Vice President - Retail Operations & Course Materials

About the role

This senior role reports directly into the COO and leads two of BibliU’s most critical initiatives: 1) Retail operations across the 16 community colleges of the Kentucky Community and Technical College System (KCTCS); and, 2) Physical course material operations for the entire BibliU retail customer base.

Responsibilities

• Driving year on year bottom line growth across the KCTCS system.
• Managing the 16 KCTCS P&Ls, optimizing sales, COGS, payroll and OpEx to drive efficiency and profitability across the system.
• Monthly reporting to COO on P&L performance across all stores, providing detailed customer-level strategies for each store to improve performance.
• Directly manage and develop at least 2 regional managers covering the Kentucky region (strong potential to expand, depending on success in role).
• Regular travel to build a detailed understanding of retail operations in Kentucky.
• Leading programmes to automate, streamline and optimise retail processes that can be rolled out across the wider BibliU customer base.
• Good potential to expand retail operations leadership beyond Kentucky depending on performance in role.
• Build relationships with campus partners and provide financial updates quarterly.
• Course Materials:
• Build the new course materials vertical at BibliU across all stores.
• Ensuring cost-neutrality against current payroll.
• Introduce new roles, structures, processes and systems for the forecasting, ordering and returns of physical course materials.
• Define KPIs and OKRs that track and measure physical course materials performance and working capital demand across the entire BibliU business.
• Experiment with a blended model of new books, used books and rental programmes to optimise EBITDA and working capital across the customer base.
• Build and develop an outstanding data analytics capability with the course materials group, delivering real time actionable insights that can rapidly course correct and enhance course materials buying.

Requirements

• A strong people influencer, capable of leading data-driven change initiatives to optimise performance.
• A highly experienced course materials and campus retail leader, with multiple years’ experience at VP level.
• Candidates with excellent P&L management experience, who can demonstrate how to optimise bottom line performance through a variety of levers in a short space of time.
• Candidates with strong inventory and working capital management skills, especially in physical course materials.
• Someone willing to travel extensively to stores across the US to learn about course material operations and implement solutions to improve them.
• A strong collaborator who can build excellent personal relationships across the retail and digital business.