Director of Core

HOW TO APPLY - Please submit an expression of interest

ABOUT THE OUTDOORS GROUP

The Outdoors Group is a ten-year strong, pioneering, ‘for purpose’ organisation primarily based in the county of Devon, providing opportunities for children, young people, and adults to access education, training, and fun experiences in outdoor settings. We are all about creating a fun and fantastic place to work with a strong emphasis on work-life balance as part of a community of like-minded people, focusing on providing excellent development opportunities for all our learners and staff. Leading in our market, we have heaps of knowledge, enthusiasm, and a strong vision about who we are and where we’re going…. come and join us on the journey!

For all our roles, a DBS and reference checks are required. The Outdoors Group Ltd is committed to the safeguarding of all staff, children, young people and vulnerable adults involved in its activities and in promoting their welfare.

Role context

TOG Operating Group is moving into its next stage of development as a multi-entity group. The Group is building a clearer operating model, with HoldCo governance, subsidiary accountability, shared core services, defined decision rights, Delegation of Authority, reporting rhythms and service-level expectations.

Core Services sits at the centre of this model. It covers the enabling functions that allow the Group and its subsidiaries to operate safely, consistently and efficiently, including HR / People operations, Finance, IT, systems and data, Operations and Estates, Health and Safety, and Marketing and communications standards.

The Core Services model includes a mandatory Core layer for governance, risk, compliance and minimum standards, alongside tiered Essential, Enhanced and Premium services for operational support, capability development and strategic input.

This role is being implemented at an important point in the Group’s development. TOG is not yet operating as a fully mature platform, but it is no longer small enough to rely on informal relationships, local variation, and reactive support. The Director of Core Services will therefore build the bridge between the current state and the future state.

This is not a back-office role. It is the role that makes the Group platform usable, consistent and scalable. The postholder will ensure that central services are not experienced as bureaucracy, but as practical infrastructure that helps subsidiaries deliver well, stay compliant, manage risk, improve performance and grow.

Role purpose

The Director of Core Services is accountable for designing, leading and embedding the Core Services platform across TOG Operating Group.

The role exists to ensure that subsidiaries have access to clear standards, reliable support, consistent systems, practical processes, transparent service levels, good reporting, and effective escalation routes.

The postholder will lead Core Services as a service platform: one that protects the Group, supports local delivery, improves quality, enables integration, and creates the conditions for scalable growth.

The role must balance three priorities:

1. Control: Ensuring the Group has consistent standards, governance, compliance, risk management, and reporting.
2. Service: Ensuring subsidiaries receive practical, responsive, and useful support.
3. Scale: Ensuring the Group can grow, integrate new entities, and improve performance without reinventing processes each time.

Key accountabilities

1. Build and lead the Core Services platform

Lead the development of Core Services as a coherent Group platform across HR, Finance, IT, Operations & Estates, H&S and Marketing. This includes ensuring that each service area has a clear purpose, service scope, standards, escalation routes, reporting expectations, and ownership model. The Director will ensure that Core Services operates as one joined-up platform rather than a set of disconnected central functions.

2. Make the Group operating model usable

Translate the Group’s governance and operating model into practical ways of working that subsidiaries can understand and use. This includes embedding the mandatory Core layer, clarifying service tiers, defining customer responsibilities, and ensuring that policies, systems and processes are simple enough to be followed consistently. The role should make the Group model easier to operate, not more complicated.

3. Balance standardisation with subsidiary ownership

Ensure that subsidiaries retain appropriate ownership of day-to-day operational delivery, while Core Services provides the standards, assurance, frameworks, support and specialist capability needed to operate safely and consistently. The Director must prevent both over-centralisation, where subsidiaries feel disempowered or slowed down, and under-standardisation, where local variation creates risk, inefficiency or poor visibility.

4. Own service performance and service discipline

Establish a clear rhythm for Core Services performance management, including monthly reporting, quarterly service reviews and annual service and cost reviews. The Director will ensure that Core Services is measured on outcomes, not just activity. Measures should include responsiveness, compliance, user experience, issue resolution, quality of advice, reporting accuracy, cost transparency and improvement over time.

5. Lead implementation, integration and scaling

Lead the Core Services implementation approach for subsidiaries moving into, or maturing within, the Group model. This includes baseline assessments, risk reviews, service tier recommendations, mobilisation plans, implementation governance, resourcing plans and handover into steady-state service. Implementation should be treated as the first step in sustainable, repeatable service delivery, not a one-off project.

6. Strengthen governance, controls and risk management

Work with the Group COO, CEO, CFO, CPO, CIO, functional leads and subsidiary CEOs / MDs to ensure that Core Services supports the Group’s Delegation of Authority, reserved matters, reporting standards and escalation requirements. The Director must ensure that Core Services teams understand escalation principles and operate accordingly, particularly where safety, legal, regulatory, reputational or strategic impact is involved.

7. Develop scalable systems, data and processes

Work with IT, Finance, HR and other functional leads to improve the systems, workflows, templates, dashboards and reporting infrastructure needed to support growth. This includes identifying where processes are too manual, duplicated, locally variable or dependent on individual knowledge. The role should actively reduce organisational friction by making it easier for people to find information, raise requests, follow processes, access support and make decisions.

8. Own the Core Services value and cost model

Work with the CFO and functional leads to ensure that the Core Services commercial model is transparent, fair and sustainable. The Director will help ensure the cost-recovery model is understood by subsidiaries and linked clearly to the value received.

9. Lead continuous improvement

Use service data, subsidiary feedback, audit findings, incident trends, cost information and management reporting to improve the Core Services platform over time. The Director should create a culture of practical improvement: fewer workarounds, clearer processes, better systems, stronger controls and a better experience for subsidiaries.

Key responsibilities

• Lead the Core Services operating model across HR, Finance, IT, Operations & Estates, H&S and Marketing.
• Maintain a clear Core Services catalogue, including mandatory Core requirements and tiered service options.
• Ensure service standards, response times, escalation routes and responsibilities are defined and understood.
• Coordinate functional leads so that subsidiaries receive joined-up support.
• Embed monthly reporting, quarterly service reviews and annual service / cost reviews.
• Work with the CFO to maintain transparent pricing, cost recovery and chargeback arrangements.
• Support annual planning, budget setting and service capacity planning.
• Lead implementation plans for subsidiaries moving into the Core Services model.
• Ensure group policies, standards and frameworks are embedded practically.
• Monitor service performance, risks, issues, user feedback and improvement actions.
• Ensure serious incidents, safeguarding concerns, H&S matters, control failures and reputational risks are escalated appropriately.
• Improve service request routes, templates, documentation, workflow and management information.
• Ensure the Core Services model supports integration, acquisition readiness and future scaling.
• Build a service culture that is responsive, practical, clear and accountable.
• Advise the Group Executive Team on Core Services capacity, risk, maturity and investment needs.

Objectives and key results

Objective 1: Establish Core Services as a clear, usable Group platform

• Core Services service catalogue agreed and published across all relevant subsidiaries.
• Mandatory Core requirements clearly defined for each functional area.
• Service tiers, exclusions, responsibilities and escalation routes documented and communicated.
• Subsidiary leaders confirm understanding of how to access and use Core Services.
• Single Core Services reporting and review rhythm established.

Objective 2: Improve consistency and compliance across the Group

• Baseline compliance review completed across priority subsidiaries and service areas.
• Priority gaps identified, risk-rated and assigned to owners.
• Group policy and standards framework implemented across key Core Services areas.
• Clear escalation process operating for H&S, safeguarding, finance controls, HR risk, data and reputational issues.
• Evidence of improved audit readiness across priority subsidiaries.
  

Objective 3: Move from reactive support to managed service delivery

• Monthly Core Services performance dashboard introduced.
• Service requests tracked by function, priority, response time, resolution time and outcome.
• Quarterly service reviews completed with subsidiaries.
• Top recurring service issues identified and improvement plans agreed.
• Reduction in avoidable escalations, duplicated work and unclear ownership.

Objective 4: Build scalable infrastructure for growth

• Repeatable onboarding / integration process developed for subsidiaries or new entities.
• Standard templates, workflows and documentation created for key recurring processes.
• Priority systems or data gaps identified and costed.
• Core Services capacity plan developed to support Group growth.
• Clear recommendations made to the Group Executive Team on investment needed to support scale.

Objective 5: Demonstrate value and financial sustainability

• Cost recovery model reviewed with CFO and functional leads.
• Service costs and cost drivers clearly explained to subsidiaries.
• Annual service and cost review process implemented.
• Core Services improvement plan linked to measurable value, such as reduced risk, improved reporting, better controls, faster response or lower duplication.
• Subsidiary feedback shows improved confidence in Core Services value.

Objective 6: Build the culture and capability of Core Services

• Functional leads aligned around shared Core Services principles and ways of working.
• Clear RACI developed between Core Services, subsidiary leaders and functional teams.
• Core Services team expectations agreed around service quality, responsiveness and accountability.
• Training or capability gaps identified within Core Services and subsidiaries.
• Feedback loops established so subsidiaries can raise concerns and suggest improvements.

Success measures

The role will be successful when:

• subsidiaries experience Core Services as enabling, practical and responsive;
• the Group has clearer visibility of risk, compliance, cost, service performance and capacity;
• mandatory standards are understood and consistently adopted;
• local teams know what they own and what Core Services owns;
• service reviews are active, evidence-based and improvement-focused;
• functional teams operate as one joined-up platform;
• fewer issues depend on informal relationships or individual workarounds;
• Core Services supports growth without creating unnecessary bureaucracy;
• the Group can integrate subsidiaries or new activities more quickly and consistently;
• Core Services is recognised as a strategic platform for scale, not simply an administrative overhead.

Person specification

Essential experience

• Senior experience in a shared core services, group operations, business operations, transformation, integration or platform leadership.
• Experience working in a multi-site, multi-entity or group structure.
• Proven ability to lead cross-functional services across areas such as finance, people, systems, operations, compliance, estates, H&S or marketing.
• Experience designing or improving service models, SLAs, reporting frameworks, operating rhythms or governance processes.
• Experience working with senior leaders, boards, CEOs / MDs or executive teams.
• Strong understanding of governance, risk, compliance, controls and escalation.
• Experience building scalable processes in an organisation that is moving from informal to more structured ways of working.

Essential skills and capabilities

• Strong operating model thinking: able to turn strategy and governance into practical delivery.
• Excellent stakeholder management, especially with subsidiary leaders who need both support and autonomy.
• Strong service mindset, with the ability to design services around user needs.
• Commercial awareness, including cost recovery, capacity planning, pricing and value demonstration.
• Strong judgement on risk, escalation and materiality.
• Ability to simplify complexity and create clear processes.
• Data-informed approach to performance, service quality and improvement.
• Comfortable working in ambiguity and building structure without over-engineering.
• Strong communication skills, with the ability to explain standards, expectations and change clearly.
• High credibility with both operational teams and executive leadership.

Desirable experience

• Experience in education, care, outdoor learning, regulated services, safeguarding-led environments or other people-and-risk-intensive sectors.
• Experience supporting acquisitions, integrations or group restructuring.
• Experience implementing shared systems, workflow tools, service desks or management dashboards.
• Experience developing internal chargeback or cost allocation models.
• Experience leading cultural change across semi-autonomous teams or entities.
  

Personal attributes

• Practical and delivery-focused.
• Collaborative but clear on standards.
• Comfortable holding the line on governance and compliance.
• Commercially aware without being purely finance-led.
• Able to build trust with local leaders.
• Low ego, high accountability.
• Systems-minded and improvement-focused.
• Able to operate strategically while staying close to operational reality.

Final positioning statement

The Director of Core Services is the person responsible for making TOG’s group platform work.

The role is not simply about managing central functions. It is about building the infrastructure that allows the Group to be safe, compliant, consistent, efficient and scalable. It must help subsidiaries do their work better, not just ask them to follow more processes.

At the current size of the business, the role needs to bring clarity, discipline and consistency without creating unnecessary bureaucracy. At the future scale of the business, it needs to create the systems, standards, reporting and service model that allow TOG to grow with confidence.