Director

Milltown Partners LLP; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 200,000 - 320,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Discretionary bonuses

28 days PTO

401k contribution

Medical, dental and vision insurance

Monthly commuter benefits

Team events

Breakfast and snacks

Job summary

Milltown Partners LLP in San Francisco is seeking a Director to lead client teams, shape strategy, and ensure the highest quality of work across advisory projects for technology firms, founders and investors.

You will coach colleagues, manage workload, design team structures, set fees, and drive growth initiatives while collaborating across the firm to deliver evidence-based, ambitious guidance and measurable impact for clients.

Qualifications

• 10+ years of professional experience in consulting or advisory leadership.
• Strong track record leading high-performing client teams.
• Excellent strategic thinking with data-driven insights.
• Fluent English and exceptional client communication skills.

Responsibilities

• Lead client teams and set clear goals, priorities, and accountability.
• Coach and develop consultants, ensuring high performance and growth.
• Shape project scope, budgets, and fees; design team structures for optimal delivery.
• Deliver evidence-based advice and drive client outcomes while expanding firm capabilities.

Skills

10+ years experience

Team leadership

Strategic advisory

Fluent English

Job description

We are a team of around 80 people with offices in London (HQ) and San Francisco. We are now looking to recruit talented Directors to join us in San Francisco, where our fast-growing team is advising ground-breaking technology firms, their founders and investors.

The role

Directors are ultimately responsible for the quality of everything we produce. They ensure every team has an agreed strategy, clear priorities, and consistently exceeds client expectations. Directors set the scope, agree the fees and design the structure of our teams to ensure we have the right resources to deliver our best work. They give brilliant advice to our clients and coach their teams to do the same. Directors are instrumental in the development of the firm, across the design and delivery of plans for quality, talent and growth.

The way we work

We have chosen to be a referral-based business - we rarely competitively “pitch” for work - so our continued success depends on delivering exceptional results.

To achieve that, people at every level work on a small number of teams (typically three or four) so they have the space and time to develop a deep understanding of our clients and their interests. We also rely heavily on data and insight, from focus groups to social listening, to ensure our advice is rooted in the best evidence available.

We’ve deliberately built a team that combines experienced consultants with senior individuals who have been clients themselves, to ensure our advice is ambitious and pragmatic. We don’t have separate divisions or competing P&Ls, even for our international offices, which means everyone is pulling in the same direction and drawing on the full breadth of our collective experience. We expect every member of the team to be willing to challenge (and be challenged!) to get to the best possible answer for our clients.

What the role involves

Client team leadership

• Setting clear goals and priorities for their teams, and holding everyone, including themselves, to account for meeting them.
• Supporting the team to develop and deliver communications plans to meet those goals.
• Drawing on the full expertise and resources of the firm to develop and deliver advice that helps our clients build and protect their reputations.
• That means doing the work as well as managing it: our Directors write documents, speeches and emails as much as anyone else on their teams.
• Giving our clients the right advice, even if it isn’t what they want to hear, and finding a solution that works for them.

Coaching, development and well-being

• Coaching the team; we want Milltown to be the place where people learn the most in their career.
• Giving (and receiving!) thoughtful, constructive feedback at all levels in the firm.
• Line managing Consultants outside client teams: setting development goals that enable them to perform at their best and stretch into opportunities for development.
• Supporting the wellbeing of everyone on the team.

Raising the quality of our work

• Leading by example in delivering exceptional work to clients.
• Sharing your insights and experience in a way that allows the rest of the team to replicate your success.
• Seeking expertise from outside the firm - media, business, policy, academia, research - and using it to improve the quality of our advice and analysis.
• Identifying operational efficiencies, however marginal, that make it easier for us to do our best work.

Expanding the boundaries of our business

• Growing and evolving the kind of work we do and the way we do it: new methodologies, new sectors, new challenges.
• Using your existing network and forging new relationships to improve our access to the most interesting and exciting communications and policy challenges around.
• Bringing long-term ambition and energy: where should we be in five years? Ten years? Fifty years?

What we’re looking for

• Willingness to play a hands-on role within client teams and across the firm.
• Experience managing high-performing teams with diverse experiences.
• Ability to turn around thoughtful advice for senior clients on short timeframes.
• A strategic approach to reputation, rooted in research, data and insight.
• An extremely high level of ambition about the impact smart advice can have on clients’ businesses.
• Experience building and managing relationships with senior reporters.
• A highly motivated team member who values collaboration and is interested in coaching and building capability across the team.
• A desire to seek out feedback in order to learn and develop.
• 10+ years of professional experience.
• Fluent command of English.
• Successful applicants will need to have the right to work in the US.

Milltown Partners ensures that there are equal opportunities for all applicants, regardless of age, sex, race, religion, ethnic origin, sexual orientation or disability. We celebrate diversity and are committed to creating an inclusive environment for all applicants and employees.

Compensation and benefits

• Discretionary twice-yearly bonuses (taking account of firm and individual performance).
• 28 days of annual Paid Time Off (PTO).
• 401k contribution
• Medical, dental and vision insurance.
• Monthly commuter benefits.
• Variety of team events, such as socials, external guest speakers and annual firm celebrations.
• Selection of breakfast foods and snacks, plus a team lunch every Thursday.