General Manager Operations in Cambridge

A privately owned, multi-site logistics business with a long trading history and a deliberate position in the market. It specialises in food and food ingredients, handling storage, distribution, container work, value added services and contract packing for clients who have stayed with it for decades rather than for contract terms. It has grown steadily and profitably, it is conservatively financed, and it has never had any interest in winning work on price alone.

What it sells is precision and care. Customers use it because their goods are handled properly, because problems are spotted before they become costs, and because the same people answer the phone year after year. That is a genuine commercial position rather than a marketing line and protecting it while the business grows is a real part of this job.

The business now intends to double the size of the operation over the next three years, through a combination of organic growth and acquisition. That ambition is the reason this appointment exists.

You will lead the entire operation, reporting directly to the Chief Executive. Warehousing, transport, contract packing, quality and compliance across multiple accredited sites all sit with you, together with the site management teams who run them day to day.

You will own the operating budget in full. You will build toward running your own profit and loss and presenting it to the board, reviewing the numbers weekly, flagging exceptions as they arise rather than saving them for a monthly meeting, and using conversations with customers to anticipate volume and plan labour and agency cover before it becomes urgent.

You will carry accountability for accreditation and food safety across every site, and for health and safety across both warehousing and transport. You will lead the operational management team, develop the layer beneath it and build the succession that a growing business needs.

When the business acquires again, and it fully intends to, you will assess the target operationally and lead the integration of its people, its systems and its standards.

The challenge, in practical terms:

• The first is measurement. Performance reporting has not kept pace with growth. Measurement today leans toward customer service and complaints, with less on service levels, cost to serve, utilisation and compliance. You will build the framework that a business of this size and ambition needs, and you will be given the room to do it.
• The second is consistency. The sites have grown up at different times and in different ways, and some have operated with considerable independence and done so effectively. Standards, reporting and ways of working need to align. Doing that without alienating capable people who have run their sites well for years is the harder half of the task.
• The third is systems. A capable warehouse management system was implemented relatively recently and now runs across the business, but it is largely being used to replicate what the previous system did. Nobody has yet asked whether the business is getting everything it should from it. That is not a project you are being handed, but it is an opportunity waiting for somebody with the experience to see it.

You are a senior operations leader from a medium sized third-party logistics business, with warehousing as your primary discipline and genuine transport experience alongside it. That combination matters more than anything else on this list. A warehousing career with transport managed at arm's length will not be enough, because closing exactly that gap is part of the reason for the appointment.

You have owned a profit and loss or a substantial budget, and you can build one, defend it and present it. You have integrated an acquisition or a significant new contract, and you understand that the operational condition of an acquired business is rarely what the financial due diligence suggested. You have held accountability for quality and compliance in an accredited food environment, and you know what an audit actually requires rather than what the manual says.

Ideally your career spans a larger business earlier and a medium sized one more recently. That combination tends to produce leaders who bring proper disciplines without expecting a central function to be there to apply them.

We are looking for evidence rather than assertion. That means operations you have scaled rather than simply maintained, measurement frameworks you have introduced where none existed, teams you have strengthened rather than inherited functioning, and cost or service improvements you can quantify and explain. If you have taken a site or a network from inconsistent to consistent, that is the experience that matters most here.

This is a business where relationships carry a great deal of weight. Many of the workforce have fifteen or twenty years of service, several have progressed from the warehouse floor into management, and they will form a view of you quickly. You will need to be visibly hands-on at the start, because credibility here is earned rather than granted by job title.

You will also need to be the kind of leader who arrives with proposals rather than criticism. The business is candid about what is not yet right, and it welcomes challenge, but there is a real difference between somebody who says the current position is not good enough and somebody who identifies the same gap and explains how they would close it. The second person will thrive here. The first will not.

Beyond that, the business wants somebody proactive. The most valuable thing you can bring is the habit of coming forward with what should happen next, rather than executing well when asked. Decisions are made quickly and often in the room, so you will need to be comfortable with pace on the day to day and with proper consideration on anything involving capital.

£85,000 to £95,000 base, with a defined route to Operations Director and £105,000 to £115,000 on promotion against criteria agreed with you. Bonus, company car, private health insurance, pension, and 25 days holiday plus bank holidays.

Apply in confidence with your CV. Our client is not named at this stage. We will brief you fully on the business, the operation and the opportunity before anything is shared with them, and nothing is passed on without your agreement.

Selection involves a structured competency and technical interview, followed by a second stage presentation on how you would approach the role. Psychometric assessment forms part of the process, with the interpretation shared with you as well as with our client.