Director of Operations: Marketing Agency

One Firefly is a seven-time Inc. 5000 company and the leading marketing agency in the custom integration industry. In business since 2007, we serve more than 500 active clients and are approaching $10M in annual revenue. We have redesigned how operations leadership works here. The seat focuses entirely on our six delivery teams and carries a mandate to work shoulder to shoulder with those teams on improving how their work gets done. This is a newly defined role, and you would be the first person in it. Six delivery teams report to this seat: Web, SEO, Content, Paid Search, Social Media and Live Chat, and Media including Graphic Design and Branding. Six team leads, with roughly forty talented people across their teams who know their craft. These teams produce nearly all of the client work we deliver. Clients stay with One Firefly for a lot of reasons, and the quality of what these teams produce is one of the biggest. This is a working leadership role. You lead from inside the work, sitting with a team, learning how they produce a deliverable today, and working with them to make it better. You report to our CEO, sit on our executive team, and partner daily with our Director of Technology and Innovation on the tooling that supports it. Why This Role Matters Our teams are good at what they do. They are also being asked to work in ways the industry has never worked before, with tools that did not exist two years ago, while keeping quality high for hundreds of clients. Our team wants to work differently. They want to know what the standard is, how much is enough, and measured against what. Building that clarity and the path to it is what this role will do. The work runs at three levels. People. Six team leads, with roughly forty skilled people across their teams, who deserve a leader in their corner. Someone who gives them clarity on what is expected, coaches them into stronger versions of themselves, removes what gets in their way, and carries them through change rather than announcing it. This is the largest part of the job. Process. Much of how we produce work predates the tools we now have. Rebuilding it around them is a large part of this job. You take it apart in collaboration with the team, and rebuild it so the tedious parts stop eating the day and the skilled parts get the attention they deserve. Where automation and AI genuinely help, you put them to work. Where human judgment and craft matter, they stay with people, and you make sure our people have the room to do that work well. Product. Every service we deliver deserves the question of whether it earns its price for the client and what it should become next. You bring our CEO and our innovation lead a real point of view on what should improve and what is missing. You are not doing this alone. Our technology and innovation function builds the tooling, and you set its priorities. Our CEO is personally invested in this work and wants a true partner in it. You also start with an unusual amount already in place. A brand built since 2007. A defended leadership position in a real industry niche. More than 500 clients who count on us. A team that knows its craft. You are not inventing a product or finding a market. You are taking a business people already trust and helping it deliver better, transforming it for the future. What You'll Own Six teams and six leaders. Coach the team leads into stronger leaders. Advocate for their people, remove obstacles, and make sure everyone knows what is expected of them and how they are doing against it. Build each lead's capability to run improvement in their own function, so that capability lives in the team rather than in one seat. What good looks like. Define clear standards for output in every function, so teams know the target and know when they have hit it. This may be the most valuable thing you do here. How the work gets produced. Map how each function delivers today, design how it should deliver, and rebuild it with the team. Decide together what automation and AI handle well, what belongs with skilled people, and where human judgment stays in the loop. Improvements should take work off the team, not add to it. Product quality. Know what outcomes and results each service delivers for the client, how well it performs, and what it takes to produce, and own making it better. Audit every service against where digital marketing actually stands in 2026, not against how we built it. How the department runs. We operate on EOS, and that cadence stays. Everything beyond it is yours to design, and you protect real time each week to work alongside teams. Delivery visibility. Build a clear picture of capacity and how work actually flows, so we can staff teams properly, quote work accurately, and find where the process is costing us time. You build it with our Director of Finance. The technology agenda. Act as the internal customer for our technology and innovation function. Decide what gets built and in what order, specify the problem and the measure of success, and give feedback in weeks rather than months. What You Bring You lead people well. Four or more years leading teams, including leading other leaders. You coach, you develop, and you have specific stories about people who grew because they worked for you. You handle performance problems directly and early, with real conversation before formal process. A change agent. You have led people through a real change in how work gets done. You know where it gets hard, you explain the reasoning rather than issuing the directive, and you have honest stories about what you learned when it didn't go smoothly. First-principles and systems thinking. You break a problem down to what is actually true, set aside inherited assumptions about how it has always been handled, and reason back up from there, seeing how the parts interact and where the real constraint sits. A degree in engineering, computer science, or a related technical field is one signal of this, as is a clear record of taking systems apart and rebuilding them. Delivery experience. Eight or more years in agency operations, marketing, or digital services, with a record of owning delivery outcomes. Hands-on AI fluency. Current, working experience with reasoning models like Claude and ChatGPT and with orchestration or agent-building tools. You do not need to build every system yourself, but you need to understand what these tools do well, where they fail, and how to design work around them. Self-directed learning. You already follow what is changing in marketing and in AI because you want to. Nobody here has to send you to go learn something. The same instinct applies to any unfamiliar discipline: recognizing what excellent output looks like, doing the homework on your own, and working through your team leads to get there. Comfort with numbers. You use capacity, throughput, and margin to find what to fix, while keeping a broader view of the people and clients behind them. Remote-ready communication. Excellent written and verbal communication in a fully remote, Slack and Google Workspace environment. A Strong Plus Formal training in systems engineering, operations research, or a similarly quantitative discipline. Experience building or rebuilding a production function, not just running one. Experience leading operators inside a marketing or digital agency, or hands-on background in AI-assisted web, search, or social work. Direct experience operating inside EOS. How We Work We are fully remote and have been for years. Working alongside a team here means live working sessions, screen shares, and time in the tools together, not relocating. We run on EOS and have since 2019. Scorecards, quarterly rocks, weekly Level 10 meetings, and structured issue resolution are how we operate, not an overlay on it. Our purpose is to help people feel proud, prosperous, and connected, and that includes our own team. Our values are how we hire and how we hold each other accountable: own it, embrace innovation, grow together, bring good vibes, and speak up. Two of those matter most in this seat. Grow together, because this role exists to make the people around it better. And speak up, because we want someone who surfaces problems early, including their own, and brings a real point of view rather than only observations. Your first months are for listening and learning, understanding the products, people, clients, and how work gets done before changing any of it. We are not looking for someone to reorganize in week two. You are joining a market leader at a moment of real change, with a team worth leading and a mandate to make their work better. The company is small enough to move fast and established enough to matter, with a CEO committed to this direction who wants a partner to build it with. If you want to lead a talented team into a new way of working and see the results reach hundreds of clients within months, this is a rare seat. What We Offer As a full-time employee, you would receive the following benefits: A remote-first culture that allows for flexible hours Private Health, Dental, and Vision 100% paid for employee only, dependent coverage is available for an additional cost 10 Paid Holidays PTO that increases with tenure, plus 1 additional day for Volunteer work Simple IRA with company match Bonus opportunities tied to clear performance metrics Personal Development Allowance (To be used for Professional and Personal Development) Company provided computer, monitor, keyboard and mouse along with additional office supply funds your first year Team events to build relationships in person Quarterly offsite planning with the Executive Management Team Location Remote (United States) Reports to Chief Executive Officer Compensation $150,000 - $180,000 On Target Earnings #J-18808-Ljbffr One Firefly