A Startup's Crucial First Hire: The "Do-It-All Office Admin"

> Sadly, more often than not, at least in my experience, aforementioned execs take all that for granted and the secretary remains a secretary in terms of pay and appreciation.

True story:

A friend of mine is a broker to a guy who is/was a major real estatement developer. Billions of dollars of developments. The guy is a maniac too, he'd develop multiple sites in different ways at the same time and he had a pretty small staff. Just infinite amounts of work and energy. Immigrant parents, came up from nothing, developer was just a pretty amazing guy.

My friend was one of the brokers he used. One year, secretary's day was coming around. Normally, the developer would give his secretary like a $200 gift certificate for Tiffany's or to a fancy restaurant or something like that.

This year, he thought - you know, my secretary has been with me for 20 years, she's been amazing, I should do something really special for her. My friend was just about to trade his car in and get a new car, and so he sold it to the developer for a pretty good bargain - something like $12,000. It was a nice sports car, only a few years old.

So he gave her the car, and she was thrilled, really really happy. Very grateful. After a couple weeks, the thrill wore off, and it was just business as normal, and she was still the very good secretary she had been for years and things were going well.

Next year, secretary's day rolls around again, and he gives her... a $250 gift certificate for Tiffany's. Like every other year.

And she was TICKED. Very upset. Her work quality suffered. She'd been very excited about what she was going to get, and then a slightly bigger than normal gift certificate was very upsetting.

Long story short - many people have thought the same way as you and tried to rectify it, often with undesired results. Everyone in the world isn't necessarily stupid - if something is done almost everywhere a certain way, it might because that way works the best. When deviating from the normal way, things should be thought through carefully. I do agree that a top notch assistant is invaluable though, and often times underappreciated.

This may be one area in which big corporate business is better than startups/SMB. The Exec assistants in the large companies I've worked for have been very well respected, well treated, and often made more money than the average IT guy.

The departmental assistants, not so much. But the ones who truly supported the execs did quite well.

Indeed. One of the things I've learned as a graduate student is that the department secretary is the single most important person in the department, at least for a student. They will likely be the one to schedule your exams, order your supplies (including chemicals!), get you time with faculty, coordinate meetings with your committee, and generally keep things running smoothly. Woe to the student who gets on their bad side.

Having an office admin isn't about offloading tasks which are "below" you: these tasks often require experience and excellent people skills, and it's about an effective division of labor.

I worry about the startup whose CEO cares a single second on what kind of fridge they have. Wrong priorities. Spent that extra 20 minutes on hiring, product planning, sales or coding.

"Office Manager" is a good percentage of the role, but in a chaotic startup environment, settling on the narrower job expectations that come with that title is limiting. Our d-i-a-o-a's were doing usability studies, guerilla marketing, recruiting and other things way beyond the tranditional scope. In a startup, it is good to have generalists and people willing to stretch and do whatever it takes (even for engineers...imagine if one of your devs said "um, sorry, i only do OO, if you need a shell script for XYZ, that work is below me" or whatever...disaster)

With all due respect, this is totally different from exec admin or exec babysitter. When we were 12 people in a small room coding and focused on our product, our do-it-all-office admins were absolutely strategic, important and appreciated by everyone in the company....and they allowed everyone to focus without distractions. And when we were acquired, our d-i-a-o-a were doing due diligence and holding their own with multiple execs and about 5 laywers. They were incredible. I'd lay down on the tracks for them now. Their job was anything but "baby-sitting". And it got each of them into top schools pursuing law and business degrees. By the way, not bad for a first job out of college.