Head of Operations (Remote, Detroit)

Blacksmith Agency LLC; Detroit (MI); Remote; USD 150,000 - 230,000; Full time

Job summary

Blacksmith Agency is a remote agency serving US clients, seeking a Head of Operations to run day-to-day. You will oversee four department leads, shape weekly rhythms and quarterly priorities, and own profitability.

This integrator role coordinates sales, recruiting, delivery, and marketing with direct accountability to the founder. You will drive cross-functional leadership, coach leaders, and manage critical client contracts and vendor terms, ensuring the company scales from a strong base to

Qualifications

• Experience leading multiple functions with P&L responsibility.
• Experience scaling teams from ~40 to 140 employees.
• Profit/m_margin ownership, not just revenue.
• Real contract negotiation experience.
• Clear communicator with multiple leaders and founders.

Responsibilities

• Oversee four department leads and their performance.
• Define weekly rhythm, quarterly priorities, and tradeoffs.
• Own profit, margin on delivery, and hiring costs.
• Lead client contracts and vendor terms negotiations.
• Develop operators into actual leaders and coach them.
• Make decisions alongside the founder and implement them.

Skills

Leadership

Operations management

Negotiation

Contract review

Strategic planning

Communication

Job description

About The Role

Blacksmith Agency is a remote agency building websites and running paid and organic programs for US clients. As Head of Operations 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.

Blacksmith Agency

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

About The Role

Blacksmith Agency is a remote agency building websites and running paid and organic programs for US clients. As Head of Operations 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.

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.