Panda Drum
Head of Operations
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The Company
Panda Drum is the world's biggest steel tongue drum brand. Bootstrapped, profitable, growing 3x year over year for three years straight, projected ~$50M this year. US market. Physical product on the front end; subscriptions, courses, and an app on the back end, with new products in the pipeline, including connected hardware. The business is highly seasonal, most revenue concentrates in Q4, so cash flow discipline is a core requirement. We run lean, automate first, and make decisions from data. The founder currently runs operations himself. This role removes that bottleneck so he can focus on marketing.
The Structure
Since we currently have no head of ops or ops manager, you start de facto as operations manager, plus some strategic scope. You get the Head of Operations title and compensation from day one, every head of department in this company has gone through the same path. This is how it looks in practice:
- Month 1: Run day-to-day operations yourself: cadences, verification, unblocking, including the mundane parts. First usable deliverables ship in week one.
- Month 2: Document the processes you've been running, start making strategic calls, begin designing the operating architecture.
- Month 3: Process architecture and documentation complete enough to hand a large portion of the day-to-day to a replacement. We open that search together.
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The main goal: Remove yourself from day-to-day by building the processes, then hire your replacement as Operations Manager, and formally take over the full Head of Ops scope. Not the other way around.
After the Handover
- Product development coordination: Working directly with engineering and design on new physical and connected products
- The company operating system: KPIs, dashboards, single source of truth, accountability cadences
- Cash flow management across the seasonal cycle
- Strategic projects, reputation management, legal operations
- Building the ops org as the company grows. We hire long-term; this role grows with the business
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Requirements
- Proven build-from-scratch track record: P&Ls built from zero, dashboards teams actually used, processes that kept running after you stopped touching them
- Strong finance skills: P&L, working capital, cash conversion
- You have automated or replaced your own position at least once and moved up because of it
- Strategic thinking combined with willingness to execute
- Operating experience at a physical-product or e-commerce company at real scale
Compensation
- $100,000-130,000 base
- Up to 30% annual performance bonus, tied to written numeric gates you receive in month one
- Discretionary budget: tooling, consultants, pilots
- Travel: factory trips to China, US market visits
- Personal development budget
- Fully remote, direct daily work with the founder
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