Director, Strategy & Transformation

Job Description

Job Description

Description:

About the role

We are a middle-market HVAC and plumbing distribution company based in Meridan, CT, serving contractors, trade professionals, and commercial customers through a branch-based operating model. We are looking for a highly capable, hands-on strategy and value creation leader to report directly to the SVP of Sales Acceleration.

The Director, Strategy & Transformation will identify, prioritize, develop, and lead high-impact initiatives that improve EBITDA, gross margin, working capital, operating efficiency, service levels, customer experience, and long-term enterprise value.

This is a senior individual-contributor role with significant cross-functional leadership responsibility. The successful candidate will operate at the Executive and senior leadership team, bringing fact-based recommendations, external perspective, and practical operating judgment.

Opportunity identification and strategic analysis

• Use financial, operational, customer, product, vendor, pricing, inventory, branch, and market data to identify value creation opportunities.
• Conduct rapid diagnostics to find margin leakage, cost inefficiencies, working capital opportunities, process breakdowns, service-level gaps, and growth constraints.
• Develop fact-based recommendations using internal performance data, market benchmarks, competitive insights, customer needs, and business-unit input.
• Evaluate strategic opportunities such as pricing discipline, sales effectiveness, procurement savings, vendor rebate optimization, branch network productivity, warehouse and delivery efficiency, inventory turns, service model improvements, and operating model changes.
• Synthesize complex data into clear executive-level insights, decisions, and action plans.

Business case development and decision support

• Build clear business cases for priority initiatives, including baseline performance, financial opportunity, required investment, risks, implementation approach, timing, ownership, and success metrics.
• Partner with Finance to validate assumptions, quantify EBITDA, cash flow, gross margin, revenue, productivity, and working capital impact.
• Prepare executive-ready materials for the Executive and senior leadership team, including strategic narratives, initiative updates, decision memos, scorecards, and performance reviews.
• Support leadership discussions by clarifying tradeoffs, surfacing risks, identifying dependencies, and recommending practical paths forward.
• Create simple, high-impact models and analyses that support resource allocation, investment decisions, and operating priorities.

Initiative leadership and execution

• Lead high-priority cross-functional initiatives from concept through implementation, adoption, and financial realization.
• Mobilize and direct workstream teams across sales, branch operations, warehouse operations, logistics, procurement, finance, IT, HR, and other functions.
• Establish clear objectives, workplans, owners, milestones, metrics, dependencies, and escalation paths.
• Drive fast pilots, test-and-learn approaches, and practical solutions that can scale across the business.
• Remove blockers, force decisions when needed, and escalate issues to their supervisor with clear options and recommendations.
• Ensure initiatives move beyond analysis into implementation, adoption, and sustained operating change.

Value creation PMO and governance

• Build and run a lightweight value creation PMO for Executive-sponsored initiatives.
• Maintain the enterprise initiative portfolio, including priorities, owners, milestones, risks, dependencies, financial targets, and realized impact.
• Create practical governance mechanisms that increase accountability without slowing execution.
• Define and enforce a high standard for “done”: implemented, adopted, measured, and producing verifiable results.
• Create executive dashboards and scorecards that connect initiative progress to operating KPIs and financial outcomes.

Financial impact and performance measurement

• Partner with Finance and functional leaders to track value from idea identification through realization.
• Measure and report run-rate savings, one-time savings, revenue uplift, gross margin improvement, cost reduction, productivity improvement, working capital impact, and service-level gains.
• Identify gaps between expected and actual results, diagnose root causes, and lead corrective action.
• Conduct post-implementation reviews to confirm impact, capture lessons learned, and ensure sustainability.
• Help create a company-wide discipline around measurable value delivery, not just activity completion.

Cross-functional leadership and executive influence

• Act as a trusted advisor to senior leaders and functional owners by bringing analytical rigor, operating judgment, and constructive challenge.
• Influence leaders and frontline operators without relying on formal authority.
• Build credibility across branch operations, sales, procurement, warehouse operations, delivery/logistics, finance, IT, and executive leadership.
• Facilitate strategic working sessions, initiative reviews, and problem-solving discussions.
• Communicate clearly across all levels of the organization, from branch managers and operations teams to the executive leadership team.
• Help build a faster, more accountable, more data-driven operating culture.

Strategic planning, market perspective, and organizational scalability

• Support enterprise planning activities by helping translate long-term strategic goals into actionable operating priorities.
• Identify risks, constraints, and organizational capability gaps that could limit growth or value creation.
• Support operating model improvements that help the company scale, standardize, and improve consistency across branches and functions.
• Help leadership determine where the business needs clearer process, better data, stronger accountability, different roles, or improved management routines.

Candidate profile

The ideal candidate has experience in corporate strategy, enterprise transformation, value creation, operations improvement, management consulting, private equity portfolio operations, strategic finance, commercial operations, distribution, supply chain, or branch-based business operations.

This person should be equally comfortable building an executive-ready business case, analyzing margin leakage, challenging assumptions in a leadership meeting, walking a branch or warehouse floor, and driving a cross-functional team to deliver results.

Key competencies

• Strategic thinking with practical execution discipline.
• Financial and commercial acumen.
• Operational problem solving.
• Executive presence.
• Cross-functional influence.
• Data-driven decision-making.
• Change leadership.
• Comfort with ambiguity.
• Strong communication and storytelling.
• Bias for action.
• High ownership and accountability.
• Ability to create structure without bureaucracy.

Requirements:

Required qualifications

• 8–12+ years of relevant experience in strategy, transformation, value creation, operations, management consulting, corporate development, strategic finance, PMO, commercial operations, supply chain, or distribution.
• Demonstrated experience leading cross-functional initiatives with measurable business impact.
• Strong financial and analytical skills, including comfort with P&L drivers, margin analysis, operating KPIs, business cases, ROI, and performance dashboards.
• Ability to synthesize complex data and ambiguous business problems into clear recommendations and action plans.
• Strong project and program leadership skills, including milestone management, risk tracking, dependency management, and executive reporting.
• Proven ability to influence senior leaders and cross-functional teams without direct authority.
• Excellent written and verbal communication skills, including executive presentations and decision memos.
• Strong bias for action and comfort operating in a fast-paced, entrepreneurial, middle-market environment.

Preferred qualifications

• Experience in wholesale distribution, HVAC, plumbing, industrial supply, building products, branch-based operations, logistics, procurement, or B2B services.
• Experience in management consulting, private equity value creation, corporate strategy, business transformation, or an internal strategy function.
• Experience with pricing, procurement, inventory optimization, working capital improvement, sales effectiveness, warehouse productivity, logistics efficiency, or branch operations.
• MBA or advanced degree preferred but not required.
• Experience working with BI, pricing, inventory, or operational reporting systems.
• Familiarity with KPI/OKR frameworks, strategic planning cycles, transformation offices, or enterprise initiative governance.