Operations & Growth Partner

WHAT IS OUTDOORBENGAL

OutdoorBengal exists to help cat parents do more (and better) with their cats. You can find more about the company and Albert´s story at We make adventure cat gear and training tools for the people who think of their cat as family, not furniture. We’re a small, profitable, fast-growing team. We sell mostly online (Amazon and our own website), and we’re scaling quickly: ~70% growth on Amazon and roughly 10x on our website over the last year.

Right now, we are a small team of 4 people: Albert (founder, operations, marketing, and most things in between), Neus (product and innovation), Pave (product and innovation, reporting to Neus), and Jemar (graphic design).

Customer emails, demand planning, re-routing orders, growth opportunities… they all flow through one inbox, and most days, the urgent crowds out the important.
That’s where you come in.

WHAT IS THE ROLE

You will take operational work off the founder’s plate so the business can grow. Over time, as we earn trust together, you’ll grow into the work that creates growth.

We’re looking for one person, long-term, who wants to grow with us. Not a contractor. Not a task-rabbit. A partner in the early-stage, hands-dirty sense of the word. Here’s how the role grows:

Phase 1 — Foundation (Months 1–6)

In your first six months, your job is to take three things off Albert’s plate, completely, and own them better than he did.
1. Customer service emails.
You will be the voice of OutdoorBengal. This is a very important job. Cat parents are passionate, and the way we respond to them is the way we earn their trust for life. You’ll learn our products inside out, develop a tone that sounds like us (warm, direct, knowledgeable), and over time build the playbooks that turn a one-time buyer into someone who tells their friends.
2. Financial and demand planning reports.
You’ll own the cadence of our internal reports — sales, inventory, demand forecasts — pulling data from Amazon, Shopify, and our spreadsheets, keeping it clean, and flagging anomalies before they become problems. We make decisions based on these numbers. Accuracy and timeliness are non-negotiable.
3. Order rerouting and exception handling.
When orders go sideways — wrong address, lost shipments, fulfillment hiccups — you make them right. Quickly, following the blueprint, with judgment when needed, and without escalating every decision.
If you nail Phase 1, you’ll have done something rare: you’ll have given the founder back his time. That’s the first half of the job.

Phase 2 — Growth (Month 6 onward, conditional on Phase 1)

Once the foundation is solid and trust is established, the role expands into growth work:
1. PR outreach — pitching the brand to publications, podcasts, and blogs in the cat and outdoor spaces.
2. Influencer outreach — finding, contacting, and building relationships with cat influencers and creators who can put our products in front of new audiences.
3. CRM management — owning the email/SMS lifecycle, segmentation, automation, and the relationship with our subscribers.

To be clear: Phase 2 is not guaranteed. If you turn out to be excellent at operations but not a fit for outreach work, that’s fine. We’ll figure out together what’s next. But we are intentionally hiring someone with the ceiling to do both, and we’ll pay accordingly when you grow into it.

WHO YOU ARE

We don’t care about your degree. We care that you are:
- A clear, warm writer in English. You’ll write hundreds of customer emails. You should be able to be kind, specific, and brief (without sounding like a corporate FAQ or an AI Agent).
- Numerate and careful. Spreadsheets don't intimidate you. You can run VLOOKUPs, SUMIFS, and pivot tables — and you'll learn whatever else the work requires. You catch your own mistakes before someone else does, and you respect the difference between 5% and 0.5%.
- Curious and a self-starter with judgment. When you spot something not quite right, you dig deeper to try to find an answer. If you don’t know what to do, you find out. When something feels off, you flag it. You don’t need to be told twice.
- Hungry. Self-motivated, diligent, always looking for more. You go beyond the job description without being asked. Comfortable with both freedom and structure. (Some weeks are process, some are chaos, and you're at home in both.)
- Humble in the truest sense. Willing to learn, willing to admit when you got it wrong. You believe humans never peak, and great work can always be better.
- Long-term oriented. We’re not looking for someone for the next six months. We’re looking for someone for the next five years. Pave has been with us 3 years, Jemar 2. We’re building a team and looking for a great teammate.

WHAT'S HELPFUL (Not Required)

- Prior experience in customer service, e-commerce operations, or VA work for a founder.
- Familiarity with Amazon Seller Central, Shopify, and Excel sheets at an intermediate level.
- Experience with PR or influencer outreach in any category — bonus if it’s pets, outdoors, or DTC consumer goods.
- ChatGPT/AI literacy. We use it. You should, too. It’s as important to master it as it is not to sound like a robot because of it.

WHAT "Good" LOOKS LIKE IN 90 DAYS

- Customer email response time under 24 hours, with a tone that matches our brand.
- Weekly financial and demand reports delivered on time, with no errors for Albert to catch.
- Order exceptions handled end-to-end without Albert in the loop on routine cases.
- You’ve documented your own SOPs as you go to make the playbook stronger and reduce guesswork.

If those four things are true at the 90-day mark, we are in business together.

HOW DO WE WORK

- Remote and async-friendly. You set your own hours within reason. We don’t micromanage your day.
- Hubstaff for hours and accountability. We use Hubstaff to track working hours and take periodic screen recordings while you’re on the clock. We’re upfront about this because we’d rather you know than feel watched. In practice, we rarely review the recordings. They exist as a baseline of trust and a paper trail, not as a surveillance tool. You log your hours; we pay against them.
- Direct feedback, both ways. We tell you when something’s off; we want you to tell us the same. The fastest way to lose trust here is to tell us what we want to hear.
-Long-term win-win. We want you to grow. We want you to be paid well. We want you to be here in five years. If any of that stops being true on either side, we talk about it openly.
- Tools you’ll use regularly: Asana, WhatsApp, Shopify, Amazon Seller Central, Etsy Seller Central, Excel, and Hubstaff.

COMPENSATION

We pay well for the right person. We will tell you specifically what we’re offering once we know who you are and what you bring, but the range is competitive for the role and the trajectory, and it grows as your scope grows. If money is your only filter, we are probably not the right fit. If trajectory + money + meaning is your filter, let’s talk.

HOW TO APPLY

Send an email to ---------- with:
- A short note (3–5 paragraphs, not a cover letter template) telling us who you are, why this role caught your attention, and what you’d want to be doing in three years if this works out.
- A link to your CV or LinkedIn.
- Answers to these two questions:
1. Tell us about something you got wrong at work in the last year. What happened, what did you do, and what did you learn?
2. What's something you've taught yourself in the last year (work-related or not), and how did you go about it?

We read every application. We only respond to applications that have “Operations Growth Partner - btw, I love your cat” as the email subject.

OUR PROCESS

We don’t hire from interviews alone. Here’s how we choose:
- Application review. We read your email and your answers. If we like what we see, we move you to the next round.
- Paid tasks. Shortlisted candidates are asked to complete three small, paid tasks: two real-world customer service emails and one Excel/Google Sheets tracker. These mirror the actual work of Phase 1. We pay for your time whether or not we move forward together.
- Interview. A conversation with Albert (and Neus, depending on schedules). We’ll talk about your tasks, your background, and how you think.
- Decision. The combination of how you handled the tasks and how you showed up in the interview is what determines the hire.

Expect the full process to take 2–3 weeks from application to offer.

I can’t wait to meet you.

— Albert
OutdoorBengal