Job Specification: OPERATIONS DIRECTOR, WEST AFRICA
Location: Lagos with significant travel in Nigeria and some travel elsewhere
In order to accelerate this growth, we are seeking to hire an experienced Operations Director with responsibility for the West Africa region with specific focus on Nigeria. Reporting to the West Africa General Manager with a dotted line to the Group CEO, the successful candidate will be a member of the corporate Senior Management Team and will contribute to the wider growth of the company as well as taking ownership for sales and operations management in West Africa region.
The company’s distribution channel has to be built by bringing together partners with key skills and access to the customer base made efficient using company’s data. This is similar to a franchise model but is a closer relationship where, for larger partners. The typical profile of an external distribution partner is that of a large consumer business in Africa ($50 million+ turnover) and has direct reach into rural communities.
The role therefore calls for someone with experience of creating and scaling end to end distribution supply chains, particularly consumer service supply chains in Nigeria and elsewhere in Africa. This may be for products such as FMCG, telecoms, insurance or agricultural offerings but importantly must reflect company’s need for a service supply chain that runs on PayGo and not a retail product supply chain.
Role requirement
• Build a powerful, scalable distribution system that is effective in Nigeria and replicable across other territories in West Africa, with appropriate localisations
• Lead the team that works with the country organisations to ensure the effective delivery of the distribution system within company’s target territories
• Define the processes and scope out the support systems required to manage and support the complete distribution lifecycle including (for example) Distributor Selection, New Customer selection, registration, installation and payment, Customer Care, Customer Protection and In-Market warranty management
• In conjunction with Distribution Management, Sales, customer care and other business functions, drive continuous improvement of the business processes required for an efficient and effective market operations and distribution system.
• In collaboration with the marketing team, create the agent and management tools, training materials and processes needed to drive distribution growth
• Ensure that field teams have the tools and processes to deliver quality customer data necessary to provide ongoing support to customers and to facilitate the financing of working capital
• Collaborate with the in-country call-centre, field operations teams and IT teams to develop an effective and scalable customer care solution and organisation that can handle and expeditiously resolve customer issues
• Troubleshoot and create action plans to quickly and effectively address problems
• Identifies process improvement opportunities to drive efficiencies through the market operations
Note: this is a “hands in” role, where the leader will be running a small, high calibre team and interacting closely with the local country operations. The successful candidate will be required to have a detailed understanding of the processes and contribute directly to their implementation on the ground, not just operate at arms length, while at the same time being able to contribute actively to the Senior Management Team and other parts of the organisation.
Skills requirement
• 15 + years of experience with increasing operational responsibility within the consumer services sector in both large and smaller organisations
• Extensive proven experience of building and managing consumer service distribution systems in Africa, ideally in Nigeria
• Strong financial and analytical skills. Ability to routinely analyse cashflow, balance sheet and P&L and to build appropriate models in Microsoft Excel for this purpose
• Strong sales management skills, with a proven record of building, motivating and managing distributed sales teams
• Managerial skills to work across boundaries, particularly with colleagues in other countries
• Gravitas to be able to interact comfortably at Board level, both within and partner organisations
• The self-confidence to operate as an effective team player across the senior management team
• Strong interpersonal and leadership skills to maximize effectiveness
• Strong persuasive communicator with demonstrable business acumen
• Excellent written and verbal communication skills and strong presentation skills
• Problem solving, decision making and organizational skills
• Strong customer service skills
• Ability to manage staff and multiple programs requiring attention to detail
• Flexibility and versatility in problem analysis and resolution
• Ability to communicate across functional lines
• Ability to analyze and interpret qualitative and quantitative data
• Excellent interpersonal, written and oral communications and organizational skills
• It is expected that the candidate will have spend at least some of their career working for multinational companies, potentially outside Africa.
Education
• Degree educated and possibly a higher business degree (e.g MBA), from a well-recognised institution.
Other requirements
• Fluent in at least two local languages
• Absolute integrity. We have a zero-tolerance policy to any kind of inappropriate commercial behaviour.
For more information on this exciting opportunity please email a copy of you CV in MS WORD format to power@energitalent.com using Completions Engineer as Subject and we would get in touch with all suitable applicants for this role.
