VP OF OPERATIONS

VP of Operations Job Description

The VP will be an expert managing a distributed team reliant on technology to track daily workflows, communications, and performance.

The VP of Operations will be a leader, a mentor, and a trainer in the organization and will set an example for teammates in both their actions and words. Our hire should inspire and motivate their team to go the extra mile in ensuring our guests, our venue partners, and talent walk away excited about their experience with us. Our VP should be able to achieve this without needing to be physically present next to each team member to drive these results.

About the role:

The Vice President of Operations will manage the Company's operations team in New York City, a market that is expected to produce ~$50mm annually.

Our ideal candidate will have had prior experience scaling a VC-backed logistics startup building and designing scalable operational workflows and managing operations teams.

Our hire will love building structure to enable organization and building processes to ensure consistency.

The VP will plan, direct, coordinate, and oversee all operational activities for New York, ensuring the development and implementation of efficient operations and cost-effective systems to meet the current and future needs of the organization. The VP of Operations will excel at drafting standard operating procedures, working cross-departmentally to finalize their implementation, and ensuring that they are consistently followed. After implementing these product enhancements, they will devise ways to track results to monitor the effect of any such changes. The VP of Operations will be laser-focused on improving our workflows and providing critical insights on how to improve communication, scheduling, resource deployment, and reducing the operational complexities of their department to facilitate the ability to host an ever-increasing number of events.
Our hire will recognize that, as a hospitality brand, saying “yes” is important to building client relationships. Our VP of Operations will also understand that if insufficient infrastructure or training exists to support saying “yes,” our team may sacrifice the quality of not only that event but others taking place concurrently. The VP will race to identify areas where infrastructure (the designing of SOPs, or revisions to training) needs to be concepted and implemented and will spearhead its construction to enable our ability to confidently say “yes.” The VP of Operations will be obsessed with our mission of empowering the next generation of culinary talent on the platform, but even more obsessed with building a team that is digitally native and embraces working in a dynamic environment that is constantly changing.

Start Date: Flexible, but target of 6/1/2024.
Qualifications

• Experience scaling a VC backed hospitality startup (ideally from Seed to Growth Rounds).
• Digitally savvy- the ability to research, recommend and implement software-based solutions and tech solutions to drive operational efficiencies and obtain buy-in from the team to utilize the solutions.
• Experience managing a digitally native team requiring consistent use of slack, Monday.com or other project management software.
• Excellent oral and written communication skills such that they can be client-facing in their correspondence and presence in meetings.
• Strong business acumen with a broad understanding of fundamental business principles
• Analytical problem-solving with impeccable attention to detail
• Excellent oral and written communication skills
• The ability to work effectively with different personalities.
• Ability to drive process improvement, set strategy and deliver results to senior leadership.
• Strong organizational skills & time Management skills; the ability to efficiently prioritize deliverables.
• Excellent team management/leadership skills- Ability to support and grow existing team and be a driving force in their continued success.
• Strong ability to multi-task
• Strong analytical and writing skills, intermediate skills in Microsoft Office
• Ability to react and adjust quickly to changing conditions and problem solve real-time challenges.

Responsibilities:

The core responsibilities of the VP of Operations will include, but not be limited to the

Operations Team Management

• Work alongside your team to align on systems and protocols that are well-documented and easy to follow, execute, and replicate to provide consistent, outstanding service at events.

• Manage and develop a communications strategy that translates into operations team members successfully managing their direct reports, efficiently detailing challenges and areas where they need support, and facilitating fewer communications break downs

• Develop and maintain SOPs for all operational activities such as our Handbook, Service Manual, and other relevant company policies and monitor implementation of those activities.

• Collaborate with senior management to develop and maintain current AORs and KPIs for team, guide their activity and measure their success.

• Propose strategic initiatives to senior management and create/ implement a strategic plan to execute and implement it.

• Oversee the creation and maintenance of the Operations Weekly Sprint schedule for the team

• Leverage technology and digital workflows to further facilitate building efficient processes on a distributed basis.

• Build and maintain a digital workflow that allows the daily, weekly, monthly tracking of productivity of each teammate.

• Manage the team in a manner where each team member feels engaged, valued, and respected.

• Identify, train and develop leaders within the company and set them on a path for management.

• Leverage technology such as Culture Amp to be able to drive better team morale and reduce pain points that the team is experiencing.

Cross-Department Communication & Collaboration

• Working directly with Financial Controller on setting, implementing, and tracking budgets for various projects, including monitoring and controlling event costs and all team expenditures

• Partner closely with our Sales, CSS, Marketing, and Finance leaders and their teams, serving as the operational subject matter expert in various meetings and correspondences.

• Informing C Suite Executives and all major departments of all important strategic initiatives and key decisions that will affect the Company and other departments.

• Meet weekly with senior leadership to contribute ideas to company initiatives that would affect the operations team and provide perspective and recommendations as to how to proceed.

• Venue Development: Work cross-functionally with other departments to lead all activities related to new venue activations. This includes but is not limited to:
  New Venue Activation: As a reference: Real Estate Venue Opening Checklist
  Work with Director of Event Operations to direct all pre-opening activities, including creation of venue-specific SOPs, ordering all required items, and collaborating with CSS, Marketing, Sales, Ops to coordinate Friends and Family event, floor plans, venue capacity guidelines.

  Oversee Venue Closing x Move out

• Team Performance Reporting

  • Establish high levels of quality, accuracy, and process consistency in planning, forecasting, and budgeting approaches developed and used by the operations team.

  • Establish KPIs for each employee on the team, and a means for tracking each colleague's KPIs in a transparent and communicative fashion in order to drive high quality, consistent results team-wide. Ex: meeting attendance, hitting strategic project deadlines, # of events hosted, margin on beverage

• Incorporate early detection and identification into the KPI process to ensure timely actions are taken if an employee isn’t achieving expected productivity.

• Establish benchmark performance reports to define the collective success/failures of the team, present to senior management your monthly assessment of the performance as a team.

Product Familiarization

• Become intimately familiar with every role on the team such that you understand each team member’s day-to-day workload, responsibilities and focus granularly.

• As the leader of the team, demonstrate a hands-on, positive attitude towards volunteering to take shifts to understand the roles of our event staff, event leads, directors, etc so that we develop a company culture where nobody is too big or important to get their hands dirty with any small task.

Miscellaneous Responsibilities:

• Tackling unforeseen issues and troubleshooting

• Representing the company for external and internal events

• Monitoring the competitive landscape and attending industry events to stay abreast of new initiatives and ways to stay ahead.

• Ensuring we maintain compliance across the operations team.
  $160,000-$200,000 base + bonus + equity