Customer Relationship Management Executive in City of London

Mon-Thursday in the office, working from home on Fridays.

We’re building the AI-first operating platform for food and drink brands. Growing a brilliant brand is hard enough. Running it shouldn’t mean wrestling with endless spreadsheets, disconnected systems and manual processes. Pesto connects the tools a brand already uses - Shopify, Xero, 3PL software and the wholesaler EDI layer - and takes a good chunk of the operational faff off their plate. Production and demand planning gives challenger brands the data, visibility and automation they need to scale - without having to build huge teams to hold everything together.

Now we’re looking for a Founding Customer & Operations Manager to help our customers get the very best from Pesto and shape what we build next. As our customer base grows, we’re looking for someone to take real ownership of the customer journey - helping us onboard more brands while continuing to deliver a brilliant experience for every customer.

You’ll manage the onboarding process for new brands, get their integrations live, help their teams feel confident using Pesto and make sure they’re getting real value from it. This isn’t a traditional customer success role. You’ll be the person closest to those conversations - spotting what’s broken, understanding the real problem underneath each request and helping us decide what to build next.

You’ll also shape how our customer function works as we grow including onboarding, support, escalations and customer health:

• Own the onboarding of new brands, from getting their integrations live to training their teams and helping them get value from Pesto quickly.
• Build the way we approach onboarding, support and customer success as we grow.
• Work out how we measure whether a brand is genuinely thriving with Pesto.
• Work closely with our Customer Success Engineer, combining your food and drink operations know-how with their software engineering expertise.
• Develop user guides and videos that help customers get the most from Pesto.
• Work directly with our COO & CTO, on product and roadmap priorities.
• Run discovery with customers to test ideas, pressure-test our assumptions and work out what’s worth building before we build it.
• Turn what you hear into a clear, structured and prioritised view of what can help customers most.

Keeping the commercial engine running (20%):

• Support product demos and pre-sales conversations with hands-on product knowledge.
• Help keep our commercial operations running properly, including CRM hygiene, pipeline reporting, renewals and processes.

Picking up the things that matter (10%):

• As part of a start-up there will be broader projects and initiatives to take on, such as:
• Building automations to speed up sales preparation.
• Creating customer-facing content.
• Other special projects that will support the business and drive your personal development.

Within your first three months, you’ll be running new customer onboarding independently, answering most customer questions and contributing ideas about how the product and customer experience could be improved. You’ll have created a documented, repeatable approach to onboarding and support, alongside a clear feedback loop between customers and product. You’ll also be discussing what comes next, whether that’s developing towards a Chief of Staff role or building a customer team around you.

Requirements:

• Have at least three years’ experience in operations, customer success or account management, either within a consumer brand or a B2B SaaS business serving them.
• Have worked in or with food, drink, FMCG or consumer goods businesses.
• Are genuinely comfortable working with spreadsheets and data, as you'll be managing reconciliations and integration setup, not just managing the relationship.
• Actively use AI to improve the quality and efficiency of your work.
• Are excited by the opportunity to help build the defining software that food and drink brands run their businesses on.
• Have hands-on experience with some of the systems our customers use, such as Shopify, Xero or 3PL tools.
• Have helped customers or internal teams adopt new software, systems or processes.
• Have worked closely with product or engineering teams, using customer feedback to help shape product improvements.

You’ll become that channel - working directly with the COO & CTO on prioritisation and using your own customer relationships to work out what’s worth building. You won’t be inheriting a rigid customer success function with embedded processes. You’ll help create the onboarding approach, support process and measures we use to understand whether customers are successful. You’ll sit with the COO & CTO every day, with no layers between you and the decisions being made.

Depending on your strengths and ambitions, the realistic next step could be Head of Customer or Chief of Staff - and we see that as being 12–18 months away, not five years.

Benefits:

• Pension.
• ~25 days holiday, plus bank holidays.
• Your birthday off.
• Mon-Thursday in the London Bridge office, Fridays working from home.
• Flexible approach.

We have a female CEO and diverse representation in the team across nationalities, gender and LGBTQIA+.