Blacksmith Agency × Full time, remote from the US or Canada
Run the company day to day.
You came from our Chief Operating Officer, Marketing Agency posting. Same seat. We run it internally as Chief Operating Officer, and the title moves with the size of company you are coming from.
The number two at a growing US marketing agency. Sales, recruiting, delivery and marketing all report to this seat. The founder decides where the company is going. You are the one who makes it happen, on a date, with the people we actually have. Today that work sits on the founder's desk, which is the whole reason this seat is open.
The role
The founder owns where the business goes next. You run it day to day: sales first, alongside recruiting, delivery and marketing. You hold four department leads to their numbers, and when everything cannot happen at once you decide what gets dropped. Each lead knows their own function better than you will, except sales, which you should know as well as anyone in the building.
You own
Sales, recruiting, delivery and marketing report to you. Their numbers, their development, their reviews, and the call when one of them is not going to get there. Several are strong operators who have never been coached as leaders. Building them into that is the job, not a side effect of it.
You own
The day to day, end to end. The meeting rhythm, what the priorities are this quarter, what gets cut when two of them collide. Decisions that wait on the founder today get made by you the same day instead. That is the change we are buying.
You own
Profit, and you are measured on attainment rather than activity. Margin on the work we deliver, what a hire really costs, which business we take and which we turn down. If a quarter misses, the diagnosis is yours before anyone asks you for it.
Blacksmith Agency is a fully remote agency running web, paid and organic programs for US clients. You would report to the founder and sit above every department. The seat also carries the commercial conversations: client contracts and the redlines that come back on them, vendor terms, and what we will and will not agree to. If the hard conversation is the part of a job you would rather route around, this is the wrong seat and it will be obvious in the first thirty minutes.
Why this seat
Most operations roles hand you one function and three layers of approval above you. Here you get every function, department leads who are already hired and running, and a founder who actually wants the day to day handed over rather than a deputy to carry messages.
Sales, recruiting, delivery and marketing all answer to the same person, and that person is you. No peer owns half the company and no committee has to agree with you before something changes.
This is not a title with the work still sitting on the founder's desk. The founder wants the visionary seat and is hiring you to take the other one, which means the authority arrives with the job rather than being earned back a quarter at a time.
You carry a profit number, not a list of initiatives. That cuts both ways and it is the better deal: being measured on margin is what makes the authority over what we say yes to real.
The business is big enough to be a real operating problem and small enough that what you decide to change goes live the same week you decide it. You will not spend a year building consensus for something you could just do.
The bar
You came up through sales and then ran more of the business than sales, ideally at an agency, otherwise in SaaS or professional services. You have been the number two, or one seat off it, at a company that actually grew while you were there, and you have carried a profit number. Below is what each conversation digs into, so you can decide now whether this is worth your hour.
Must have
You carried a quota, then managed salespeople against a number, as a VP of Sales, CRO or sales-led general manager, ideally at an agency; SaaS or professional services also work. You can coach a rep, run a pipeline review and close a deal yourself. You will be asked about a rep you developed, a quarter you missed and what you changed.
Must have
More than one function reporting to you, where their numbers and the call when a leader was not working out were yours. You joined a company at one size and left it three or four times bigger; forty people to a hundred and forty is the shape we mean. We will ask for the headcount the day you arrived and the day you left.
Must have
Margin, not revenue somebody else sold and not a budget you were handed to spend. You will be asked what it was when you took it, what it was when you left, and the single decision that moved it most. "We grew a lot" ends the conversation there.
Please do not apply if you have never managed salespeople against a number, if nobody has ever reported to you, if you have only ever led inside one function, or if the company you point to was already large when you arrived. Same if what you want is the visionary seat, because that one is taken and this is explicitly the other one. These are how we screen rather than preferences we bend on, so applying anyway costs you an hour and gets you a no.
The process
No take-home project, no panel interview, no going quiet on you. This is the whole thing, start to finish.
Four fields and a short behavioral assessment. The assessment is a real signal we read alongside your background, not a filter to thin the pile.
Thirty minutes on your background, the real scope of the seat and what you are looking for.
The person this seat reports to. This is the one where you walk through the growth story, the profit number and the leader you had to performance-manage.
Scope, comp, start date. You meet the person you report to twice, on purpose, because for the seat directly beside the founder that relationship is the whole job.
Apply
Add your details and we will take you straight to a short behavioral assessment. No cover letter, no portfolio upload, no account to create.
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