Managing Director | High-Growth Circular Economy Business

£120,000–£150,000 Base Salary (DOE) Significant Annual Performance Bonus Long-Term Incentive Opportunity Company Car / Car Allowance Pension.

You do not need to come directly from the waste management / circular economy industry. More important is your track record of building, growing and scaling a business, combined with a genuine interest in sustainability, innovation and the circular economy.

The Opportunity

This is not a role for someone looking to maintain the status quo. Working closely with the founders and Board, you will take full responsibility for the day-to-day leadership of the business and its next stage of growth. You will be responsible for:

• Building the organisational structure and leadership capability required to scale.
• Recruiting, developing and leading a high-performing team.
• Delivering sustainable revenue and EBITDA growth.
• Professionalising systems, processes, KPIs and management information without losing the entrepreneurial culture that has driven the business to date.
• Developing new markets, services and strategic growth opportunities.
• Strengthening relationships with major national and multi-site customers.
• Driving innovation through technology, data and smarter ways of working.
• Identifying and integrating strategic acquisitions where appropriate.
• Working alongside the founders and Board to build significant long-term enterprise value.

The ambition is substantial: to scale nationally and establish the business as one of the UK's leading circular economy partners.

The Person

We are particularly interested in speaking with entrepreneurial leaders who can demonstrate that they have:

• Built a business, business unit or division and taken genuine ownership for its success.
• Successfully grown and scaled an organisation through a sustained period of commercial expansion.
• Personally hired, developed and led the team required to support significant growth.
• Held broad, end-to-end leadership responsibility across a business rather than operating solely within one functional discipline.
• Owned financial performance and demonstrated an ability to improve profitability.
• Built the people, processes and infrastructure required to support sustainable growth.
• Worked successfully within an entrepreneurial, fast-moving environment where leaders are expected to be hands-on.
• Operated comfortably alongside founders, shareholders and/or a Board.
• Created a high-performance culture while developing future leaders.

Previous experience in waste management, resource management, recycling, environmental services, or the circular economy would be highly relevant, but not essential. We are open to exceptional leaders from other sectors who can demonstrate experience building and scaling businesses and who have a genuine interest in sustainability and the transition to a circular economy.

What We're Not Looking For

This appointment requires broad, end-to-end business leadership. Candidates whose experience has remained predominantly within a single functional discipline, whether sales, service delivery/operations or finance, are unlikely to have the breadth required for this particular opportunity. Equally, we're not looking for someone who has simply inherited a large, mature organisation and maintained its performance. We want to speak with leaders who can demonstrate what they have personally built, how they built it and the measurable growth that followed. A team they assembled. A business unit they created. A structure they put in place. A proposition they developed. And a business they successfully scaled.

Why This Opportunity?

The business operates at the intersection of commercial performance, resource management, sustainability and the circular economy. It helps organisations reduce costs, improve operational efficiency, increase recycling and accelerate their transition towards a circular economy through a combination of resource management, environmental intelligence, data, reporting and circular innovation.

The founders have reached an important point in the company's evolution. They are looking for an experienced leader who can assume full day-to-day responsibility and build the organisation well beyond its current scale. For the successful candidate, this is an opportunity to apply everything you have learned from building and scaling businesses to an organisation with significant growth potential and a clear environmental purpose. This is an opportunity to build, not maintain.

Confidential Executive Search

This appointment is being managed exclusively by 55 Exec Search. Further information regarding the organisation and its growth strategy will be shared with candidates whose experience closely aligns with the requirements following an initial confidential discussion. If you have genuinely built and scaled a business or business unit, assembled the team around you and can demonstrate the growth that followed, we'd like to hear from you. You don't need to have built your career in waste management. You do need to be a builder.