Operations Manager in Henley on Thames

Be the operational central nervous system of a pre-launch company, and the person who makes AI actually compound across the team.

Henley-on-Thames (with remote flex) · Full-time, 5 days/week · £45-60k + EMI options · Start by arrangement

About Three Doors

Three Doors is a pre-launch immersive entertainment company.

We're building a 90-minute live experience for teams of 3-6 where every player walks out with a behavioural profile derived from how they actually moved through pressure, not from a questionnaire.

Two audiences, one product: consumer tickets for friends, couples and groups; corporate team-development packages on weekdays.

The founder is Tom Ball, who built Desk Lodge (48,000 sq ft, £4m turnover, Sunday Times Top 10 Best Places to Work 2023, B-Corp) and has played 121 escape rooms in service of this.

We are pre-seed. We are small on purpose: a couple of full-time hires and a small consultant pool, leveraged hard by AI. This is a real founding-team seat.

The role

This is Operations Manager for a four-person company, which means more, not less, than at a larger one.

You hold the rhythm of the week, you keep the project plan honest, you partner closely with Tom on what needs his time and what doesn't, and you own the digital glue (the AI workflows, the automations, the shared tools) that lets four people do what fifteen would have done five years ago.

It is a hybrid role on purpose: project manager, chief-of-staff and digital-ops specialist, in one head.

AI is what makes the combination viable.

Without it, this would be three hires; with it and the right person, it is one of the most leveraged seats in the company.

By month 3, the team has a weekly rhythm that holds and Tom has 8 hours a week of his time back.

By month 6, the full-venue project plan is built and tracked, and we have AI workflows running for at least three repeatable processes (customer comms, content review, journal triage).

By month 12, you are the operational lead preparing the launch venue opening, which is where this role goes next.

What you'll do

• Hold the operational rhythm: weekly cadence, project tracking, decision log, follow-ups
• Run Tom's week as a working partnership (not a service relationship): calendar, inbox, prep, debrief, what-needs-saying-now
• Own the digital toolkit: Notion, Claude Code and the small in-house tools (we run a couple of internal Cloudflare-Access-gated tools, you'll learn to extend them)
• Build and maintain AI workflows that compound across the team: prompt libraries, transcription pipelines, customer-comms drafting, document review
• Lead preparation for the full venue build: timeline, dependency map, contractor coordination, kit ordering, fit-out coordination
• Be the second pair of eyes on everything that goes out: investor docs, contracts, public copy
• Light-touch coordination of the marketing function pre-launch: keeping the Marketing Consultant and Social Content Consultant aligned, briefed and shipping.

Volume is minimal until we go to market, but the rhythm sits with you.

Who you are

• You've worked as an EA, chief-of-staff, project manager, or ops lead at a small company or as a senior IC, and people you've worked with describe you as the reason things actually shipped
• AI-native already. You use Claude/Chat GPT daily, you've built at least one workflow that saves you real time, and you have an opinion on where the tooling is going
• Comfortable with technical glue: you can stand up a Notion database, write a passable Tally→Airtable automation, read a JSON file, and brief a developer without losing your mind
• High judgement on what to surface and what to handle silently
• Calm under volume. Twelve open threads doesn't faze you; you'd rather close five than start a sixth
• You like the founding-team stage: being involved in everything, with the variety and the load that implies
• Bonus
• Background in immersive entertainment, hospitality, attractions, or any throughput-driven physical-operations business
• Construction or fit-out project experience (we'll be running a real warehouse build)
• Light coding ability: you can read a config file, run a script, push a tweak to a static site
• Familiar with Claude Code or similar agentic-AI tooling
• How we work
• Small team, AI-leveraged. You will use Claude/Chat GPT/Cursor daily and we will help you get good at it.
• Pre-venue. Early hires are building the company and the product at the same time. If that energises you, this is the job. If it makes you nervous, it isn't.
• Cockroach, not unicorn. We optimise for surviving long enough to learn, not for looking impressive.
• Bias to operating discipline over startup-theatre. Tom's background is operational real estate, not VC-circuit.
• Terms
• £45-60k depending on experience
• EMI share options: meaningful founding-team grant, vesting over 4 years with a 1-year cliff
• Full-time, 5 days/week. This role is the operational rhythm; a part-time rhythm-holder isn't a rhythm.
• Based at our Henley-on-Thames HQ (Unit 1 Stuart's Lane, RG9 1RY). Hybrid pattern available once trust is built: likely ~3 days on-site per week, more during build phases.
• 28 days holiday inclusive of bank holidays; pension auto-enrolment

Three Doors Experience Ltd is an equal‑opportunity employer. We hire on judgement, behaviour under pressure, and whether you'll make the team better, not on credentials.