Business operation manager

Small Luxury Fine Jewelry House — Part-Time, Remote ? Path to Full-Time

Most operations roles are about putting out fires. This one is about building the calm.
We're a 20-year-old online fine jewelry house specializing in alexandrite — one of the rarest gemstones on earth. We've built a real business, real craft, and real client relationships, and we're now growing into a higher-end, custom-commission market. The infrastructure to support that growth — vendors, freelancers, agencies, payments, CRM, fulfillment, tooling — needs an operator who can take it from "founder runs everything by hand" to "quiet, beautiful machine."
That operator is you.

Why this role, why this house
Three things define how we work, and the person we hire embodies all three:

Precision. We are stewards of rare materials and meaningful client ---------- nts. Sloppy work has no place here.
Quiet competence. We make complicated things feel effortless — to clients, to the founder, to our partners. The best ops work is invisible.
Care. Our clients spend $1,500 to $30,000 with us; they deserve infrastructure that respects that.

What you'll own

You'll take everything operational off the founder's plate so he can spend his days where he creates value — designing, selling, and deepening client relationships. By the time you've been in seat 60 days, his calendar should look completely different from today's, because you are running the back of the house.

Operations & Vendor Management (the core of the role)

Own all vendor relationships — shipping company, fulfillment app, payment processors, software agencies — and resolve issues end-to-end without escalation where possible
Coordinate with our manufacturing partner on every custom order: timelines, photo handoffs, milestone tracking
Source, evaluate, hire, brief, and quality-check freelancers across Fiverr, Upwork, and direct hires.
Keep our HubSpot agency partner on schedule, on scope, and accountable
Provision tool access for new collaborators; troubleshoot login and access issues; own our internal tooling stack
Build, document, and improve SOPs so the business doesn't depend on any single person — including you

Systems & CRM Hygiene

HubSpot is the source of truth. Every lead, conversation, deal stage, note lives there, and you keep it pristine.
Maintain templates, sequences, lists, and basic automations in HubSpot
Surface pipeline gaps, flag stale opportunities, prepare weekly operational summaries for the founder
Light Shopify admin: orders, customer issues, basic troubleshooting
Own quote preparation, invoicing, payment follow-up, and helping clients through any payment friction

Client Communications (a defined slice, not the whole job)

Be the first response to incoming inquiries within 60 minutes during business hours — warm, professional, on-brand — and triage appropriately to the founder, the manufacturing partner, or yourself
Handle routine client follow-ups, order updates, and operational communications so the founder is only pulled in when his time genuinely creates value (high-end discovery calls, design decisions, relationship-deepening ---------- nts)

Required

3+ years in business operations, executive operations, or ops management — ideally for a small-to-mid-sized brand, e-commerce business, or premium/luxury company
Fluent English with strong comprehension and a warm, clear written voice. You don't need to be a literary stylist — for complex written correspondence, AI tools are part of how we work — but you'll be reading nuanced client messages, speaking with clients live on phone and chat, and writing in real time, so genuine fluency matters.

Comfortable using AI tools to draft and refine written work, while exercising real judgment on tone, accuracy, and brand fit before anything goes out.
Hands-on HubSpot experience (Sales and/or Marketing Hub), or deep experience in a comparable CRM with willingness to come up to speed on HubSpot fast.

Track record of taking founder-dependent processes and converting them into systems that run without the founder
Comfortable owning vendor relationships, holding freelancers accountable, and resolving operational issues independently
Proactive, low-drama, organized to a fault — you spot problems before the founder does and bring solutions, not questions
Discreet — you will see client details, payment information, and confidential business data

Bonus, but not must have:

Operations experience inside a premium, luxury, or fine-goods brand
Familiarity with Shopify, Notion, Crisp, Okendo, Retell.ai
Bookkeeping, invoicing, or finance ops experience
Real interest in fine jewelry, gemstones, or design

Logistics

Hours: 20–25 hrs/week to start, with the path to full-time Director of Operations within 6–12 months if it's the right fit
Structure: 30-day paid trial ? ongoing engagement once fit is mutual
Location: Fully remote. Meaningful overlap with US business hours required.
Reports to: Founder

How to apply:

A short note — not a templated cover letter — telling us why this operations role at this house interests you specifically.
A 60–90 second Loom or voice memo introducing yourself. We want to hear how you sound, live and unscripted.
Your résumé or LinkedIn.
One concrete example of a founder-dependent operation you took ownership of and turned into a system that ran without them. Include before/after specifics — what was the chaos, what did you build, what was the result?

Applications missing any of the four will not be reviewed. We read every complete application personally.