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 Western Province, Saudi Arabia.
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 the Central Region.
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 6 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 be 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: