Executive Assistant to Founder

Retail Smart Group; City of Melbourne; On-site; AUD 70,000 - 110,000; Full time

Job summary

Retail Smart Group in Melbourne, Australia, seeks an Executive Assistant with strong project management and operations skills to turn outcomes into actions and deliver end-to-end results. You will coordinate contractors, external advisers and timelines, keeping progress visible in one weekly view.

We value hands-on problem solving and decisiveness over process, with daily use of AI tools to quickly understand unfamiliar areas and drive initiatives to completion in a small, agile team.

Qualifications

• Executive assistant, project management and operations exposure is preferred but not required.
• Ability to translate outcomes into actionable plans and drive delivery.
• Comfort with AI tools and fast decision-making in a small team.

Responsibilities

• Take on outcomes across any part of the business and work out what it will take to achieve
• Use AI to get to a working understanding of an unfamiliar area in hours, not weeks
• Call people cold until you find the ones who can help us get there
• Come back with numbers and a recommendation, not a list of questions
• Drive delivery end to end: contractors, external parties, timelines, follow-through
• Hold external and internal parties to what they agreed
• Run occasional projects for the founder personally, alongside external advisers
• Keep everything visible in one weekly view, so nobody has to ask where things stand

Job description

We're an Australian D2C group creating products that reduce household waste and single-use plastic, across sustainability, health and everyday consumables. We have brands in market and more in development. The team is deliberately small and we're building an AI-first team.

Who we are

We're an Australian D2C group creating products that reduce household waste and single-use plastic, across sustainability, health and everyday consumables. We have brands in market and more in development. The team is deliberately small and we're building an AI-first team.

The premise of this role

One paragraph will tell you whether this role is for you.

You'll have a clear list of projects. Each one arrives as an outcome. You work out what it takes to achieve, who to talk to and what it costs, propose an execution plan, and on approval you execute until the goal is met. If you like being given the destination and finding a route there, keep reading.

If your instinct on an unfamiliar problem is to ask what tasks you should perform, we're not a fit. Genuinely no hard feelings.

What you'll actually do, week to week

• Take on outcomes across any part of the business and work out what it will take to achieve
• Use AI to get to a working understanding of an unfamiliar area in hours, not weeks
• Call people cold until you find the ones who can help us get there
• Come back with numbers and a recommendation, not a list of questions
• Drive delivery end to end: contractors, external parties, timelines, follow-through
• Hold external and internal parties to what they agreed
• Run occasional projects for the founder personally, separate from the business, working alongside external advisers and driving them through to completion
• Keep everything visible in one weekly view, so nobody has to ask where things stand

How we work

• Work reaches you as a prioritised list of outcomes
• You keep moving and be corrected rather than wait a week for permission
• Decisions get made fast, usually in a page or less
• You own projects, not departments. You move horizontally to get priority work delivered
• AI is part of how we work daily, not a novelty. If you don't use it yet, you'll receive training
• Chase until you get an answer, and find another way when the answer is no
• You'll see commercial and personal information early and often. Discretion isn't a policy here, it's a condition of the role

You’ll probably fit if

• You've been the person in every job who ends up with the hard, undefined work, because you're the one who reliably finishes it
• Someone has handed you something well outside your experience because they trusted you'd work it out, and you did
• You've found the right person to talk to with no introduction and no network
• You've chased something down that everyone else had quietly given up on
• You've run several unrelated things at once and kept them all moving
• You've got things moving through people who don't work for you
• You've run work through professional advisers, lawyers, accountants, agents or similar, and kept it moving without being chased
• You've held confidential information and it never went anywhere it wasn't intended
• You can write a one page business case that ends in a recommendation

Executive assistant, project management, operations. The background doesn't matter. No domain expertise required.

This role is not

• A calendar, inbox or travel role. None of that sits here
• A management role. No team, no direct reports, no department to run
• A governance role. No ceremonies, no politics

The process

• CV and the question below
• A short call, 10 to 15 minutes
• A paid project on something real, followed by a conversation discussing how you approached it
• References, then an offer