook, and repeatable playbooks.
It then argues the same version chaos now appears with AI, where everyone has their own chat window and context, so two people ask the same question and get two versions of the truth, before describing Replit as a shared playbook for agents that records what each agent did.
The other post lists EOR, global payroll, immigration support, and benefits administration as terms the writer did not know before becoming a chief of staff and links to Pebl as a cheat sheet.
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.
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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.
The open roles page collects chief of staff positions with locations including San Francisco, New York City, and Seattle, salary ranges for full-time roles, plus operator and fractional openings.
The hiring post describes the team four years earlier as Ma alone, running recruiting, community, partnerships, strategy, and finance, then names Katie Bell on recruiting and candidate matching and Sarah Agopian-Khalifé as community manager for a membership described as 500-plus.
The Partnerships Lead role is contract and fractional to start, owns sponsor relationships end to end, and names Notion, Gamma, and Offsite as brands the audience works with.
It answers the first question a new chief of staff usually faces — how do you take real work off an executive's plate — with one exercise that can be run in the first week.
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Clara Ma describes sitting down with a principal and having them draw two pie charts: how they spend their time now, and how they want to spend it.
In the example given, recruiting and hiring took 50% of the executive's time against a desired 25%, general operations 35% against 10%, forward-looking strategy 10% against 35%, and flex or thinking time 5% against 30%.
Recruiting was Clara Ma's own background, so that was the slice taken over, and the post says the share fell from 50% to 25% within a month.
The closing instruction is to redraw both charts every quarter, so the gap — and the work absorbed — stays visible and documented when review season arrives.
For brands planning a campaign
This is a ready-made session asset.
The two-chart template, the concrete percentages, and the quarterly redraw give a webinar or article a runnable exercise with a measurable before-and-after, rather than advice the audience cannot act on.
A coaching or productivity platform could build an entire session around the recruiting-to-strategy reallocation, because the same person both identified the gap and closed it.
It shows the reading canon Clara Ma would hand a newcomer, and it is the clearest single statement of where the role sits in the wider business press.
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An annotated reading list, described as an update to a list first assembled in 2022.
The picks are Dan Ciampa's Harvard Business Review piece, called the one to hand a CEO considering the role for the first time; a New York Times article on why so many CEOs are hiring a chief of staff, in which Clara Ma says they were quoted; a Forbes explainer that draws on the 2025 chief of staff compensation survey; a First Round Review piece containing a quoted line from the Hugging Face years about giving yourself time to do nothing but think; and a guest piece in the Ask a Chief of Staff newsletter by a former chief of staff to Google's Search Ads team.
The post also points to a running 2026 compensation survey.
For brands planning a campaign
The format itself is a partnership shape: a co-branded reading list, a commissioned entry, or a data-backed explainer built on the compensation survey. Because the list names publications and authors rather than only internal material, an outside platform can slot in as a recommended resource without the page reading as an advertisement.
It is the clearest example of how Clara Ma argues for a vendor: a real operational failure first, the product second.
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The post opens on a specific problem — four separate versions of member onboarding emails and nobody able to say which was current — then lists the three fixes: one repository as the source of truth, onboarding emails moved inside the onboarding playbook, and repeatable playbooks so anyone on the team could cover.
It then draws the parallel to AI, where each person has their own chat window and context, so two people ask the same question and get two versions of the truth.
Replit is described as a shared playbook for agents, one place deciding what counts as the source of truth and when a person signs off.
The post identifies itself as a paid partnership with Replit.
For brands planning a campaign
A template for sponsored storytelling in this niche: name the failure in operational terms, show the fix that worked before the product existed, then position the vendor as the same pattern applied to a new medium. Any platform buying this kind of placement should expect the problem narrative to come first and the product to occupy a short, clearly labelled close.
It is the most concrete account of how Ask a Chief of Staff is staffed and how sponsorship work is resourced.
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Clara Ma describes the team four years earlier as just themselves, running recruiting, community, partnerships, strategy, and finance, then names the hires since: Katie Bell leading recruiting and matching chiefs of staff with principals, and Sarah Agopian-Khalifé as community manager for a membership described as 500-plus.
The open role is a Partnerships Lead, contract and fractional to start, owning outbound pipeline, running deals end to end, and holding sponsor relationships with brands named as Notion, Gamma, and Offsite.
The stated requirement is prior sponsorship sales experience at a newsletter, podcast, events business, media outlet, or membership community.
For brands planning a campaign
Sponsorship here is a dedicated function with a named brand roster, which matters to a platform deciding how to approach the organisation — there is a person to talk to, and the expected deal shapes are newsletter, events, podcast, and community. Treat the brand list as what this one post names, not as a verified current partner set.
It shows the in-person side of the community and the event format that carries the sponsorship model.
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A notice for a first in-person NYC Mastermind on 18 November: breakfast and networking at 8:00, small-group mastermind discussions at 8:30, group reflections and wrap-up at 9:30.
Registration is approval-based and capped so groups can be planned in advance, handled through a Luma sign-up page.
The post says the same format was the top-rated session at that year's NYC Summit and thanks ABS Partners Real Estate for partnering on the event.
The framing is peer problem-solving — competing priorities, a difficult leadership-team dynamic, a project stuck on red — with participants asked to bring a live problem and leave with other people's approaches.
For brands planning a campaign
A sponsorable format with a low production cost: a breakfast slot, small facilitated groups, and a host-partner credit. For a coaching or productivity platform, the small-group mastermind is a better fit than a keynote, because the value comes from the room rather than from stage time, and the approval-based list gives the organiser a known audience.
It answers a question newcomers rarely ask early enough: what should a chief of staff stop running, and who should own it instead.
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Clara Ma recalls joining Hugging Face as chief of staff in 2020 into a situation where the CEO already had an executive assistant who knew the CEO's rhythms, owned the calendar, and later took on admin the role had been carrying.
The argument is that this is what let the chief of staff keep building processes and handing them off instead of running each one indefinitely.
The contrast drawn is with chiefs of staff who build a process and then spend every week operating it, leaving the next priority whatever time remains.
The post ends with a question — what am I still running that someone else could own now? — and names Oceans Talent as a resource, without a paid-partnership label.
For brands planning a campaign
A strong entry point for an audience beyond the chief of staff title, since the handoff question applies to any operator role. It also shows Clara Ma's willingness to point at named services, which gives a partner a route into the content — but the argument has to be the delegation question first, not the service.
It shows the data asset behind the profile's authority: original market research, not commentary on other people's research.
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A call for the 2026 compensation survey, reporting 150-plus responses at the time of posting, a target of a larger dataset than the previous year, an under-five-minute anonymous form, and a closing date of Friday 20 November, with results promised in a December issue of the Substack.
The stated reason for collecting it is that chief of staff pay varies wildly between the same title and that most people negotiating an offer are working from a sample size of one.
More responses are said to allow breakdowns by company stage, location, years of experience, and reporting line.
The post notes that the previous year's results were featured in Forbes.
For brands planning a campaign
A platform can sponsor or co-publish survey results, or use the breakdowns as the data spine of an article or webinar on compensation and scope. Because the raw dataset is treated as the asset and publication is planned ahead of collection, a partner has a defined window to attach to the release rather than needing to create the data.
Delegation, executive assistants, and handing off recurring work3
Compensation benchmarking for the Chief of Staff market2
Recruiting and the Chief of Staff job market2
Sponsored and partner content on operational tools2
Executive time allocation and the Two Pie Charts exercise1
Curated reading lists for the role1
Peer community and in-person events1
Executive time allocation and the Two Pie Charts exercise
Ma describes asking a new principal to draw two pie charts in the first week: how they spend their time today and how they want to spend it.
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The gap between the charts becomes the Chief of Staff's mandate.
In the worked example, the principal was spending 50% of time on recruiting and hiring and 35% on general operations, but wanted 25% on recruiting, 10% on operations, 35% on strategy, and 30% on flex and thinking time.
Because recruiting was Ma's own background, they took it over and moved the principal from 50% to 25% recruiting within a month, which built trust and defined the role.
Run the exercise with the principal in the first week, then redraw the charts every quarter, especially when priorities or the role change. The charts double as a record of impact for review season.
For brands planning a campaign
This is the most presentation-ready topic for a webinar or article on executive time allocation: it pairs a named, teachable exercise with a concrete before-and-after example and a repeatable review cadence.
Delegation, executive assistants, and handing off recurring work
A recurring argument across Ma's posts is that a Chief of Staff creates value by getting out of work they have built.
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Ma recalls joining Hugging Face in 2020 into a setup where the CEO already had an executive assistant, which allowed each new process to be handed off before moving to the next problem, and contrasts that with Chiefs of Staff who build a process and then spend every week running it.
The recommended prompt is to ask what you are still running that someone else could own now, and to treat the answer as a future assistant's job description.
A similar logic appears in the advice to delegate as a team grows, and in a post about consolidating member onboarding emails into one repository with repeatable playbooks so anyone on the team can step in.
For brands planning a campaign
A delegation-focused article or workshop can use Ma's framing of handoff as a discipline rather than a one-time hire, and can draw the throughline from assistant support to documented, repeatable playbooks.
Compensation benchmarking for the Chief of Staff market
Ma runs an annual Chief of Staff compensation survey and reports the market as the most competitive it has been in the five years of tracking it.
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The post recruiting responses for the 2026 edition says more than 150 Chiefs of Staff had already submitted, that last year's results were featured in Forbes, and that a larger dataset would allow breakdowns by company stage, location, years of experience, and who the respondent reports to.
Responses are anonymous, take under five minutes, and results are scheduled for a December Substack issue.
The point made is that pay varies widely for the same title and scope, and most people negotiating an offer are working from a sample size of one.
For brands planning a campaign
For a content platform, the survey offers a recurring, data-backed hook on executive pay and role scope, and a citable annual dataset rather than a one-off opinion piece.
Ma publishes updated reading lists for Chiefs of Staff, framed for both practitioners and CEOs deciding whether they need one.
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The current list covers Dan Ciampa's "The Case for a Chief of Staff" in Harvard Business Review, a New York Times piece on why more CEOs are hiring Chiefs of Staff, Edward Segal's role primer in Forbes, First Round Review's tactical tips, and a guest-authored piece in the Ask a Chief of Staff newsletter. Ma notes the list was first assembled in 2022 and that the wider conversation about the role has changed since, and links the Forbes primer to the 2025 compensation survey.
Round-up format with a short reason for each pick and a direct link, updated rather than replaced over time. The account also cites being quoted in First Round Review from the Hugging Face period.
For brands planning a campaign
This is a low-friction format for a platform to co-produce: a curated, annually refreshed list that places a sponsor's material alongside established business publications without needing new original research.
Ma organizes events for the Chief of Staff community, including a first in-person Mastermind session in New York City on November 18.
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The format is breakfast networking followed by small-group problem-solving and group reflections, built around real situations people bring from their own roles, such as competing priorities or a project stuck on red.
Registration is approval-based because groups are planned in advance, and the post credits ABS Partners Real Estate as a partner.
Ma notes the mastermind format was the top-rated session at the earlier New York Summit.
For brands planning a campaign
Small-group, peer-led sessions are a proven format for this audience and a natural sponsorship slot for a brand that wants visibility with senior operators without a keynote-style pitch.
Ma runs recruiting infrastructure for the role, including an open roles page with Chief of Staff positions, salary ranges for full-time roles, locations such as San Francisco, New York City, and Seattle, operator and fractional openings, and a candidate pool for future matches.
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A hiring post for a Partnerships Lead describes a team that grew from Ma alone four years earlier to include a recruiter matching candidates with principals and a community manager serving more than 500 members. That role is contract and fractional at the start, owns sponsor relationships end to end, and names Notion, Gamma, and Offsite as examples of brands the audience already works with.
Fractional and contract structures are used both for Ma's own team and for the roles placed, with sponsor sales experience as the stated hiring bar for the partnerships role.
For brands planning a campaign
A brand can reach this audience through hiring content or a recruiting partnership, but the sponsorship route runs through a fractional partnerships function rather than a standing media kit.
Sponsored and partner content on operational tools
Two posts promote software in the context of Chief of Staff work.
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One is an explicitly labeled paid partnership with Replit, arguing that companies face the same version chaos with AI agents that they once had with documents, and that a shared playbook should define the source of truth, what agents can touch, and when a person signs off, with a record of what each agent did. The other is a short post listing EOR, global payroll, immigration support, and benefits administration as terms the writer did not know before becoming a Chief of Staff, with a link to Pebl as a cheat sheet.
Only the Replit post states that it is a paid partnership. The Pebl post is promotional in tone but does not state terms, so payment should not be assumed from it.
For brands planning a campaign
Ma is open to sponsor content about operational and tooling problems and writes it in the same practical register as the non-sponsored posts, which suits a software brand seeking an operator audience.
Clara Ma's brand relationships center on Ask a Chief of Staff, the community and recruiting business she runs and has staffed up over the past four years.
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Two commercial arrangements are stated outright: a paid partnership with Replit for a post about shared playbooks for AI agents, and a named partnership with ABS Partners Real Estate for an in-person Chief of Staff mastermind breakfast in New York.
Two other posts recommend outside services — Pebl for global payroll, EOR, and immigration support, and Oceans Talent for executive assistants — without saying how Clara Ma is connected to either company, so the terms of those relationships are unstated.
The material also places her previously at Hugging Face as Chief of Staff, the role she draws on for firsthand advice in her writing, and names Notion, Gamma, and Offsite as brands her community's partnerships work with.
Ask a Chief of Staff
Owned business
Clara Ma describes building and running Ask a Chief of Staff, the community and recruiting resource for the role: she says the team was just her four years ago, handling recruiting, community, partnerships, strategy, and finances, and that the group now has a recruiting lead, a community manager for more than 500 members, and a hiring push for a partnerships lead.
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Its open-roles page and candidate pool live on the organization's own site.
A post comparing version chaos in onboarding documents to the same problem with AI agents promotes Replit as a shared playbook for agents, where a company decides what counts as the source of truth and when a person signs off.
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The post carries an explicit paid-partnership disclosure.
Named as the partner that helped make Ask a Chief of Staff's first in-person Mastermind session possible, a November 18 breakfast in New York with small-group discussions for Chiefs of Staff.
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Original disclosure
A big thank you to ABS Partners Real Estate for partnering with us to make this happen!
A short post aimed at new Chiefs of Staff lists EOR, global payroll, immigration support, and benefits administration as terms she had not encountered before the role, then points readers to Pebl as the cheat sheet she wishes she had had.
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The post does not state whether this is paid, sponsored, or a referral.
A post about the value of an executive assistant says she points executives to Oceans Talent when they do not already have one, and closes with a link to the firm.
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The post does not state the nature of the relationship.
Clara Ma states that she joined Hugging Face as Chief of Staff in 2020, and cites that role as the source of firsthand advice, including being quoted from her Hugging Face days in First Round Review.
Clara Ma's work is easiest to explore in three directions.
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For technique, start with the Two Pie Charts exercise for mapping an executive's time, then the posts on handing off finished work and on playbooks that anyone on a team can run, and use the annual compensation survey when pay or scope comes up.
For the wider canon, the annotated reading list is the fastest route to the outside writing the role leans on, and the New York mastermind announcement shows the peer format the community runs on.
For the job market itself, the recruiting posts set out the openings, listed salary ranges, and fractional arrangements Ma's team works with.
Readers who want a different emphasis can compare Erin Howe on where the role came from, Ed Erickson on running a practice's marketing through busy seasons, and Katie Jones on owned media and content in staffing and recruiting.
Chief of Staff roleExecutive operationsExecutive time managementDelegationCompensation benchmarkingHiring and recruitingProfessional communityChief of Staff enablementStartup operationsLinkedIn postsCurated reading listsIn-person eventsCompensation surveySponsored contentChiefs of StaffExecutives and founders
Erin Howe
Both write from inside the chief of staff and operations seat and argue about what the role actually is rather than listing duties.
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Howe's account of the work existing before the title — fixers and connective tissue, people who managed through influence and kept leadership honest — answers a version of the same question Ma answers with the Two Pie Charts exercise and the compensation survey: what belongs on this person's plate. Both work in short, single-observation LinkedIn posts that carry an argument rather than a summary.
Howe reaches the role through revenue operations and go-to-market, and the posts read as a point of view on how the function should be scoped, including the argument that RevOps turns into a crutch when sales leaders push their own work onto it. Ma's material is more instrumental: exercises, handoff prompts, job listings, and pay data for people in the role or hiring for it, with less commentary on adjacent functions.
The teaching method is close to Ma's: name a pattern the audience recognises — the feast-famine cycle, four versions of an onboarding email nobody can tell apart — diagnose why it keeps recurring, then offer the fix rather than a pitch.
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Both write for operators who run a practice or a function, and both close on a direct question that asks the reader to apply the point to their own situation.
Erickson writes for principals of boutique consulting firms about marketing and pipeline: why DIY marketing always loses to delivery pressure, and why content works as a product sample and an authority signal.
Ma writes for chiefs of staff and the executives who hire them, so the subject matter barely overlaps.
The resemblance here is the structure of the argument, not the audience or the topic.
Both tie content and community to a recruiting audience, and both point to their own operating results rather than theory — Jones cites a 50% reduction in customer acquisition cost and a 400% increase in average contract value from content work, while Ma reports survey response numbers and where the results have been picked up.
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Both build on owned formats instead of borrowed reach: a podcast for Jones, a Substack and in-person events for Ma.
Jones sells fractional content work to staffing and recruiting agencies, and writes about content strategy, podcast production, and demand generation for a software company in that market. Ma's subject is the chief of staff role itself — career advice, peer problem-solving, job listings, and compensation data — with sponsor posts as the commercial format.
The only measured audience figure in the available evidence is a following of 64,114 on Clara Ma's LinkedIn profile, observed on October 8, 2026.
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The rest of the material is content, not audience measurement.
The posts reviewed are written for Chiefs of Staff and for the executives deciding whether to hire one: a reading list for the role, the two-pie-charts exercise for moving a principal's time out of recruiting and operations, compensation survey results drawn on by Forbes, open Chief of Staff roles, and a New York mastermind session.
That shows who the content is aimed at.
It does not show who actually reads it.
No follower geography, seniority, job function, employer, or company size data was available for review, and no post-level reach or engagement numbers were supplied.
A buyer cannot tell from this evidence what share of the following works as a Chief of Staff, what share are executives or founders who might hire one, and what share are recruiters, vendors, or job seekers.
For a webinar or article brief on executive time allocation and delegation, the topic match is direct and easy to argue from the posts themselves, but the professional composition of the audience is unverified.
No video, podcast, or newsletter performance sample was supplied, so no format comparison is possible and no delivery range should be assumed from the follower count.
Concrete next step: before committing budget, ask for a LinkedIn follower demographics export covering location, seniority, industry, and company size, any audience survey the creator has run that captures job titles and reporting lines, and recent post results for comparable topics, depth, and formats.
If the brief depends on reaching sitting Chiefs of Staff specifically, treat the survey or another documented audience source as a requirement, not a nice-to-have.
Clara Ma's partnership evidence centers on Ask a Chief of Staff, the community and recruiting resource Clara Ma leads.
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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.
Disclosed paid LinkedIn partnership
Buyer requirement
Expect a narrative post with a clear paid-partnership disclosure and a product link. The Replit example used #ReplitPartner and tied the sponsor to a practical operations lesson, so the buyer should supply a message that can be integrated into Clara Ma's usual advice format.
Event partnership for Ask a Chief of Staff community events
Buyer requirement
A buyer would support a small-group mastermind or community event. The public announcement thanked ABS Partners Real Estate for making the NYC mastermind happen and used approval-based registration, so the buyer should plan for event logistics, capacity, and attendee screening.
Sponsorship inventory across Ask a Chief of Staff channels
Buyer requirement
The hiring post for a Partnerships Lead describes sponsorships across newsletter, podcast, events, media, or a membership community, with brands such as Notion, Gamma, and Offsite named. A buyer must ask for current inventory, placement specs, pricing, and audience data because the supplied evidence does not include a rate card or sponsor policy.
Brand mention or referral
Buyer requirement
A post can direct readers to a vendor or service, as with the Oceans Talent mention. No payment is disclosed in that post, so a buyer should not treat it as a paid placement; any paid version would need its own clear disclosure.
A B2B executive coaching or productivity platform wants credible Chief of Staff content and wants to co-produce a webinar or article on executive time allocation and delegation.
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Reasons
The Two Pie Charts exercise is a ready-made teaching asset rather than a topic opinion. The creator describes having a principal chart current versus ideal time use — recruiting and hiring at 50% against a desired 25%, general operations at 35% against 10%, forward-looking strategy at 10% against 35%, flex and thinking time at 5% against 30% — then taking over recruiting because it was their own background and moving that share from 50% to 25% within a month. A coaching or productivity buyer gets a runnable exercise with a measured before-and-after, not advice the audience cannot act on.
The delegation argument supplies a second module in the same session. A post on joining Hugging Face as Chief of Staff in 2020 says the CEO already had an executive assistant who owned the calendar, which let each new process be handed off before the next problem started, and contrasts that with Chiefs of Staff who build a process and then spend every week running it. The recommended prompt — what am I still running that someone else could own now — translates directly into a delegation exercise for an audience beyond the Chief of Staff title.
The commercial format is proven in public. One post for Replit is labelled as a paid partnership and still follows the creator's usual structure: a concrete operational failure first (four versions of member onboarding emails, nobody knowing which was current), the fix that worked before the product existed (one repository as source of truth, emails moved into the playbook, repeatable playbooks), then the sponsor positioned as the same pattern applied to AI agents. A platform buying this kind of placement can see the expected shape of the message.
Repeatable, citable hooks already exist: an annual Chief of Staff compensation survey that reports 150-plus responses for 2026, previous results featured in Forbes, and a December Substack publication date; and an annotated reading list first assembled in 2022 and updated, which names Harvard Business Review, The New York Times, Forbes, and First Round Review. Either gives a sponsor a second piece of content to attach to.
The event format is small-group and low-production: a New York mastermind with breakfast at 8:00, facilitated small-group problem-solving at 8:30, and group reflections at 9:30, approval-based registration, and a host-partner credit for ABS Partners Real Estate. For a coaching platform, a facilitated peer session is a better sponsorship slot than a stage slot.
Limits and conditions
Audience composition is unverified. The only measured figure available is a following of 64,114 on LinkedIn observed on October 8, 2026. There is no follower geography, seniority, industry, company size, or job function data, and no post-level reach or engagement numbers. The topic match is easy to argue from the posts; the professional make-up of the audience is not.
Before committing budget, request a follower demographics export covering location, seniority, industry, and company size, plus results for recent posts of comparable topic and depth. If the brief depends on reaching sitting Chiefs of Staff specifically, treat a surveyed audience source as a requirement rather than a nice-to-have.
No rate card, sponsor policy, or official sponsorship inquiry page was supplied, and sponsorship appears to run through a Partnerships Lead role hired contract and fractional. Expect a longer contracting path than dealing with a standing media kit, and ask for current inventory, placement specifications, and pricing directly.
Nothing in the evidence supports guaranteed delivery, conversion rates, or click performance. Any agreement should be scoped on the content deliverable, not on a guaranteed traffic or lead number.
Verdict
Strong fit. This is the brief the available material supports best, and it can be executed without new research.
When to choose a specialist
A recruiting or HR technology vendor wants a performance-priced lead campaign — a gated asset or webinar plus a cost-per-lead arrangement measured on booked demos — targeting HR directors and heads of people operations at companies with more than 1,000 employees.
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Reasons
The audience cannot be qualified from the available evidence. There is no follower geography, seniority, job function, employer, or company size data, and no post-level reach or engagement numbers. A buyer cannot tell what share of the following are executives who might hire a Chief of Staff, what share are recruiters, vendors, or job seekers, and what share are HR or people-operations leaders at large companies. Targeting a named enterprise buyer committee is a claim the material does not establish.
The recruiting-adjacent content exists but points elsewhere. Posts cover an open roles page with Chief of Staff positions, salary ranges for full-time roles, locations including San Francisco, New York City, and Seattle, operator and fractional openings, and a candidate pool. That is job-market content aimed at candidates and hiring principals, not evidence of an HR-buyer readership. Recruiting and hiring also appears as one slice of the two-pie-charts executive time exercise, which is a coaching topic rather than an HR procurement topic.
The commercial structure conflicts with the evidence. No rate card, sponsor policy, or sponsor inquiry route was supplied, and no paid calls are authorized. A cost-per-lead or demo-booking arrangement also depends on conversion tracking the supplied material does not include; no analytics, click, or booking data were available.
The compensation survey and the open roles page are genuine hooks for a recruiting vendor, and the one named brand roster — Notion, Gamma, and Offsite in a Partnerships Lead hiring post — points toward software and operator tooling sponsors rather than HR buyer committees. Those are reasons to reframe the brief, not reasons to accept it unchanged.
The strongest channel evidence is text posts from one LinkedIn account. No video, podcast, newsletter performance sample, or event recording was supplied, so the buyer cannot weigh formats or assume a delivery range from the follower count.
Reframe
If the same vendor wants to work with this creator, the workable version is a recruiting-content partnership aimed at Chiefs of Staff and the executives who hire them — for example a co-published piece on how the Chief of Staff role is scoped and compensated, built on the annual survey — priced on the production and placement rather than on booked demos. That still requires the demographics and comparable post results above before a budget decision.
Verdict
Weak fit as specified. The brief is not impossible on topic, but the evidence cannot support the commercial structure or the audience claim, and proceeding would require data nobody has supplied.
A worked campaign example
Angle
A 45-minute webinar paired with a co-published article, built around one runnable exercise: chart the executive's current week against the week they want, then use the gap to decide what gets handed off first.
Assets
A blank two-pie-chart worksheet with printed percentages for a worked example and an empty pair of charts for the participant's own case.
A one-page quarterly redraw checklist: current state, ideal state, slice being handed off, owner, date, and what counted as success.
A handoff prompt card carrying the question about what is still being run that someone else could own, with space for the answer to be turned into a role description.
Sponsor integration
The platform's product enters as the mechanic for the handoff, not as the topic. Keep the operational problem narrative first — competing priorities, recurring work nobody owns, a process that lives in one person's head — and place the product in a short, clearly labelled close, the same order the Replit partnership post follows. If the sponsor supplies a template repository or tracking sheet, it should be the handoff artefact participants leave with, not a separate pitch.
Structure
Content
Draw the two pie charts with the audience rather than describing them. Show a current state and a desired state side by side, using the public example: recruiting and hiring 50% against a desired 25%, general operations 35% against 10%, forward-looking strategy 10% against 35%, flex and thinking time 5% against 30%. The point to land early is that the distance between the two charts, not the job title, is what defines the role's mandate.
Segment
Opening, first 10 minutes
Content
Walk through how the recruiting slice was taken over because it was the creator's own background, and how that share fell from 50% to 25% within one month. Keep the account specific: picking the slice where you already have standing, running point from week two, and letting one visible win buy the credibility to take on more.
Segment
Worked case, minutes 10 to 22
Content
Move from reallocation to handoff. Use the executive assistant example from the Hugging Face period — an assistant who knew the CEO's rhythms, owned the calendar, and later absorbed admin — to make the argument that handoff is a discipline, not a one-time hire. The working question for the audience is what they are still running that someone else could own now, and the answer becomes a job description.
Segment
Delegation module, minutes 22 to 34
Content
Participants redraw their own charts on the worksheet, pick one slice to hand off in the next quarter, and write the first three steps. Close on the review cadence: redraw both charts every quarter so the gap and the absorbed work stay visible when review season arrives.
Segment
Exercise and close, minutes 34 to 45
Title working
Two Charts, One Month: How to Move Half Your Week Off Recruiting and Operations
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.
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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.
The accepted brief asks for a mechanism the audience can run.
Howe's material is argument and definition: there is no charting exercise, no measured change in an executive's week, and no published sponsorship format showing how a labelled placement would be shaped.
A platform choosing Howe trades the ready-made Two Pie Charts worksheet and its 50%-to-25% recruiting result for a sharper definitional point, and would have to build the working resource itself.
Two posts is also a thin sample for judging range.
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.
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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.
This is a different audience and a different decision.
The campaign would be about client acquisition for services firms rather than time allocation and handoff, so a platform that wanted credible Chief of Staff content would need to reframe the brief around marketing consistency.
Erickson's posts state the pattern and the argument without a worked example, a template, or an exercise the reader can complete, and neither post shows a sponsorship, event, or co-produced asset a platform could attach to.
Two posts is a narrow base for estimating range or availability.
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.
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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.
Jones's evidence is content marketing inside staffing and recruiting, not the Chief of Staff role or executive time allocation, so the audience overlaps with the accepted brief only at the edges and the exercise-based angle would not transfer.
Jones also advertises fractional content work, which makes the working relationship closer to hiring a producer than sponsoring an existing channel — a different commercial shape, with different expectations about disclosure and placement.
Neither post shows audience size, a rate card, or a placement format, so cost and reach would need to be established before a budget decision.
This page was built from nine posts published on Clara Ma's LinkedIn account, read in full, plus a small set of comparison posts by three other creators working in adjacent territory.
The posts cover the two-pie-charts exercise for mapping how an executive actually spends time against how they want to spend it, the case for handing off a process once it works instead of running it forever, an annual anonymous Chief of Staff compensation survey, an annotated reading list first assembled in 2022 and since updated, a first in-person Mastermind session in New York, recruiting pages and a partnerships hire, and two posts about software products, one of them labelled as a paid partnership.
The comparison material was published between March and June 2026 and was used only to place Ma's approach against similar creators.
The posts themselves carry no publication dates.
Years and deadlines that appear inside them — 2020, 2022, 2025, 2026, and two November dates — are Ma's own references and were not independently confirmed.
The only measured audience figure is a LinkedIn following of 64,114 observed on October 8, 2026.
No follower demographics, no reach or engagement numbers, and no post-level performance data were available.
Gaps that remain open: no newsletter issues, video, podcast, or event recordings were reviewed, so longer formats such as the Substack compensation report and the NYC Mastermind are known only from mentions inside the posts.
No books, shows, or earlier career material were found in the reviewed evidence, so any signature work beyond these posts is unconfirmed and should be researched separately before release.
Commercial terms for two recommendations the posts make — Pebl and Oceans Talent — are not stated, and payment should not be inferred.
Recent engagement
Across their last 7 LinkedIn posts, the median post got 62 reactions and 26 comments. Checked 2026-11-02.
