Chief Operating Officer (Remote, Phoenix)

Blacksmith Agency LLC; Phoenix (AZ); Remote; USD 150,000 - 210,000; Full time

Job summary

Blacksmith Agency LLC is seeking a Chief Operating Officer to run the company day to day. This remote role oversees four department leads, with responsibility for profit, delivery, and client contracts. The COO collaborates with the founder to set the vision and ensures execution, recruitment, and growth across the team.

The role requires strong negotiation, clear communication, and experience scaling teams from mid-size to larger environments. Remote work is available for the US/Canada region.

Qualifications

• Proven ability to communicate clearly with multiple leaders and founder.
• Experience negotiating contracts and vendor terms.
• Owned profit numbers and margins in a leadership role.
• Led or reported to several department heads with measurable outcomes.

Responsibilities

• Oversee four department leads and their performance, development, reviews, and contingency decisions.
• Own weekly rhythm, quarterly priorities, and trade-offs when conflicts arise.
• Own profit metrics, margins on delivery, and decision on which business to take or turn down.
• Lead commercial discussions, client contracts, and redlines with partners.
• Develop leaders across the organization and replace founder-day-to-day decisions with timely execution.

Skills

Communicator

Negotiation

Profit ownership

Leadership of multiple functions

Job description

About the Role

Blacksmith Agency is a remote agency building websites and running paid and organic programs for US clients. As Chief Operating Officer you run the company day to day. Sales, recruiting, delivery and marketing all report to this seat. Today that work sits on the founder's desk, which is the whole reason it is open. This is the integrator seat. If you run on EOS you know the shape already: the founder is the visionary and owns where the business goes, and you are the one who makes it happen, on a date, with the people we actually have. Each department lead knows their function better than you will. You are accountable for all four of them together, and for the profit number underneath.

Blacksmith Agency

• Operations
• Full time
• Remote (USA or Canada)

What You Own

• Four department leads: their numbers, their development, their reviews, and the call when one of them is not going to get there.
• The week. The meeting rhythm, this quarter's priorities, and what gets cut when two of them collide.
• Profit, measured on attainment rather than activity. Margin on delivery, the real cost of a hire, which business we take and which we turn down.
• The commercial conversations: client contracts and the redlines that come back on them, vendor terms, and what we will and will not agree to.
• Building strong operators into actual leaders. Several of them have never been coached as one.
• The decisions that wait on the founder today, made the same day instead.

What You Need

• More than one function reporting to you, where their numbers, their hiring and the decision when a leader was not working out were yours to make. Running a large team inside a single function is a different job.
• You joined a company at one size and left it three or four times bigger. Forty people to a hundred and forty is the shape we mean. Expect to be asked for the headcount the day you arrived, the day you left, and what you put in place to make the second number survivable.
• A profit number you personally carried. Margin, not revenue somebody else sold and not a budget you were handed to spend.
• Real negotiation experience, on contracts and with people. This seat sits across the table often.
• A communicator. Most of what this job is, is being clear with four leaders and one founder about what is true right now.

Please do not apply if

• Nobody has ever reported to you, or you have never owned someone's review or had to performance-manage a leader.
• You have only ever led inside one function.
• The company you point to for growth was already large when you arrived.
• What you want is the visionary seat. That one is taken, and this is explicitly the other one.

None of these are preferences we bend on. They are how we screen, so applying anyway costs you an hour and gets you a no.

Process

Three conversations, then a decision. A thirty minute screen with our recruiter, a first round with the founder this seat reports to, and a final. No take-home project and no panel interview.