Oplu recruits private PAs for founders and entrepreneurs whose personal lives have outgrown their capacity to manage them alone. You are building at speed, your personal admin is falling behind, and you are spending hours each week on logistics that have nothing to do with your company.
You need what a UHNW principal has: a brilliant PA who can run your personal world without being told what to do. You just do not have the infrastructure yet. No family office, no household team, no systems. That is exactly where Oplu starts.
Oplu places private PAs with founders, entrepreneurs, and fast-scaling executives who are hiring personal support for the first time. We apply the same rigour used in UHNW family office placements to principals building their infrastructure from scratch.
Related roles
Most founders hire their first PA too late. By the time they realise they need one, they have already lost months of their own time to logistics they should never have been handling. These are the signals we hear most often:
Founders frequently try to combine personal and professional support into a single hire. It rarely works at scale. The Private PA handles personal logistics: travel, property, lifestyle, financial admin, and vendor management. The EA handles business workflow: diary, stakeholders, and executive communications. The Chief of Staff owns delivery across workstreams with decision-making authority.
| Role | Focus | Typical mandate | Key difference |
|---|---|---|---|
| Private PA | Personal logistics, lifestyle, admin | Founder's private continuity | Owns everything outside the business |
| Executive Assistant | Business workflow, diary, stakeholders | Founder's professional rhythm | Controls business calendar and information flow |
| Chief of Staff | Delivery, decision cadence, operations | Cross-functional accountability | Requires authority to act on the founder's behalf |
If your personal life is the bottleneck, start with a Private PA. If business operations are the bottleneck, start with an EA or Chief of Staff.
The founder closes a funding round on Wednesday and decides to fly to Lisbon on Thursday for a long weekend. There is no itinerary. The PA books flights, finds a hotel the founder will like based on three previous trips, arranges ground transport, moves two personal appointments, alerts the accountant to hold expense receipts, and sends a single confirmation message. The founder boards the plane and everything is handled.
A tax deadline is ten days away. The accountant needs bank statements from two jurisdictions, proof of residence, and a signed declaration. The founder has not opened the accountant's email. The PA pulls the documents from the filing system they built in month two, chases the missing bank statement, prepares the declaration for signature, and gets it to the accountant with a week to spare. The founder signs one document.
The biggest risk with this hire is not competence. It is that the PA treats the role like a 9-to-5 when the founder's life does not have those boundaries.
UK: Approximately £50,000 to £90,000 depending on scope, travel, and hours. Roles with extensive travel and round-the-clock availability can reach £120,000 or more.
US: Approximately $80,000 to $160,000. New York and California benchmark highest. Founders in tech and venture capital often pay at the upper end due to pace and complexity.
These are not corporate PA salaries. The hours are long, the scope is undefined, and the right person is worth every penny.
Oplu shares detailed ranges and benchmarks once the brief is scoped.
Private PAs who work well with founders are a specific breed. They thrive on pace and autonomy. They leave when the founder adds complexity without adding resource, or when the role that started as personal support quietly absorbs business admin, household management, and event planning until no lane is protected and everything is half-done.
What motivates them is trust and proximity. They want a founder who delegates fully, not one who delegates then second-guesses every decision. They want the authority to act without waiting for approval on routine matters. They are drawn to founders who are building something and want their personal world to run as tightly as their business.
During interviews, they assess the founder's self-awareness. They listen for whether the founder understands what the role actually involves or whether they describe it as "just keeping things organised." They want to know if the founder has had personal support before and what happened. A founder who has never had a PA and expects perfection from day one is a warning sign.
Red flags include: a founder who cannot describe a typical week, an expectation of 24/7 availability with no discussion of compensation or boundaries, a role that combines PA, EA, and office manager into one seat with one salary, and any sign that the founder views the PA as an extension of their phone rather than a professional with judgement. The best candidates at this level will ask direct questions about scope, hours, and what success looks like in six months. If the founder cannot answer, they walk.
Oplu's experience placing PAs in UHNW environments means we know what high-trust, one-to-one support looks like. We apply the same rigour to founder placements. The trust model is identical. The difference is that we also assess for comfort with ambiguity, pace, and the absence of existing systems.
We test candidates through scenario-based interviews: a last-minute travel change, a vendor who has missed a deadline, a personal request with no context. Referencing is handled discreetly, validating how candidates managed sensitive information, responded to undefined scope, and whether they built structure or waited for it.
What you receive
A Private PA manages the founder's entire personal life: travel, property, financial admin, lifestyle logistics, vendor coordination, and information management. Unlike a corporate PA, this role operates one-to-one with a single principal, handling sensitive personal matters with full discretion.
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