CEO job description
Apiary Collective Highlights
- Culture and operations rooted in a consistent vision, values, and purpose in a certified woman-owned package: Delivering exceptional value to clients through means that enable talent to do what’s important outside of work.
- The future of marketing is inclusive marketing: We’re looking for a leader committed to embedding DE&I into the DNA of the business.
- Established client base and new business pipeline comprising name brand and high-growth DTC ecommerce & B2B tech clients: At the intersection of digital commerce and the technology that fuels it.
- Exceptional talent with backgrounds from top global agencies and Fortune 500 brands, delivering quality work while living their stories as parents, travelers, artists, and entrepreneurs: Lead (and learn from) a team you’re always proud to introduce to clients, who challenge you to be your best every day.
- Ideally positioned for the present and future: Over 5 years of established remote work culture and connection: Taste-makers at the cutting edge of the future of work.
- Start from a healthy P&L, balance sheet, and rate of YoY growth: Lead your team to making purpose-and profit-based decisions against a consistent set of values.
The Role
The ideal CEO candidate understands that the magic of Apiary relies on a symbiotic relationship both with the clients who have short- or long-term marketing challenges to solve, and with the The Collective—the highly skilled, independent digital marketing experts that are the engine behind Apiary’s flexible, turn-key, on-demand business model.
As CEO, you will have your hands in all aspects of Apiary Digital’s business. You will bring a well-rounded digital media background, P&L management, relationship building, leadership, and a spark for selling marketing services to top-notch DTC ecommerce and B2B tech clients. Combining a balance of organizational leadership, as well as technical skill set, you will be able to seamlessly blend overseeing the sales process and ensuring Apiary’s teams deployed to work on clients’ businesses deliver flawlessly executed service. At the center of it all you are the ringleader, promoting the culture and values Apiary was built upon, and inspiring others to live and breathe those values.
In keeping with Apiary’s values, the CEO role can be based in any location in the U.S. or from a location that falls within a U.S. time zone.
Key Responsibilities
Operational Leadership
- Establish and build relationships with existing and new clients, building and nurturing strategic relationships, partnerships, and connections
- People management and team success: Ensuring the right people are in the right roles, aligned to business needs and goals
- Manage service level and performance standards for client teams, and actively manage growth and development opportunities for leadership team, setting KPIs and budgets
- Working with finance to manage P&L and cashflow
- Accountability for results: Maximizing stakeholder value and executing on vision and values with strong financial health
- Identifying need for course-correcting and leading through change
Sales
- Opening the doors for new sales and building out the Apiary sales pipeline
- Establish go-to-market strategies for winning new business and organically growing existing clients; driving and owning sales process from end-to-end
- Building new capabilities, repositioning existing capabilities, and leading major deals
- Coaching sales to evolve how we position, sell, scope, service, price, resource, and deliver on our promises
- Champion of building inclusive marketing practices into our standard best practices
- Hands-on developing proposals and leading pitches; ultimate accountability for scoping, pricing, negotiating, and closing client deals
Client Services
- Executive sponsor, nurture, and build client relationships
- Hold The Collective accountable for delivering the highest standards of performance and client service
- Stand up client strategists to handle client/team success & retention
- Help the team unlock upsell opportunities and build context to strengthen alignment to client’s business
- Support the team and client(s) through major inflection points such as client-side turnover, pivot, and acquisition
Talent
- Coaching Apiary leadership to ensure the balance of power and stakeholder value that makes Apiary magic
- Champion of Apiary initiatives to build diversity, equity, and inclusion into the DNA of our business
- Provide coaching to ensure talent and recruiting strategy, evaluation criteria, and resourcing/recruiting efforts yield a Collective of best-in-class consultants, aligned to clients’ business needs
- Working with talent in a “product” capacity to continually improve and adapt the value proposition and package of services we offer consultants
Founder Relations
- Work closely with Apiary’s Founder to transition the business as the Founder moves into a Board/Advisory role
Requirements & Qualifications
- Significant client-facing, agency-side experience in a senior account role with enterprise and Fortune 500 clients
- Previous hands-on experience in one or more performance digital marketing disciplines
- Track record with sales, leading agency pitches, and closing new business
- 10+ years digital marketing experience with at least 5+ years in a senior role with management-level direct reports
- Demonstrated commitment to building inclusive organizations and codifying DE&I practices into normal business operations
- Savvy with P&L and cashflow management
- Experience within early-stage startup or small business
- Previous experience working as an independent consultant or hiring and managing independent consultants
- Highly adept with remote work, remote leadership, and building remote culture and operations
- Rolodex of quality relationships to help build sales and talent pipeline
- Experience maximizing stakeholder value
- Training and development in DE&I and/or inclusive marketing practices
- Leads with empathy and kindness
If you’re interested in learning more about this position, please reach out to our executive recruiter, Helene DeVries and CC Apiary Talent, including your resume.
Apiary Digital is an Equal Employment Opportunity Employer. Program and employment policies of Apiary Digital are nondiscriminatory in regard to race, color, gender, religion, age, national origin, disability, veteran status or sexual orientation.
Meet Apiary
Not the typical origin story, Apiary Digital® began with the Founder leaving her San Francisco ad agency & B2B tech startup life to travel the world, with the grand plan to “Figure it out later.” Between milking cows in New Zealand and exploring rice fields in Bangladesh, she began independent consulting.
Via the generous referrals of friends and colleagues, things quickly grew into too much work for one person. Moreover, clients were requesting flexible access to deep expertise across a variety of skill sets. Talented digital marketers started coming out of the woodwork asking how they too could contribute to big client projects while working remotely and with the flexibility to do important things outside of work.
The demand for curating structurally flexible teams of independent performance digital marketing consultants (“The Collective”) became clear, and in 2015 Apiary Digital was born—a passionate community of on-demand marketers ready to drive results for clients.
Today, we are on a mission to take Apiary Digital to the next level, seeking a Director of Operations for this thriving, unique, small agency business. This is an exciting opportunity to build on a business that has both a strong foundation and room to partner in creating the future of the organization.
