About the role
This role is for an intense, relentless, and systems-minded Operator. We are not looking for a corporate manager, an advisor, a meeting coordinator, or a senior Executive Assistant looking to "level up." We are looking for an execution-heavy backbone builder who actively enjoys pushing people to perform and holding them strictly accountable.
If you are conflict-averse, need daily task lists, or care more about corporate perks and titles than raw performance and speed, do not apply. You will waste your time and ours.
🟢 This is for you if:
You are a true Operator: You don’t just "oversee", you personally hunt down loose ends, write the SOPs, sit with team members to diagnose slow workflows, and drive projects to completion.
You hold people accountable without flinching: You are entirely comfortable asking "Why is this late, what is the actual blocker, and when exactly will it be done?" in a direct, zero-fluff manner.
You have thick skin and zero ego: You thrive in high-output, rapid startup environments and welcome harsh, hyper-direct criticism without getting defensive.
You think in systems and constraints: When you look at a pipeline shipping 100 assets a week, you instinctively map out exactly what needs to be true to scale it to 200.
You are highly resourceful: You walk into a messy, fast-moving business, identify what is broken, and propose the fix independently without waiting for a manager to hold your hand.
🔴 This is NOT for you if:
You are conflict-averse: If having difficult conversations or pushing a teammate on a missed deadline makes you visibly uncomfortable, this role will eat you alive.
You come from a slow corporate background: If you are used to stable workflows, lengthy quarterly planning cycles, or spending weeks "getting buy-in" and making slide decks, our pace will kill you.
You want to manage from a distance: If you expect to delegate all the grunt work, avoid getting your hands dirty, or act primarily as a strategy filter, this isn't your role.
You expect a comfortable 40-hour work week: We move at lightning speed and operate with an always-on mindset. You work the hours the work demands to win.
You are looking for an EA or Chief of Staff role in title only: This is a high-leverage operating function. If your career has been built on process theatre (calendar management, typing up meeting notes, and status reports) without real operational ownership, this is a mismatch.
🏢 About Us & The Mission
Ziella is a fast-growing, performance-first Direct-to-Consumer (DTC) brand ecosystem operating at the cutting edge of paid social advertising. We are scaling rapidly across creative production, media buying, aggressive product launches, and a secondary brand.
The Scale Bottleneck: We are growing fast, expanding across creative pipelines, media buying, product launches, and a secondary brand. Because our revenue is scaling ahead of our operational infrastructure, our founders are still acting as the primary air traffic controllers for daily execution. To unlock our next level of growth and absorb new hires, we need a dedicated operator to institutionalize accountability, streamline our workflows, and remove the founders as the day-to-day operational bottleneck.
Your Mission: You will step in to build the operational backbone of Ziella. You will take project management, accountability rhythms, and process optimization entirely off the founders' plates, transforming loose execution into a hyper-efficient, legible, and fast-moving factory.
📋 Scope of Work (What You Will Do)
This is a heavy execution role with strong operational decision-making authority within your lane. You will influence laterally across the team through cadence and process.
Daily Responsibilities:
Enforce the Accountability Cadence: Run the weekly accountability rhythm across the entire team so that project statuses are fully visible without the founders ever having to hunt through Slack.
Own the SOP Library: Personally author, audit, and tighten core operational workflows, starting immediately with our high-leverage ad operations pipeline and our UGC creator content systems.
Drive Stuck Projects: Take immediate ownership of delegated initiatives that are dragging (e.g., product launches, system builds, hiring projects) and force them to visibility and completion.
Unblock the Founders: Synthesize complex updates, blockers, and operational decisions into clean, frictionless formats so the founders can review and approve in seconds.
Audit Throughput: Constantly analyze our pipelines to find constraints, identify where time is leaking, and determine what is required to 2x or 3x our current output.
What You Own vs. What You Don't:
You Fully Own: Team accountability cadences, project timelines/delivery, SOP authorship, throughput audits, and vendor/tooling research.
You Do NOT Do: Top-level growth strategy, brand direction, revenue/ROAS/CAC ownership, dashboard/data infrastructure building, or founder calendar/admin work. (Note: We have an existing operations team member who strictly owns data, reports, BigQuery, and supply chain/fulfillment—your scope sits distinctly across process and execution.)
🎯 Experience & Skill Signals
We are looking for a senior-level operator (or a highly rigorous mid-level operator on a clear COO-track) who possesses an unmissable mix of operational discipline, elite written communication, sharp interpersonal judgment, and a relentless drive to execute.
Your Background Likely Looks Like One of These:
The Former Small Business Founder: You have personally built an operational backbone from scratch, SOPs, hiring pipelines, and accountability metrics—and you know how to make a team execute without you in every meeting.
The Ex-Chief of Staff / COO: You have scaled a smaller DTC brand, e-commerce brand, or high-growth startup, and you have a proven track record of driving outcomes in scrappy, intense environments.
The Post-Consulting Operator: You come from a top-tier firm (McKinsey, Bain, BCG, etc.) but left consulting because you wanted to stop making slides, start operating, and actually build systems with attached outcomes.
The Elite Senior Operator: You have been the foundational person quietly making a small, high-performing team run on time, and you are ready to own the entire operational function at the next level.
Verification Non-Negotiables:
You must be able to share highly specific, concrete operational stories detailing: “Here was the core project that was dragging, here is exactly what I did to diagnose the block, and here is how I forced it to ship.” Or “Here was a team failing its commitments, here is the exact accountability framework I built, and here is the measurable outcome.”
⚡ Operating Style, Cadence & Selection Process
Response Cadence: Same-day response speed, every single working day, across a 5-day work week. No exceptions.
Travel: You must be flexible and open to international travel roughly twice a year for intense, in-person alignment and strategy workshops with the founders.
The 30/60/90 Day Trajectory:
Day 30: Fully absorbed our workflows, sat with every contributor, made project status perfectly legible, and launched the weekly accountability rhythm.
Day 60: Shipped our three primary SOPs (Ad Operations, Content Systems, and Product SKU Launches) and forced real ship dates on stuck initiatives.
Day 90: Complete independent ownership. Founders spend zero hours chasing execution, blockers are routed in minutes, and you have successfully surfaced your first major throughput optimization finding.
Hiring Format: We do not use traditional take-home trial tasks for this role. Finalists will undergo a live round format featuring a live scenario Q&A and an operational thinking test. We will present actual bottlenecks from our business to evaluate your diagnostic questioning, structural thinking, and comfort with pushing back under pressure.