General Manager - KSA

Unconventional JD

Written by Ahmed Alrawi, Founder & CEO

[10 minute read]
 

We’re looking for a General Manager to drive growth & profitability for Calo in Saudi.

We believe business is a team sport.

The sport is about solving customer problems.

The bigger the problem, & the more the people that have it, the more you win.

The score is revenues and profits.

People pay you their hard earned money to reward you for a job well done solving their problem. They come back to pay you more if nobody else does it better.

We’re looking for the captain of our team in Saudi.

Some Context on Calo:

Calo is an ambitious startup set on a mission to make healthy easy.

We started <5 years ago with the simple idea that eating good food should not be hard (good food = good for your body, taste buds, & personalized to your nutritional needs). Our main product was meal subscriptions, but we’re expanding to retail and other verticals.

Since then, Calo is now the biggest healthy food brand in the GCC operating in +10 cities, employing +1,000 people, delivering +10,000,000 meals.

But it’s still day 1. We have ambitions of becoming a global brand. Why not? There’s no global food brand positioned to own the ‘healthy’ segment, and we want to win that title starting from the region.

Some Context on the Role:

We scaled to 5 countries very quickly, and we want to open in more.

That being said, we believe that the best way to win is to win locally.

We’re on track to set up a local team for each market that obsesses over the customer needs of that particular market.

We are very entrepreneurial as a company, and we love to work with people with a high sense of ownership and agency.

We’re looking to fill the role with someone who thinks and acts like an owner. Someone who embodies our values and shares our passion for the mission.

For context, our values are summed up in GOWKII: growth, obsession, winning, kindness, impact, and integrity. Our mission is to make healthy easy, and it’s more than just a statement on the wall for us. It’s a personal mission - we are the people who will make healthy easy.

Back to the role: what does it mean to own a market and become a GM?

Simply put: your role is to get us to win, whatever it takes (within our values).

How is winning defined?

We believe the scoreboard for business is defined in revenues & profits.

How are profits achieved?

By obsessing over what the customer wants, then obsessing over delivering that to the customer in the most efficient way, while building a sustainable culture of A-players.

You’d control and influence the levers: growth & marketing, operations, product, finance, people & culture, etc…

Our job would be to get you the resources you need, remove barriers from your way, and support/keep you accountable if needed.

The Mission

Although being a GM is probably one of the hardest roles, describing the mission of it is the simplest thing to do. Your mission will be described on this formula, with the variables changing depending on the market:

Grow the market by X% in Y years while maintaining Z% EBITDA.

If you don’t know what EBITDA is, maybe this isn’t the role for you (or maybe it is, we don’t have stupid rules - I didn’t know what EBITDA meant a few years ago)

The How

Well, we’re hoping you’d tell us :)

But I’d bet it would be something like this:

1. Obsess over the customer to deeply understand what he/she wants, what they love or hate, what motivates them, what brings them back, etc
2. Obsess over delivering that to the customer. Do whatever it takes to compete with yourself in delivering the highest value possible for the customer. Go above and beyond. Invent for them. Surprise them. Exceed their expectations
3. Build a culture of obsession. Recruit the best people. Drive the negative or losing players out. Inspire the team to keep thinking big, obsessing over the customer, and delivering above expectations
4. Keep score. Make sure that all your efforts are paying off. The scoreboard for a business is profits. If you did a great job at solving big customer problems, found many customers who have them, and done it efficiently, then profits will be there

Experience

We like to bet more on character than experience, but the best candidates will have a bit of both.

In an ideal world, you would have:

1. Started or managed a business before
2. Had your back against the wall - been faced with very difficult situations in business that you learned to navigate your way out of them the hard way. You have battle scars
3. Shown clear signs of customer obsession in previous roles
4. Had a winning track record. Such track records must start with failures, for no athlete becomes a great scorer without 10,000 missed shots. But ideally, you have shown that you can win
5. Read a lot of business books, listened to business podcasts, loved the business game and obsessed about winning :)

Advice on Applying

We get lots of candidates that apply or reach out, and we’re always humbled by the interest. It’s impossible for us to know who’s a killer candidate and who isn’t from a black & white A4. If you put more effort in your application, you’d get more of our attention.

Try recording a 3 minute video telling us why you’d be a great fit for the role, upload it on YouTube and make it unlisted, and share the link in your application.

Thank you for reading this far.