Manager - Business Operations (m f)

📋 Description

• • Own messy, high-impact operational problems end-to-end. You will be dropped into the most chaotic corners of our portfolio—logistics, customer support, finance, HR, product, marketing—and asked to diagnose, fix, and scale them. One week you may be redesigning a returns workflow that spans three countries; the next you may be building a KPI dashboard that the CEO uses every morning. You will not be given a playbook; you will write it.
• • Build lightweight, bullet-proof systems that scale from 0 to 100 M+ revenue. We acquire companies at a blistering pace—six in 18 months—so every process you create must survive rapid head-count growth, new geographies, and shifting product lines. Think Google-Sheet-turned-Looker-board that still works when the data set grows 30× overnight.
• • Lead cross-functional squads without formal authority. You will rally engineers in Toronto, warehouse leads in Veneto, and customer-support agents in Manila around a single North-Star metric—then ship the project before anyone asks for a status update. Influence is earned through clarity, data, and delivery, not hierarchy.
• • Turn fragmented data into decisions the leadership team trusts. You will extract CSV dumps from Shopify, ERP logs, Zendesk tickets, and carrier APIs; clean them; and surface the one insight that saves six-figure costs or lifts NPS by five points. SQL, spreadsheets, and BI tools are your daily weapons.
• • Take direct P&L ownership of logistics and customer support for at least one portfolio brand during your first six months. You will negotiate carrier rates, redesign SLAs, and personally answer escalated tickets until the metrics move. When they do, you will hand off a playbook and move to the next fire.
• • Prototype, pilot, and roll out new operational models in under 90 days. Example: launch a 3-PL in Germany for HEWI, measure cost-per-parcel versus in-house, and decide whether to double-down or kill it—before the next board meeting.
• • Support post-merger integration of newly acquired businesses. You will map existing processes, identify quick-win synergies, and ensure Italist-level service standards are live in the new entity within weeks, not quarters.
• • Build and track KPIs that matter. You will define, instrument, and obsess over metrics like OTIF, first-response time, cost-to-serve, and return-to-origin rate. When a KPI slips, you will know why and fix it before it becomes a board slide.
• • Coach and up-skill lean teams. You will not manage a large org chart, but you will mentor junior analysts, warehouse supervisors, and support leads so that your fixes stick after you move on.
• • Contribute to strategic planning cycles. Twice a year you will lock yourself in a room with the C-suite, pressure-test growth scenarios, and translate strategy into 90-day operational sprints with owners, budgets, and deadlines.
• • Embrace radical ownership. If a container is stuck in customs at 9 p.m. on a Friday, you find a broker, not an excuse. If a customer tweets a horror story, you reply publicly and fix it privately before social media notices.