Semata
Group Director, Operations, Tropical Reforestation (West Africa / London)
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Our client
- Develops and manages large-scale tropical forest restoration projects across West Africa.
- Generates high-quality carbon removal credits for some of the world’s largest companies.
- Has signed a landmark 15-year offtake agreement with Microsoft for up to 1.8 million credits.
- Raised a Series A led by BNP Paribas Asset Management Alts.
- Employs more than 2,500 people across four active projects in Ghana, Sierra Leone and Guinea, covering at least 370,000 hectares.
- Is on track to double its operations this year and again next, towards a long-term goal of restoring one million hectares by 2040.
- Is led by a team with experience at Bain, Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, Bboxx and the Africa Leadership Group, combining expertise in global offtake markets with the operational experience required to deliver complex, community-based projects at scale.
The role
The co-CEO is seeking a Group Director of Operations to take the responsibility to help drive performance across Rainforest Builder’s three operating businesses.
Each project has a Managing Director (MD) responsible for delivering its business plan. You will work closely with these MDs to ensure they have the strategy, organisation, people, resources and accountability required to deliver.
You will operate across the organisation rather than within a single function. One week you might be working with a project MD on their annual business plan; the next you might be recruiting a new Silviculture Manager, resolving a major operational issue in the field or restructuring a management team.
The role is deliberately broad. They are looking for someone who can move fluently between portfolio-level strategy and operational detail. This is a role for someone who has managed through senior managers, not simply advised them.
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Based in London or Ghana / West Africa. Frequent on-site travel (~16 weeks/year)
Reports to: Co-CEO/Co-Founder
Start date: as soon as possible
Responsibilities
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Drive performance across the project portfolio:
- Establish a rigorous performance-management rhythm across the portfolio, reviewing financial, operational and organisational performance regularly.
- Translate annual business plans into clear quarterly and monthly priorities.
- Identify underperformance early and work with MDs to diagnose and resolve the underlying issues.
- Hold MDs accountable for delivery while giving them the support and resources required.
- Develop a deep understanding of each project’s operating model, economics, management team and key constraints.
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Build and manage high-quality management teams
- Assess the strength and effectiveness of project-level senior management teams with MDs and the Co-CEO, identifying capability gaps and succession risks.
- Lead or support the recruitment of department level managers across the projects.
- Set clear objectives, performance expectations and accountability for department managers, and coach and challenge them where appropriate.
- Support difficult performance-management decisions, including replacing underperforming executives where necessary.
- Build a high-performance management culture and a strong pipeline of management talent for future growth.
- Help MDs become stronger leaders and create management teams that can operate with increasing autonomy.
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Build group-wide operating capabilities
As the company grows, there will be increasing opportunities to create leverage across projects. You will identify where common systems, processes and capabilities can improve performance, including procurement, HR and recruitment, operational planning, risk management, and training. The objective is genuine operating leverage without unnecessary bureaucracy or centralisation.
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You will be expected to distinguish between problems that require a group-wide solution and problems that are best solved locally within a project.
4. Support the company's long-term strategy
Work with the Co-CEO and wider leadership team on the questions that will shape the next stage of the company: what the company should look like at 20,000, 50,000 and 100,000 hectares; which capabilities and functions should sit at group level versus in the projects; where to invest additional capital and management attention; which countries and markets to enter; and how to build a scalable operating model while retaining the culture that has driven our growth.
You will be expected to bring a genuinely strategic perspective, while remaining close enough to the operations to understand what is actually happening on the ground.
5. Lead critical projects and interventions
You will take direct ownership of important problems when required: travelling to a project that is underperforming, leading a management-team restructuring, supporting the launch of a new project, establishing a new operational function, or taking temporary responsibility for a critical workstream.
You should be someone we can send into a difficult situation and trust to understand it quickly, build relationships with the people involved, determine what needs to change and drive the solution through to completion.
PROCESS
- CV / application screening
- Behavioural interview with Kupa / Semata team
- 30-min call with co-CEO
- Case study + aptitude test (in person preferred)
- Reference checks (run in parallel to the above)
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