General Manager

Saltbox•Chicago, IL

17d•$68,000 - $76,000•Onsite

About The Position

Saltbox makes the hardest parts of running a small online business simple. Our workspaces bring together flexible warehouse suites, offices, and hands-on logistics support, all designed to help eCommerce entrepreneurs scale with confidence. Our members run businesses across Fashion & Apparel, Health & Beauty, Electronics, Household Goods, and more. When you join Saltbox, you're not just joining a company, you're helping real small business owners in your own backyard succeed. This is our first Saltbox location in Chicago, opening in Elmhurst in fall 2026, and you're the person who makes it real. We're hiring the General Manager now, well before the doors open, so you're fully trained and ready to run the building from day one. You won't step into someone else's system: you'll build the team, the member relationships, and the operational playbook every future Chicago location gets measured against. You'll run this location as a business, not as an operations supervisor. Occupancy, member satisfaction, revenue, and team performance are yours, built through the systems you put in place, the people you develop, and the calls you make. Your job is to run the location as a business, member retention, team performance, and operational health are yours to own. Your job is to run the location as a business, member retention, team performance, and operational health are yours to own. Opening a brand-new location in a brand-new market is rare, and Chicago is a milestone for Saltbox. If you want full ownership of a P&L, a team, and a member community, and the chance to set the standard for an entire market, this is that role.

Requirements

3+ years managing a physical location or operations environment as a general manager, location manager, or similar, you know how to run a building and lead a team through it.
Curiosity about AI and a real willingness to build it into how you manage. You don't need to be an expert today, but you'll be expected to learn fast and bring your team along.
A business ownership mindset, you think in outcomes and hold yourself to the numbers.
A strong people developer, you grow the people around you and know the difference between developing and doing.
Member and customer relationship skills, you handle the conversations that take experience, empathy, and authority.
A clear, direct communicator, your team knows where they stand and your Market Leader is never surprised.
Operational instincts, you spot patterns, find root causes, and fix things at the system level.
Comfort with financial basics, you understand what occupancy, labor cost, and margin mean for your location's health.
Comfort with tools like Slack, Rippling, and operational reporting platforms, and willingness to adopt new ones as we grow.

Nice To Haves

You're energized by building something from scratch, not intimidated by a blank page.
You think in outcomes, not activities, and would rather own the result than work a task list.
You lead through your team, developing people instead of doing their jobs for them.
You take ownership of the whole location, that's the ownership mentality we hire for.
You stay calm and clear in the conversations that need authority: hard feedback, escalations, and tough calls.
You're close to your members and genuinely care whether their businesses succeed.
You hold a high standard and earn trust while doing it.

Responsibilities

Own the location's business performance: occupancy, member satisfaction, revenue targets, and budget adherence are yours.
Review location performance weekly, know the numbers, flag what's off, and bring your Market Leader into anything that needs attention.
Keep labor costs, supply budgets, and vendor relationships within parameters without managing every line item yourself.
Build and develop your team, their growth, performance, and confidence as operators are yours to own.
Own headcount decisions: know when it's time to hire, make the final call on who, and set new team members up to land well.
Conduct performance reviews, hold corrective action conversations, and make retention and separation decisions when it comes to it.
Coach your team through hard situations so they get better, rather than handling everything yourself.
Own member retention, staying close enough to your members to catch a problem before it becomes a cancellation.
Lead the tours and onboarding conversations that need a decision-maker: high-value prospects, complex scenarios, and key relationship moments.
Resolve member escalations directly, billing disputes, contract conversations, and anything that needs real authority.
Ensure the location runs at Saltbox's operational standards by building the systems and holding accountability, not by managing the day directly.
Own recurring problems at the system level: when the same issue keeps coming back, fix the cause, not the symptom.
Represent your location to the Market Leader and central teams, surfacing on-the-ground insight, risks, and opportunities with clear context.
Keep SOPs current and followed, auditing regularly so you catch gaps before something breaks.
Use Saltbox's reporting tools, Pulse, scheduling, and performance dashboards, to see what your eyes can't catch.
Set the expectation that your team uses the tools available to them, and follow through on it.
Stay ahead of system changes so your team isn't caught off guard.