President / COO

THE COMPANY
Our client, a leading food processing company, is seeking a highly driven and visionary Chief Operating Officer (COO) to achieve the highest level of operational excellence while driving growth and profitability. The Company is a Mission Driven organization focused on consistently achieving the highest level of customer satisfaction in the most cost effective and sustainable manner. Even though they are the World Leader in their ingredient category, they still maintain a strong entrepreneurial spirit. They operate four processing facilities, as well as transplanting, growing, and trucking operations. They employ over 500 colleagues year-round and 2,000+ seasonal colleagues and have annual revenue of over $1 billion.

THE MISSION

• Understand our marketplace, its drivers, economics, operations, supply chain, customers, products, processes, and competitors.
• Advance the Missions of the operating companies through improving strategic integration, and colleague execution of all company operations plus contributing on a personal and technical level.
• The Company was founded and is still owned and operated by such founder who desires to advance the company’s talent base to ensure operational and financial sustainability. It is expected that the candidate will absorb several activities of the founder through exhibited competencies. The enterprise has always had a strong entrepreneurial bent. The person who will be successful in this enterprise will have strong values, work ethic and will have already materially fulfilled their drive for self-esteem such that they can concentrate their energies toward contributing to performance versus politics.

THE POSITION

• Build the strongest possible talent base for the organization.
• Working with key Colleagues throughout the organization, evaluate and improve business processes, build and execute annual sales/profit plans and operating budgets that optimize ROA and maintain three year rolling forecasts for the businesses.
• Champion the Company’s culture–“Mission Focused Self-Management,” based on respect for individuals, trust and accountability for results.
• Proactively drive innovation and execution in the production, distribution, marketing and sales of our products. Understand and drive economically viable technological advances. Embrace productive change.
• Advance the Company’s Brand. Maintain and advance their enterprise values. Through personal example and performance, enhance the brand by exhibiting honesty, integrity, competency, innovativeness, responsibility, efficiency and humility as the source of our industry leadership.

THE IDEAL CANDIDATE

• Values: Passion, Integrity, Humility, Strong Work Ethic, Curiosity.
• High level of Emotional Intelligence & Influencing Skills
• Self-directed and highly accountable
• Entrepreneurial Mindset
• 5+ years of Executive Leadership in Operations ideally within the Food & Ag industry
• Solid experience leading a mid-size organization ($250 million – $2 billion) with a track record of driving profitable growth.
• Demonstrated ability to motivate and guide team to reach performance goals.
• Advanced degree in engineering is desirable, however character and competency will trump formal education.