Operations Manager (Interior Design)

Studio Bloom; Brighton (MI); Hybrid; USD 95,000 - 110,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Hybrid work schedule

Profit sharing

20 days PTO

Paid holidays

Occasional travel

Job summary

Studio Bloom, a Brighton, Michigan-based luxury residential interior design firm, seeks an organized, emotionally intelligent Operations Manager to join its growing team. You will collaborate with the Founder and Creative Director to align people, projects, systems, financials, and client experience across the studio.

This role emphasizes building and improving processes, owning operational decisions, and leading with empathy.

Qualifications

• Experienced operations and/or people leader with strong business acumen.
• Highly organized with excellent follow-through and attention to detail.
• Comfortable working with budgets, forecasting, profitability and margins.

Responsibilities

• Lead a trusted studio-wide leadership presence with day-to-day guidance and accountability.
• Oversee and optimize Asana, Airtable, and related workflows with clear ownership.
• Monitor projects and departments to ensure cross-functional responsibilities stay aligned.
• Partner with leadership on budgeting, forecasting, capacity planning, and financial visibility.

Job description

About the Opportunity

Studio Bloom is proud to partner with a Brighton, Michigan-based luxury residential interior design firm known for thoughtful, highly detailed interiors and a deeply collaborative approach to its work.

We are seeking a highly organized, emotionally intelligent Operations Manager to join our growing team. This is a newly created and highly influential role for someone who naturally sees both the big picture and the details required to make it happen. Working closely with Founder and Creative Director and the firm’s leadership team, the Operations Manager will have visibility across the business—including people, projects, systems, financial performance, and client experience—and help ensure each area is working together effectively.

The right person won’t simply maintain existing processes. They’ll take the time to understand how the studio operates, identify opportunities to make it better, and bring the structure, accountability, and follow-through needed to turn good systems into great ones.

We are a small, close-knit team, which means culture matters tremendously. We are creative, collaborative, fast-moving, and committed to high standards—not only in the work our clients see, but in how we operate behind the scenes. Our client firmly believes, “High standards matter everywhere, or they don't matter at all.”

We value people who are warm, smart, kind, hardworking, self-aware, and genuinely invested in the success of the company and one another. We also place tremendous value on the relationships we’ve built with our clients, builders, architects, vendors, and trade partners, and believe those relationships are fundamental to producing exceptional work.

Over time, this person will become a trusted point of leadership for the team and an operational counterpart to the Principal—helping determine what truly requires their attention while confidently owning the many operational decisions that don’t.

For someone who enjoys building, improving, and leading, this is a unique opportunity to have a meaningful hand in shaping the next chapter of an established luxury residential design firm as it continues to evolve its design, cabinetry, and future design-build capabilities.

What You’ll Do

• Serve as a trusted leader and central point of connection across the studio, providing day-to-day guidance, support, and accountability to the team.
• Lead performance conversations, reviews, and ongoing employee feedback, navigating conversations with confidence, fairness, discretion, and empathy.
• Help maintain clear expectations, responsibilities, and measures of success across roles, ensuring team members have the support and accountability needed to perform at a high level.
• Partner with the firm’s finance/HR support and outside HR counsel on employee relations, policies, documentation, hiring, and other people-related matters.

Operations, Systems & Accountability

• Develop a deep understanding of how work moves through the studio and take ownership of improving the systems, workflows, and processes that keep the business running effectively.
• Oversee and optimize operational tools including Asana and Airtable, ensuring responsibilities, deadlines, and action items are clearly tracked and consistently followed through.
• Maintain a high-level view across active projects and departments, helping ensure operational needs and cross-functional responsibilities don’t fall through the cracks.
• Identify gaps and opportunities for greater efficiency, communication, and accountability, improving existing processes and developing new ones where needed.
• Act as a trusted filter and thought partner to the Principal, bringing forward the decisions and priorities that truly require their involvement while confidently owning those that don’t.
• Continually refine internal processes based on what’s working, what isn’t, and lessons learned from completed projects.

Business & Financial Operations

• Partner with firm leadership and the finance team on budgeting, forecasting, capacity planning, and ongoing financial visibility.
• Develop strong visibility into project profitability, margins, purchasing and resale, vendor relationships, and the financial implications of operational decisions.
• Monitor the project pipeline and anticipated workload, helping leadership plan for capacity, identify future revenue needs, and determine when the firm is positioned to take on new work.
• Identify opportunities to protect profitability, improve efficiency, and support the thoughtful growth of the firm’s design, cabinetry, and future business initiatives.

Client & Business Support

• Serve as a polished representative of the firm with clients, prospective clients, vendors, builders, architects, and other partners.
• Participate in initial prospective-client conversations, helping assess fit before opportunities move to the Principal.
• Coordinate with outside partners supporting areas such as marketing, technology, and the firm’s website, ensuring initiatives continue moving forward.
• Be willing to step in where needed. As a small, collaborative team, no task is considered beneath any member of the studio.

Who You Are

You are someone who naturally notices what needs attention—and does something about it.

You're organized, proactive, resourceful, and comfortable taking ownership. You don't need every step mapped out for you; you ask thoughtful questions, absorb what's happening around you, and figure out how to move things forward.

You're also a strong people leader. You understand that holding high standards and treating people with kindness aren't mutually exclusive. You're comfortable having difficult conversations, but you know how to read the room and communicate in a way that earns trust and respect.

You may not know every facet of the interior design business on day one. That's okay. What's more important is that you bring strong business instincts, curiosity, sound judgment, and the ability to learn quickly.

You’ll likely thrive here if you are:

• An experienced operations and/or people leader with strong business acumen.
• Exceptionally organized with excellent follow-through and attention to detail.
• Proactive and able to anticipate needs rather than waiting to be directed.
• Emotionally intelligent, self-aware, and able to read a room.
• Confident and decisive without being ego-driven or overly rigid.
• Comfortable holding others accountable while remaining fair, approachable, and kind.
• Resourceful and energized by solving problems.
• Able to move comfortably between strategic thinking and hands-on execution.
• Comfortable working with financial information and concepts such as budgets, forecasting, profitability, and margins.
• Technologically curious and comfortable learning new platforms, systems, and AI-enabled tools.
• A polished communicator who can interact comfortably with employees, clients, vendors, builders, architects, and other partners.
• Excited by the opportunity to help shape a role and improve a business rather than simply inherit a fully defined playbook.

Experience

Experience within luxury residential interior design would be highly valued, but it is not required.

We are equally interested in candidates who have built relevant leadership and operational experience within complementary industries such as luxury cabinetry, kitchen and bath, residential construction/design-build, architecture, luxury home furnishings, showrooms, or other sophisticated, product and client-driven businesses.

We would also welcome an experienced interior designer or design-industry professional who has a strong understanding of studio operations and is ready to transition from day-to-day design into a broader leadership and business operations role.

Regardless of industry, candidates should bring meaningful professional experience leading people and/or operations and an understanding of how a well-run business operates.

Technology

The studio is Mac-based and utilizes a variety of platforms including Asana, Airtable, Google Workspace, Canva, QuickBooks, and Harvest. Experience with every platform is not required, but strong overall technology fluency and a willingness to learn and embrace new tools—including AI—are important.

• Base salary of approximately $100,000, commensurate with experience
• 5% profit-sharing opportunity
• 20 days of PTO to start, increasing with tenure
• 7 paid holidays plus paid holiday closure between Christmas and New Year's
• Hybrid schedule with one remote day per week following initial training
• Occasional travel for installations, trade events, and other firm needs

The Opportunity Ahead

This role is about more than taking tasks off a founder's plate. Our client has reached an exciting point in its evolution. The foundation is there: an established luxury residential practice, a talented team, increasingly sophisticated projects, a growing cabinetry business, and opportunities to expand what the firm can offer.

The next step is building the operational leadership that allows those pieces to work together at their highest level.

For the right person, this is an opportunity to become an integral member of the firm's leadership team, help build the infrastructure for its next chapter, and ultimately create a business that can operate exceptionally well without every decision needing to run through its founder.