Executive Assistant to the Founder

Job title

Executive Assistant to the Founder

Reports to

Founder & Director

Location

Hybrid — three days from home, two on site across the settings and head office

Contract

Permanent, employed

Hours

Full-time

Salary

£45,000-£52,000 depending on experience

Safer recruitment

Enhanced DBS and full pre-employment checks apply

Role purpose

Fountain Montessori is a group of four Montessori settings — Colindale, Edgware, St Albans and Colindale Nido — caring for around 80 children a day with a team of roughly 90 educators. The group runs on EOS/Traction, with quarterly goals tracked at a Monday leadership meeting, and is growing three ways at once: acquiring existing nurseries, building new settings, and franchising. There is a property arm alongside the nurseries. The ten-year goal is ten schools.

The Founder’s time is the group’s scarcest resource. This role exists to protect it.

The Executive Assistant provides high-level, proactive and confidential support to the Founder, so that she can stay on growth, acquisitions, relationships and the future of the business — and stop holding the detail of everything else in her head.

The single test of this role: things get done, tracked and closed without the Founder having to ask twice.

This is a role with real delegated authority. The postholder is expected to act inside a defined lane and report afterwards, rather than seek permission for work that is already theirs. The boundaries of that authority, the working rhythm and the milestones for the first six months are set out in a separate document, The First 90 Days, which is issued on day one.

Key responsibilities

This role is defined by outcomes. The postholder owns the result, not the instruction.

1. The Founder’s diary and time

The outcome: the Founder arrives at the right place, at the right time, prepared, and never has to ask a follow-up question.

• Every commitment in the calendar with the time, location, travel time either side, joining link, who is attending, and what she needs to have read beforehand.
• Nothing stays as a verbal agreement. If it was agreed, it is in the diary the same day.
• Conflicts resolved before she sees them. She is shown a decision, not a problem.
• Travel across four settings planned as a route, not as separate appointments.
• Her most productive hours protected as the default, not filled by whoever asks first.

1. The inbox

The outcome: nothing important is missed, and nothing important goes unflagged.

• Triaged daily. Deal with what is yours, draft what needs her voice, escalate only what genuinely needs her judgement.
• Every reply to a campaign, mailshot, enquiry or introduction is seen, logged and routed in the same week it arrives. Warm replies do not sit unread.
• Anything needing the Founder is flagged in a short daily summary, with a recommendation attached.
• Nothing waits more than 24 hours without at least an acknowledgement.
• Nothing is missed because of absence. A handover is left; the backlog is cleared on return.

Inbox access is granted in stages across the first 90 days as the working relationship is established.

1. Tracking, follow-through and making the plan visible

This is the core of the role.

The outcome: the Founder can see the status of everything at a glance, and never has to chase for an update.

• Every open action, project and commitment sits in one shared tracker with a named owner, a next step and a date. Not in an inbox, and not in anyone’s head.
• Take what the Founder describes verbally — the project, the intent, the next three steps — and turn it into a written, visible plan with the documents and deadlines attached.
• Chase actions across the leadership team and external advisers, at every level, politely and every time.
• Update the Founder before she asks: a written weekly summary of what has moved, what is stuck, and what needs her.
• Consistency matters more than brilliance here. The standard is the same in week forty as in week one.

1. Systems, technology and information

The outcome: the group’s tools do the work they were bought to do, and the Founder is not paying for software nobody uses.

• Confident daily use of the CRM, the project tracker, shared drives, e-signature tools and the group dashboard.
• Digital and paper filing organised so anything can be found in under a minute — deal documents filed by type and by company, not left in an inbox.
• New s…