Somebody Is Paying $150,000 for the Job You're Doing for Free
A job posting crossed my feed this week. A serious organization is hiring a Chief of Staff. The salary band is $140,000 to $155,000 a year. One-year term. Starts in January.
Read that again, because it is the most honest price tag I have ever seen on something you do every day for free.
A chief of staff is the person who holds the operation so the leader can lead. They sit between the executive and the noise. Every request, every decision, every loose end in a complicated organization lands on their desk first. They sort it. They prepare it. They follow up on it. They remember what was promised, to whom, and by when. The executive's job is judgment, direction, and the work only they can do. Everything else has a person.
Companies pay $150,000 for that person because they know what happens without one. The leader becomes the system. Every detail lives in one head. Strategy gets done at midnight, after the inbox, the calendar, the hundred small carries of the day. It works, for a while, the way carrying everything in your arms works. Until you have to open a door.
You are an executive. Nobody staffed you.
Here is the part nobody says out loud. You run an operation too.
If you run a business, you are the CEO, and also the sales team, the bookkeeper, the scheduler, and the person who remembers to reorder supplies. If you run a household, you are the executive of a small, chaotic, beloved organization with staff meetings at the kitchen counter and a budget and a calendar full of other people's lives. Either way, the operation is real. The workload is real. And the staffing is you. All of it. Every reminder, every form, every "did anyone ever call about," held in the one head that is also supposed to be doing the leading.
No board would accept that arrangement for a hired executive. They would call it a waste of the most expensive person in the building. We call it Tuesday for owners and parents, and we call the exhaustion a personal failing.
It is not a failing. It is an unfilled position.
The position just became affordable.
For most of history, a chief of staff was a luxury of the powerful, because the only way to get one was to hire a human being at a human salary. That posting, $140,000 to $155,000, is what the real thing still costs.
What changed, quietly, in the last couple of years, is that the core of the job became software. Holding the details. Sorting the noise. Preparing the decision. Remembering the promise. The tools that do those things are sitting in your pocket right now, most of them free, the rest for less than a family pizza night. The gap between the executive with a chief of staff and you was never talent. It was access. And the access just went to nearly zero.
I want to be precise about this, because precision matters more than hype. An AI chief of staff is not a $150,000 human. It will not use judgment the way a great human chief of staff does, and anyone who tells you otherwise is selling you something. What it does is the carrying. The remembering, the sorting, the first draft, the follow-up, the mental load that has nowhere to live except your head. That carrying is most of the job's daily weight, and it is the part that was crushing you.
You talk. It carries. You keep the judgment, the decisions, the parts that make you the executive of your own life. It takes the storage problem off your desk entirely.
Take the power position.
Think about what the posting is really saying. An organization looked at its leader and decided their attention was worth protecting at $150,000 a year. Your attention deserves the same verdict. Your business does. Your family does. The version of you that is not holding 400 loose ends is a better founder, a better parent, a better partner, and it is not close.
The tools are in your pocket. The doors are already there; most people just have never been shown them. That showing is the work I do. A course and a private community, built to take owners and default parents from carrying it all to directing it all, one small step at a time.
Somebody is paying $150,000 for the job you are doing for free. You do not need the $150,000. You need the staff.
Start where every executive starts. Give the job to someone whose job it is.
David Heyburn is the founder of The AI-Powered Owner, a course and private community that teach overwhelmed owners and default parents to build an AI chief of staff from the tools they already own. Start at aipoweredowner.com.