CEO Office Lead in City of London

Most companies don’t fail because they made the wrong call. They fail because the right call sat in someone’s inbox for three weeks while a deck got built about it. You’ve watched this happen. Probably more than once. The room agreed in principle, the action was obvious, and somehow nobody owned getting it done. So you went and did it yourself. Not because anyone asked. Because you cannot stand watching things move slowly when they don’t have to. That instinct is the one thing this role is for.

Healf is Europe’s fastest-growing company. Number one on the FT1000, number one on the Sifted 100. From £1m to over £100m in under three years, with a small, talent-dense team and an electric culture with day one founder intensity. Now we’re aiming for £1bn in the next three. We curate the world’s best wellbeing brands across The Four Pillars™: EAT, MOVE, MIND, SLEEP. That’s the first chapter. The next chapter is harder and more interesting. We are moving from one market to many, from e-commerce to a technology platform, and from curating wellbeing to defining it. We are a health company, so we think we should act like one. At its fullest expression, Healf redefines what wellbeing means for tens of millions of people.

Why this role is Healf: Healf went from £1m to £100m on founder intensity. Small team. Fast decisions. Direct lines. No meetings about meetings. That operating model is the most powerful force the company has and the most fragile. Most companies lose their edge somewhere between £100m and £1bn because the founder cannot be in every room and the system that replaces them is not good enough. The intensity dilutes. The pace slows. The judgement averages across a team too large to think as one. This role exists so that does not happen here.

Chief of staff is the functional label. The real job is to be the second pair of hands that does what the founder cannot personally do, at the same intensity, with the same standards, on the things that matter most. You sit next to the CEO and own the three things that decide whether founder intensity survives the next 10x:

• The international expansion.
• The operating rhythm.
• The strategic projects nobody else will drive.

You are not a chief of staff who produces decks. You are the person who gets the hard things done.

What you will own in the first 12 months:

• The international expansion: No single person is accountable for whether Healf wins in Germany, France, or the markets after that. You will be. You hold the international P&L. You run the weekly trading meeting and you make sure the meeting actually decides things. You drive central teams in London to deliver for markets they are not standing in. You build the operating model that turns one country into a system the next eighteen plug into. This is not a country manager role. It is the role that makes country managers possible.
• The operating rhythm: Founder intensity at scale needs infrastructure. With the CFO and CEO, you build the cadence that lets every team know what they own, what is moving, and what to do about it. Weekly trading meetings that drive decisions. Input metrics traced through to the P&L. Goals that connect company, team, and individual. Reviews automated by the data team so the system runs without the people who built it.
• The strategic projects nobody else will drive: Two at a time, no more. Margin re-engineered. The customer journey rebuilt around obsession rather than convenience. The agentic acceleration gap closed. You scope, drive, ship, and hand to the function leader who runs it from there.

You start as a function of one. Over time you build a small team of exceptional generalists around you. The CEO Office becomes the surge capacity for the whole company.

What you will have built in a year:

• International expansion operating under a documented model that turns the next market launch into a 60-day process rather than a six-month exercise.
• A measurement infrastructure that connects company goals to team metrics to individual performance, automated end to end.
• Core strategic projects delivered with measurable commercial outcomes, owned end to end and handed off cleanly.
• A clear path to whatever you become next. International Director. GM of a major market. Future founder. The CEO Office is the proving ground, not the destination.

How fast? Your first meaningful operating decision in week one.

Why you’re Healf: You are a ruthless executor. Hands dirty. Religious about execution. The thing you are proudest of from your last few years is not a strategy you wrote. It is something that exists in the world because you refused to let it not exist. You build before the meeting about the build is finished. You have built operating systems, not designed them. You know what a good weekly trading meeting feels like because you have run one. You know what a useful KPI tree looks like because you have shipped one and watched a team make better decisions because of it. You replaced heroics with rhythm somewhere and you watched it work.

You are commercial first. You read a P&L the way a musician reads a score. You can walk into a category, find the lever that matters, and pull it. You think in unit economics, not narratives.

You love the grind. Not in the way people on LinkedIn say they do. In the way that means you have a track record of picking up the work nobody else wanted because the work needed doing. Late nights you do not resent. Weekends you do not announce. The version of yourself you are most proud of is the one that just kept going.

You move at founder pace. What frustrated you most about your last few years was the pace. You wanted the company to move faster, so you moved faster yourself and worked around the rest. You are looking for an environment where the floor is your previous ceiling. Healf is your identity expressed as a company. You track your sleep, you research what you put in your body, you treat your own performance as something worth investing in. Applying operator instinct to a company built on what you actually care about feels obvious.

Signals we’re looking for:

• An operating system you built and ran that replaced heroics with rhythm. What was the company stuck on, what did you build, and how did the team behave differently afterwards?
• A commercial outcome you owned end to end. Not contributed to. Owned. The kind of result whose success is something only you can specifically claim.
• Something hard you got done that nobody else was going to get done. What was it, why did nobody else do it, and what did it cost you?
• Evidence of building a function from scratch, running a central-versus-local model, or operating across multiple markets.
• Why wellbeing, why this moment, why this role?

The deal: Competitive base plus meaningful equity for the right person. We ask a great deal of the people who work here. We expect full ownership and a genuine commitment to give this chapter everything you have. In return, we will give you the same: everything we have, invested in your growth, your wellbeing, and the defining skills of the next decade. We have built the fastest-growing company in Europe with a team small enough that every person in it shapes the outcome. That is still true today. The next person we hire will change the trajectory of the company. If the most important work of your career is ahead of you, this is the place to do it.

One question: Include your answer in your CV or cover letter attachment when you apply. Founder intensity got Healf from £1m to £100m. The next 10x will break it unless someone builds the system that lets it survive scale. You are 90 days in. Walk us through two things: the first thing you stop the founder from doing, and the first decision you make that the founder would not have made. 300 words. Plain English. No decks. Show us how you think.