Chief Operations Officer

Red Stag Fulfillment – Chief Operations Officer Red Stag Fulfillment, LLC ("Red Stag") is an order fulfillment company for eCommerce businesses headquartered in Knoxville, TN.  We were created with one mission: to redefine the 3PL experience for both clients and employees.  By leveraging technology to ensure accurate, reliable, secure, and fast shipping, we have established ourselves as a world-class fulfillment company.  Additionally, we understand that our people (aka "The Herd") are our most important asset.  We have grown into one of America's best order fulfillment companies by building a team of people who are eager to be a part of our growth.  Our core values are of paramount importance and inform and guide all our decisions.We treat others with dignity and respect. We sweat the small stuff. We have positive attitudes. We act like we own it.We always seek to improve.We are hiring a Chief Operations Officer ("COO") to join our executive leadership team. This is a full-time role, reporting to our CEO and working out of our Sweetwater, TN warehouse (with travel required). About the role: We need an entrepreneurial, hands-on, people-first builder who can honor our tradition of operations excellence and scale it to service our valued clients. 

At the outset, let's be clear: the title COO means different things in different organizations.  At Red Stag, while our COO will have strategic responsibilities, this is first and foremost a hands-on role, with day-to-day accountability for the four-wall fulfillment operations of our business.  This is not a COO who manages the administration of our company, or a COO who is the de facto #2 to our CEO, or a COO who leads the sales side of the house.  This is an Operations COO, in the very literal sense of the word.

Our COO will be accountable for what we do every minute, every hour, every day – fulfillment.  Each day, we re-earn our clients' trust by exceeding their expectations across a number of key service deliverables – our reputation is in the COO's hands on a daily basis.  The COO will be responsible for caring for, developing, and tending to the Herd; mastering, improving, and scaling our fulfillment systems and processes; and cultivating our internal leadership pipeline - all while exceeding daily service level expectations of our valued clients. Responsibilities:Bring an insatiable, entrepreneurial, problem-solving mentality to the warehouse floor, where continuous improvement is the rule, not the exception.Embody and teach our Core Values.Be ultimately responsible for driving excellence in our day-to-day warehousing and fulfillment performance. Underscore and grow the Operations team's client-centric mindset, where every team member is eager and  proud to serve our clients on a daily basis.Create and reinforce a culture of extreme process efficiency and accuracy.  Forecast, communicate, add, and manage new labor, facility, and transportation capacity to support growth. In collaboration with other executives, build, cultivate, and deploy a best-in-class internal leadership development pipeline. Rigorously measure our fulfillment performance through a matrix of robust-but-sensible KPIs, and then have the vision, judgment, and decisiveness to adjust when necessary.Maintain and enhance our unbending commitment to safety and compliance.Lead cross-functional efforts to shape Red Stag's service offerings to meet client needs.Partner with technology and client relations teams to identify, spec out, test, debug, and launch new solutions to better serve our clients.Partner with HR team to identify, spec out, test, debut, and launch new solutions to enable our team members to have long and successful careers at Red Stag. Constantly pursue perfection in an effort to exceed the expectations of the Herd and our clients.The perfect candidate should have the following traits, behaviors, and experiences: You understand that our business begins and ends with the Herd and our clients.You have a genuine love, affection, and respect for people.You're about your people – you're expert in recruiting, hiring, training, and developing teams.  That's why everyone from your executive leaders to your entry-level analysts to your hourly team members would walk across broken glass for you.  You have a bias to action, and a mindset of optimization and execution.  When you walk through any operations environment, you instinctively take mental notes about, and brainstorm solutions to solve, its inefficiencies.  You can flow seamlessly from "sweating the small stuff" and executing .001% process improvements, to thinking big picture about strategic concepts impacting the 5-year outlook of parcel fulfillment.  You love to leverage technology (software and hardware) to provide great service to your many stakeholders.  You're ruthless and uncompromising on matters of safety and compliance.  You have an unquenchable thirst for learning, which informs and drives your continuous improvement mindset.  You have empathy for those around you, but you are unapologetic about the unrealistically high standards you pursue for yourself and your teams. You have demonstrated an ability to scale asset-based and labor-centric operations in a high-growth, multi-site environment.You have demonstrated an ability to work with cross-functional teams to create "customer oriented" solutions.You have expertise in operational excellence and Lean principles, grounded in pragmatism (as opposed to dogmatism).You have experience in eCommerce, logistics, warehousing, fulfillment, or parcel shipping.You have experience working with, managing, implementing, and even coding software.You have a demonstrated ability to hire, mentor, lead, and promote people.You're a clear and efficient communicator, embodying respectful candor and thoughtful directness.Finally, while it's essential for us to outline the characteristics and competencies of the perfect candidate, it might be equally important to list the types of candidates who need not apply:A "strategic visionary" who prefers corporate boardrooms and investor presentations over warehouse floors and gemba walks.An order-taker, paralyzed by indecision until someone directs your day-to-day activity and tells you what to do.A maintainer, hoping to execute the established playbook as opposed to writing it themselves.A political animal, who advances via corporate politics rather than value creation.A head in the sand, who wants to "just do my job" and not actively search for other ways to improve our business and team.Application & Evaluation Process: This is a critical role for our business, and we'll be deliberate and methodical in our evaluation process.  As a heads up, candidates will be asked to complete a couple up-front assessments.  In the past, some folks have been turned off by that, and that's ok.  We certainly don't want to ask candidates to invest any time that they're not willing to invest.  But historically, we've found that the right "fits" tend to enjoy our process.    If you know someone who may be interested and qualified in this opportunity, please share this page with them. If you are qualified and interested, please apply by filling out the blanks on the right side of this page and clicking "Submit Application."  We look forward to hearing from you and will be in touch with the "next steps."