VP of Operations

The role

You own how work gets scoped, staffed, and run at Movers+Shakers. That means four things: resourcing, the PMO, how we build our scopes, and the workflow our content moves through.

Movers+Shakers is a social-first creative agency tracking to grow revenue more than 50% in 2027. The work we do is strong and demand is high. What we are missing is an operator with a bird's-eye view of capacity, staffing, and margin, who sees problems 90 days out instead of the week they land.

This is a hands-on seat. You will lead the project managers and the resourcing team, and you will also be deep in the work itself… building scopes, reworking staffing plans, and standing up new client teams. We are not looking for someone to design an operating model from scratch. The foundations exist: we run on EOS, we have a PM team, a resourcing function, and a finance practice. Your job is to connect these pieces as one system and tighten what is loose.

• Reports to: Our Integrator
• Team: You will sit on our executive leadership team
• Leads: the Director of Project Management and the PM team, and the Associate Director of Resourcing
• Peers: Business Partnership (aka Account), Integrated Production, Creative, Finance, People, AI Leadership

What you'll own

• Resourcing and capacity
• Lead the resourcing team and own who is staffed on what, across full-time staff and freelancers.
• Maintain a rolling 90-day capacity view of the agency, tied to the revenue forecast and the new business pipeline.
• Turn our revenue goals and projections into hiring requests early enough that we can recruit ahead of need (3-6 month time horizon).
• Make the calls on full-time versus freelance, with the margin impact visible.
• The PMO
• Lead and develop our project managers.
• Hold one standard for how projects are planned, tracked, and reported, so any leader can see the health of any workstream.
• PMs own the project from kickoff to close-out. Integrated Production owns the production; your team owns the plan, the timeline, the budget, and the contribution margin planning.
• Delivery Economics
• Strong partner to Finance to manage and execute on contribution margin targets for each Pod
• Run the scope-to-actuals learning loop: what we sold, the hours we delivered, and how we scope differently next time.
• Call it early when a workstream is over-servicing or under-staffed, and work the fix with the pod lead.
• Interpret, communicate, and provide actionable insights on the agency-wide view of contribution margin, resource capacity and P&L supported hiring plans to the Integrator
• Scoping & team building
• You are the owner of how we build scopes: the staffing model, and the hours behind every new and existing scope, renewal, and pitch.
• Finance is your counterpart. You build the scope; together you make sure it ties to the rate card, margin goals, and the revenue forecast.
• Give the capacity and margin read on each new business opportunity before we decide to pursue it.
• Stand up the team for a new client win quickly, without pulling the floor out from under existing clients.
• Workflow, tools, and the content supply chain
• Lead and champion the rollout of our content supply chain and Workfront integration: the connected AI-enabled workflow that moves content from brief to approval to publish.
• Partner with our head of Innovation and Technology on every technology and AI rollout. They choose and build the tools; you make them part of how each team works day to day.
• Bring them the operational problems worth solving with AI, and report back on what is actually being used.
• Own adoption of agency-wide workflow and project tools, and retire duplicate tools and manual steps as the new workflow takes hold.

What success looks like

In your first 90 days

• The rolling 90-day capacity view is live and leadership uses it to decide which new business to pursue.
• Every active workstream has a current staff plan, and every pod lead has a margin view they trust.
• The PMO works from one project standard.

In your first year

• No surprise hiring: roles are requested from the forecast, months ahead of need.
• Every scope is built one way, and we can explain every gap between what we scoped and what we delivered.
• The content supply chain runs across all retainer clients.
• A new client team goes from signed scope to staffed and running in weeks.

Who you are

• 12+ years in agency operations, project management, or resourcing, in creative, social, or content agencies.
• You have run a PMO and a resourcing function at the same time, at an agency of 50 to 200 people that was growing fast.
• You have helped client leads move workstream margin, and you can tell us the number before and after.
• You build scopes and staff plans yourself. You are fluent in rate cards, utilization, and the full-time versus freelance trade-off.
• You have rolled out a workflow or project platform across an agency and can show the adoption numbers.
• You manage managers and still are deep in the work. Senior enough to lead the function, not too senior to live & breathe the spreadsheets.
• You use AI tools extensively in your own daily work and have a view on how they change agency workflow.
• You say the hard thing early, with the data, and you bring the joy while doing it.
• EOS experience is a plus.