Hello. My name is [Job]. Let me tell you about myself.

Interested in working with a random person on the internet, but an actual person with a name and human body in real life? Rory O’Brien could be a perfect fit.

6 min readMar 2, 2017

About Person

Rory O’Brien (that’s me, by the way) is a utility player with 13 years of results driven experience in an array of industries (Finance, IT, Recruiting & HR, Ed Tech, Marketing Consulting). He has worn multiple hats in SaaS, Software, Marketing, and Professional Services related companies while also creating & managing large-scale events. He is most passionate about solving & enhancing operational processes that need creative solutions, while bridging together multiple parties in an organization of any size. He is organized and resourceful with a proven track record of getting things done. He’d rather spend his time fixing problems and learning from people than continue to talk about himself because it’s really awkward talking about yourself in the third person.

Role Description

As a seasoned business strategy and operations professional, he will work closely with the executive team to help define the overall company (or specific product) strategy while helping shape the founders vision of the company’s culture. Example activities include:

Product market research and implementing a go to market strategy for a new service/product line.
Leading a multi-faceted team, aligning all the moving parts while staying on time and budget.
Auditing a current internal workflow, wireframing and implementing a new solution saving my colleagues hundreds of hours a month and bringing efficiency and happiness to multiple teams.

He will also be required to roll up his figurative sleeves and get his hands dirty by brainstorming and creating marketing collateral, sales email campaigns, and joining in on sales calls to keep his ears close to the ground (and also to step into what his fellow colleagues are seeing, feeling, and hearing every day). He is also not opposed to helping run social and paid ad campaigns. Some people would call this a generalist, or in more modern terms a “business athlete”. “Jack of all trades…master of no idea” is also a term he may or may not have made up.

Responsibilities

Get introduced to a business problem > become its best friend and learn everything about it > hypothesize a fix > present said fix to all affected parties > get their buy-in > implement resolution > cheers, high-five, and good-hustle everyone when it’s fixed > repeat.
Work in partnership with executive leadership to identify business opportunities, then help build operational plans to execute against these opportunities. Synergy, eat your own dog food, other buzzwords, etc.
Work with existing or potential strategic partners to identify future creative growth opportunities, including up-selling opportunities from the existing product line, or brand new service/product offerings. The goal being to help craft [insert company name] growth trajectory up and to the right.
Develop a deep understanding of [insert company name] business operations and internal processes and pinpoint specific weak points. Implement fixes so that colleagues stop banging heads on keyboards when having to do the same monotonous tasks every day.
Use the decade of customer service experience to walk angry customers off the ledge of clicking unsubscribe/cancel. Dive deep into what made them want to churn-baby-churn. Implement a scalable fix to their issue and train the team on how to work with future use cases. Build a success story around said client(s) and use as marketing/sales collateral.
Work with growth hacking/sales team to fill the top of the funnel so much that they don’t need to even eat lunch anymore because their leads sustain them. Implement a turn-key process to push leads through so that their day is spent responding to folks instead of clicking buttons in their CSV’s, CRM’s, and other acronyms of your choice.
Conduct market research on a new or existing audience and create brand new marketing initiatives using inbound, outbound, paid, and social media marketing tactics. Working knowledge of all the Google marketing products, keyword research, social media outlets, and being able to write content is pretty much a requirement to live on Earth in 2017 and he should probably be comfortable doing that stuff.
On an emotional level, listen to colleagues with a neutral and fresh set of ears to read between their sentences on what’s making them happy, sad, distraught, etc. Have a knack for weeding through the B.S. (not the degree) and getting to the ‘why.’
Learn from his colleagues because he doesn’t know what he doesn’t know; which is usually a lot. The human brain contains about 1 terabyte of data, and unlike an SSD it’s really inefficient at pulling up information.
Be a nice person.

Requirements

At least 4 years experience in business operations, product marketing, product management, or in strategy from a tech company; experience with a rapidly scaling business is a plus. San Francisco startup experience is a double plus.
Strong relationship-building skills and experience working closely with senior executives. Being a firm hand-shaker has low impact on getting this job but is good to know.
10+ years of face-to-face, phone, and email customer service. Created an entire customer success division from nothing to a fully functioning 6 person department is also nice to have.
5+ years in software sales, business development, growth ninjas, or whatever else salespeople have branded themselves as in 2017. Cold-calling (even though no one does it anymore because it’s a colossal waste of time), email marketing campaigns, phone sales, and product demos are also something we want to see in this human.
Exquisite communication skills with the aptitude to distill convoluted issues and detailed analysis into uncomplicated, structured frameworks with concrete action plans. That sentence used bigger words than usual. Showing off that yes, he can write them without spell-check, most of the time.
Ability to work independently (sometimes remotely where you might not see a human for a few days) as well as physically with a small to medium size team. Side note: If someone doesn’t know how to work with a team by now please go join an intramural sport-ball team and take notes.
Bachelor of Science degree in Information Systems, but didn’t make a career out of coding.
Excited to work on a challenging, but impactful real-life problem that actually helps people improve their lives. Does not want to sell or provide non-sense fluff to people. Must have the ability to sleep happily every night knowing he’s working on something important for his fellow earthlings.
Have the athletic prowess to touch a basketball rim, but not have large enough hands (yet bigger hands than our President) to palm a basketball and dunk it.

Benefits

Will bring or pay for his own lunch every day; doesn’t expect it to be catered
Happy with remote working and also going into a physical office
Huge advocate of lowering the number of meetings in order to get actual work done
Brings computer on vacation even when he’s told not to. Gets antsy when inbox is not at zero
Lives a healthy lifestyle so he won’t be expensive to insure
Speaking of that, he has a gym he put together in his garage so you don’t need to provide a gym membership, unless that lowers the company’s insurance cost. He’s down to help the cause if so.
Will delightfully accept matching 401k’s since it’s “free money”, but is cool if that’s not an option
Has been known to set up company wide intramural sports teams (softball and basketball being predominant, but open to ultimate frisbee, flag football, shuffleboard, ping pong, or even Chutes and Ladders. He does not discriminate against any games).
Has a freshly re-formatted Macbook pro and a powerful PC, so he doesn’t need your corporate hardware handouts; he’s a strong, independent man…but will happily accept a Macbook since his is actually kind of old now that he thinks about it.
An experienced happy-hour’er

Disclaimer
Rory O’Brien is an equal opportunity opportunist. He is just a random white dude so unfortunately he will not help your diversity metrics, but will bring a special energy to your office. He has two dogs, a small white one with a mohawk and an attitude of a cat, and a real dog named Conan O’Brien who does real dog things.

Click here to apply for Rory O’Brien