That’s where you come in. This is a brand new role in a brand new department, focussed entirely on the commercial performance of the business and the various commercial projects that make it up. It’s not that we’ve bumbled along paying it no mind up until this point, but the scale and scope of the business now requires a dedicated team.
Key tasks and responsibilities
- Pricing: defining and refining the pricing strategy and toolset to optimise the price point of all of our lines.
- Stock-capital allocation: develop stock holding strategies and tools to maximise the expected return on our total stock capital.
- Creating the commercial business case for all significant projects.
- Responsible for developing the merchandising aspect of Master of Malt.
- Responsible for maximising the commercial opportunity across all areas of the business.
About you
You’re deeply commercial, obviously, and are naturally analytical. Waste makes you feel viscerally sad, whether it’s actual waste (good money after bad) or waste of potential (stuff being left on the table).
You’re good with your numbers; so you have a decent degree in maths, statistics or a related subject (science-y stuff).
You’ve managed high-profile projects and have several years experience in a relevant role which has lots of responsibility (pricing manager, business analyst, etc.).
You’re technical, insofar as you are able to create tools and reports to monitor and manage your areas of responsibility. You can conceptualise an algorithm for adjusting product prices to react to market demand and explain it to a software developer so that it can be brought to life. In a pinch, you could even knock up a proof of concept implementation yourself using something like Excel.
You need to be a flexible fast learner. You’ll be expected to take a commercial view or to own the commercial aspect of projects across the entire business; so one day you might be looking at a ‘free shipping’ retail promotion, and the next be thinking about currency hedging. This means that you’ll need to learn enough about both of these things to appreciate the big picture and make a good call.
You are a strong influencer who is comfortable making a recommendation despite incomplete information. You’ll recognise that very often in business we need to make a call before there is sufficient data available, and you are comfortable doing that based on a clear set of underlying assumptions and caveats. You’ll need to influence ‘up’ (convincing the board to agree to proceed on a project) and ‘across’ (fighting for priority on other teams’ work stacks).
You’ll definitely need to manage a team and recruit some people, so hopefully you have management experience or can otherwise convince us that you’d do a good job managing a team.