Operations Fellow

Saturn Five•Denver, CO

6d•$150,000 - $150,000

About The Position

The Operations Fellow role is designed as an approximately 24-month on-ramp to senior leadership roles within or outside Saturn Five’s growing portfolio of small businesses. The Fellow learns the Saturn Five Way, gains firsthand experience supporting small businesses, and develops hands-on operating and operational-finance experience. Working directly with Operating Partners, the Fellow executes strategic and tactical projects and supports the CEOs, GMs, and Presidents of portfolio companies while building a small-business leadership toolkit. Saturn Five is a long-term-hold investment firm that buys and operates small businesses. The Fellow supports the operational needs of a portfolio of more than 31 companies, works with a 20-person team, and helps portfolio businesses pursue sustainable growth, meet quarterly investor distribution targets, and help employees flourish. The role offers exposure to operational processes and systems and to the practices of lower-middle-market company leaders. The position includes hands-on projects for individual businesses and Saturn Five’s Portfolio Management Team. Work may span finance, people, sales, operations, and cash management, including budgets and annual plans, incentive compensation, leadership support, business improvement initiatives, playbooks, hiring, HR compliance, customer experience and sales processes, operating rhythms, inventory systems, cash forecasts, distributions, and capital expenditure planning.

Requirements

Unquestionable integrity and trustworthiness in stewarding investors’ money.
A true passion for small business and commitment to leading one soon.
Five to ten years of post-undergraduate work experience.
Real-world leadership of a small unit or team of front-line employees.
Operational finance skills.
Direct exposure to financial statements and their analysis.
Comfort with high ambiguity and day-to-day variation in job focus.
A four-year undergraduate degree; business or finance focus is beneficial, but other backgrounds are accepted.
Proactive, hardworking, and an effective teammate.
Kind, firm, and grounded approach; willingness to serve others.
Good humor and ability to handle the unpredictability of small businesses.
High standards for work quality and commitment to excellence.
Comfort stepping into ambiguous or messy situations, with a bias toward process improvement and systematizing healthy practices.
Desire for work to matter and alignment with Saturn Five’s core values of Adventure, Joy, Trust, Excellence, and Love.

Nice To Haves

Management-team-level experience in a small-to-medium-sized company with $2 million to $10 million in EBITDA.
Expertise in a small-business-related cross-company functional area, such as SEO, hiring, inventory management, or job costing.
An MBA or equivalent professional degree.

Responsibilities

Support Saturn Five Operating Partners and the Portfolio Management Team through hands-on project work for portfolio companies.
Review and improve portfolio-company budgets and annual plans.
Design and model key-employee incentive compensation plans.
Work alongside portfolio-company leaders to address major sales, supplier, or operational issues.
Tackle key projects and domain-specific initiatives to improve or stabilize operating businesses.
Build and improve Saturn Five playbooks using practical experience and examples addressing common small-business challenges and opportunities.
Support strategic planning using small-business budgets, 13-week cash projections, and monthly financial forecasts.
Run mid-level manager hiring processes, serve as a point person on HR compliance issues, and conduct coaching or mentorship meetings.
Develop customer-experience materials and sales-pipeline processes, support customer outreach and cold-calling, and conduct customer-satisfaction follow-up calls.
Coach portfolio companies on weekly, monthly, and annual status updates; conduct toolbox meetings; and design inventory-count and management systems.
Recommend quarterly portfolio-company distributions based on cash needs and recent performance, build capital expenditure plans, and help develop 13-week cash-flow forecasts.