Dishwashers Come With Manuals. Chiefs of Staff Don’t. Until Now.

THE COUL & GOLD BRIEFING · ISSUE Nº 33 · OCTOBER 1, 2026

I’ve been a Chief of Staff in a federal agency, in philanthropy, and in the private sector. In every one of those jobs, the first thing I did was open a blank document at 11 p.m. and build the weekly update from scratch. The second was the decision log. The third was the pre-read for whoever my executive answered to. In the private sector, that’s a board. In a federal agency, it’s Congress, which is a board with subpoena power and C-SPAN. Nobody handed me any of it, because nobody hands anyone any of it. Everyone just assumes you already know what the documents look like.

(I didn’t. I learned by building bad ones and watching my executive’s face as she read them. You know the face.)

My dishwasher came with a manual. In four languages, with diagrams. Every Chief of Staff job I’ve had came with a laptop and a lanyard. So Suzi and I wrote the manual for you. We call it The Vault, and it opened at 10:00 this morning.

The job runs on judgment, and the only place anyone sees your judgment is the one page you send your executive every week. That page is what she decides from. Skip the decision log and your team will re-argue the same decision every Tuesday until one of you retires. Spend nine hours on a board pre-read and the board will skim it in the elevator. Get the documents wrong in Month One and you spend the rest of the year putting out fires you set yourself.

Now, the question you’re too polite to ask. Could an AI spit out 61 documents about the Chief of Staff role in an afternoon? Sure. One helped us build these. (Hi, Claude.) We are fervent believers in transparency, so we’re not going to flat out lie and said AI had nothing to do with this. Of course it did. But, we started with an idea, and a set of documents we use(d) regularly, and a list of documents we wished we had. We knew what needed to go into each one. Claude built the fillable PDFs so there’s an ease of use we didn’t have back in the day (you know, when we walked to school barefoot). What it couldn’t do is know which version of the weekly update survives a CEO who reads it on her phone between meetings. Or where the Decision Log falls apart the first time a founder changes his mind. Or what a fractional scope letter has to say so you aren’t renegotiating the whole engagement in Week Six. (Ask me how I know.) That part is ours. Suzi and I have both done this job, we went through every document in the Vault, and we put our names on it. We don’t do that lightly.

Every Chief of Staff I know has a secret folder of these documents. They built them on nights and weekends, dragged them from job to job, and never showed them to a soul, because the first draft of every one was mortifying. Ours were too. The difference is that between the two of us, we’ve rebuilt them enough times, in enough offices, to know which version works.

Suzi had doubts about the whole idea. (She’s been wrong before.* Twice, by my count, and I keep the count.) Then she made every document in it sharper, which is how I lose most of our arguments.

*She needs to be wrong here, guys. It’s a moral imperative. So, please check it out and buy it if you’re so persuaded. Otherwise, I’m going to have to listen to the adult version of “Neh, neh, neh, neh, neh! I’m right and you’re wrong!” on an endless and insufferable loop while in NYC. (Where you can come and see us here.)

There are two vaults. The Full-Time Vault has what you need to run an executive’s office: The Weekly CEO Update, The Decision Log, The Board Pre-Read Pack, the offsite runbook, the reorg comms plan, and the one-pager you write in the first hour of a crisis (ideally before anyone who thinks they’re the rogue journalist version of TMZ — but is really just one of your warehouse guys — starts tweeting). The Fractional Vault covers a part-time engagement from The Scope and Mandate Letter all the way through the handoff, including a two-page manual for the client who has never had a Chief of Staff and has no idea what to do with you.

Across both: 61 documents, 11 interactive tools, and 5 Excel workbooks. That’s 77 in all. Yes, I counted.

Every document comes three ways. The Full Guide walks through every part with a worked example underneath, using fictitious names, numbers, and dates, so you can see what a good one says before you write yours. The fillable worksheet sits right next to it and saves to your account, so what you build in the Vault is what you send. The Quick Read gives you the short version on screen, as deep as you want to go. You can search both vaults word-for-word, and your name goes on every page, because the license is for you, not your forwarding list.

Either vault costs $495 a year, or you can get both for $895. One document from each vault is free for your name and email: The Weekly CEO Update and The Executive’s User Manual, Full Guides and all. Kick the tires before you pay.

The Vault is in beta, which means we’re still fixing things and we know it’s not perfect. But for all the junk out there (and I think junk is being generous), we think this is a pretty damn good start. Still, for those of you who have reached out in the past, there’s a request box at the bottom of the shelves, and we expect you to use it. Tell us what’s missing. The requests decide what we build next, so if you join this month, you’re helping us write the library.

Reply to this email and tell me what you think. Cranky notes welcome. Encouraged, even.

Take care,
Rachael

One voice from inside the role. One from the blueprints. Same mission.