A fractional EA service
You ask.
We do the work.
A fractional executive assistant for principals who want the hours back without handing their whole life to something that cannot be talked out of a mistake. One standing brief, and a real person on the other end of it.
Opening soon · A small number of clients, by introduction
The exposure
The fashionable answer is to give software the keys to your life.
Connect an agent to your inbox, your calendar, your files and your card, and the permissions it needs are coarse ones. Send mail as you is a single switch, not a list of the letters you would have approved. Read everything is not something you can grant carefully.
And the way such a thing works is by reading. Messages, invitations, attachments, quotes from suppliers you have never met. An instruction buried in any of that is read as an instruction, because nothing in the machinery reliably separates the text you meant from the text that merely arrived.
What leaves the other side carries your address, your authority and your standing. A confident mistake made at speed is still your mistake, and by the time you read it, it has been sent.
The duller exposure is the permanent one. Your name, your number, your address and what was inferred about your means, copied into the database of every supplier, broker and agent the thing touched along the way. It sits in their systems, in their backups, and in whatever they lose next year. You did not choose to be there and you cannot take it back.
The safeguard
So a person goes instead, and stands between the two of you.
You ask us, and we do the work. Between those two things sits somebody who has read the request, worked out what you actually want rather than what you literally typed, and decided how to get it. That is the part that does not survive being handed to a switch.
A person also knows when to stop. Whether a supplier is stalling or genuinely busy. Whether a price is a real price. When the right answer is to come back to you instead of pressing on, which is a judgement software makes badly and then defends confidently.
Nothing of yours is handed over wholesale. No password of yours, no card, no standing set of keys to your mail and your diary. Where access is genuinely needed it is asked for, narrowly, for a named piece of work, and it is the exception rather than the arrangement.
One desk, one continuing brief. Context accumulates with a person in a way it does not with a queue, so each request costs you less to explain than the one before it, and nothing goes out in your name that somebody has not looked at first.
How it works
Three steps, and the last one is always yours.
You ask
A message in plain words, as you would say it out loud. No form to fill, no ticket to raise, no explaining the background from the beginning again.
We do the work
Calls made, suppliers found and chased, options made genuinely comparable. It stays on one desk until it is done, or until you are told precisely why it cannot be.
You decide
Anything that commits you, costs money or cannot be recalled comes back to you first, with what you need to answer it in one reading.
Attribution
And you choose what we say about you.
Full attribution
Used where it opens the door, because seniority is often the shortest route to a decision and there is no sense in spending it for nothing.
Known, not named
The default. That there is a principal is clear, who they are is not. It is sufficient for very nearly everything, and it ends the call that starts with somebody recognising your name.
No client mentioned
A general enquiry that belongs to nobody in particular. Worth having for the plain reason that a quote changes when a supplier knows who is asking.
Chosen per request, not once at the start. Nothing about you is disclosed by default, or in passing, or because a form had a field for it. Disclosure takes a deliberate instruction, which is the only version of this that survives contact with a busy week.
The practice
Whatever sits between a decision and its execution.
Diary & access
Time arranged, moved and defended, including the negotiation with everybody else's calendar.
Travel & movement
Routes, reservations and the contingency held in reserve for the leg that falls over.
Suppliers & counsel
The right trade found, quotes made genuinely comparable, and the silent ones pursued.
Research & briefing
A question answered in writing, sourced, so it costs you a minute rather than an afternoon.
Rarely only these. Most of it is the thing nobody owns: the request that became a ticket, joined a queue, and stopped being anybody's problem.
House rules
Fewer clients than we could take, on plain terms.
We do not spend your money
In this phase of the service we hold no card, no account and no means of paying for anything on your behalf. Whatever costs money comes back to you to authorise and to pay. It is a fact about what exists here, not a policy we could quietly revise.
Discretion
Nothing about a client's affairs is discussed, cited or used elsewhere. No names, no case studies, no logos on this page, including yours.
Terms in person
Scope, availability and fees are set out in conversation, once we both know the work suits.
Coming soon
Not open yet.
Pippa EA opens to a small number of clients shortly. There is deliberately no address, no number and no form on this page: the first clients arrive by introduction, and until then there is nothing here worth harvesting.