Director of Operations - Charlie Mike Protective Services
Reports To:President & CEO
Location: Headquarters in Phoenix AZ
Direct Reports:Operations Manager and Field Supervisors
State:Full-time, Exempt
Compensation:$75,000-80,000 base salary + 10% annual bonus
Position Summary
The Director of Operations owns the performance of a single market end to end. This is a general manager role in everything but name: you are accountable for the people, the clients, the compliance posture, and the financial results of every contract in your territory.
You will build and lead the field organization that delivers our service — recruiting and retaining agents, keeping every post filled with qualified personnel, holding sites to the standards defined in their post orders, and making sure clients renew because the service is genuinely superior, not because switching is inconvenient. You are the senior company representative in your market, and the person clients call when something matters.
Key Responsibilities
- Own the full employment lifecycle for officers and field supervisors: recruiting, interviewing, hiring, onboarding, coaching, discipline, and termination.
- Partner with HR to ensure all hiring, corrective action, and separation decisions are documented, consistent, and defensible under federal and state employment law.
- Build a recruiting pipeline that keeps pace with contract growth and turnover, rather than reacting to open posts after they fail.
- Drive retention through supervision quality, schedule stability, recognition, and career pathing from officer to supervisor to account manager.
- Set performance standards and hold supervisors accountable for enforcing them in the field, not from the office.
Scheduling & Labor Management
- Own the master schedule for the market: ensure 100% post coverage across all client sites and all shifts, including holidays and emergent call-offs.
- Manage overtime deliberately — protect margin by minimizing unbilled OT while maintaining coverage and fatigue standards.
- Maintain accurate headcount planning against contracted hours; forecast staffing needs ahead of contract starts, expansions, and seasonal demand.
- Ensure timekeeping accuracy so that hours worked, hours billed, and hours paid reconcile every pay period.
- Maintain a qualified, trained relief pool and an on‑call escalation structure.
Client & Contract Operations
- Serve as the senior operational point of contact for every client in the market; conduct regular site visits and scheduled business reviews.
- Author, review, and maintain post orders for each site — ensuring they are current, site‑specific, legally sound, and actually understood by the officers assigned.
- Ensure every officer is post‑qualified and site‑trained before their first independent shift.
- Conduct and audit field inspections, post checks, and quality assurance visits on a defined cadence, including nights and weekends.
- Own incident management: response, investigation, documentation, client notification, and corrective action.
- Drive client retention and identify organic growth opportunities — added hours, added posts, added services — within the existing book of business.
- Review and approve payroll and hours reconciliation prior to invoicing.
- Manage market‑level operating expenses, including uniforms, equipment, vehicles, and fuel.
- Support pricing and bid decisions with accurate operational cost input; flag underwater contracts and drive corrective action.
Growth & Market Development
- Support the President & CEO in geographic and vertical expansion within the market.
- Participate in bids, proposals, site surveys, and prospect presentations as the operational subject matter expert.
- Execute clean contract start‑ups: staffing, training, equipment, post order development, and client onboarding, delivered on schedule.
- Build a bench so the market can absorb growth without service degradation.
Required Qualifications
- 5+ years of operations leadership experience with a large hourly, distributed, or shift‑based workforce; contract security, facility services, or a comparable field‑service industry preferred.
- Proven track record hiring, developing, disciplining, and terminating employees at scale, in compliance with employment law.
- Direct experience with 24/7 scheduling, overtime control, and coverage in a multi‑site environment.
- Strong written communication — this role writes post orders, incident reports, and client correspondence that may be scrutinized after the fact.
- Comfort with workforce management, scheduling, and timekeeping systems.
- Valid driver's license, insurable driving record, and ability to pass a background check and drug screen.