Director of Operations & Leadership Development

The Spice & Tea Exchange is an experiential culinary hospitality company that operates award-winning retail stores as its primary customer platform. Our guests come to discover flavor, explore tea and wellness, sample products, learn how to use remarkable ingredients, find distinctive gifts, and experience genuine hospitality. Retail is the operating platform. Hospitality is the service model. Discovery is the guest outcome.

We are looking for an experienced multi-unit operator to help lead our next stage: strengthening three established stores, developing the leaders who operate them, reducing dependence on the Founder for routine operations, and building the leadership capacity required for future growth. This is a distinctive opportunity for someone who is commercially strong, operationally disciplined, excellent with people, and energized by building leaders rather than simply supervising locations.

Store Video: https://youtu.be/LBIKui96vYE?si=MFolo33tNFY6c7Jc

Why This Role Exists

We are evolving from a Founder-dependent operating model toward a scalable leadership model. The goal is not simply to move operational work from the Founder to another person. It is to build an organization in which capable store leaders know what they own, make sound decisions, coach and develop their teams, maintain standards, address performance issues, deliver exceptional hospitality, and produce strong business results.

Leadership development is therefore a core operating strategy. This is not a traditional Learning & Development role. Leadership development is the method; stronger business performance is the outcome.

The Director will operate as a field-based player-coach who develops leaders rather than routinely doing their jobs for them, but who is willing and able to step into the work when circumstances require it, model the standard, restore performance, and then return accountability to the appropriate leader. As store leadership capability grows, the Director should increasingly achieve results through capable leaders rather than personal intervention.

What You Will Own

Multi-Unit Business Performance

You will be accountable for the operating health and increasing consistency of a three-store portfolio, including sales growth, average ticket and customer behavior, labor productivity and scheduling discipline, margin and expense awareness, inventory and product availability, store readiness, guest experience, team capability, and store-level KPI performance.

You should be able to move comfortably between a P&L, a scorecard, a store walk, a difficult coaching conversation, and a busy sales floor. You will be expected to identify operating drift early, diagnose the cause, establish corrective action, and hold the appropriate leader accountable for results.

Leadership Development & Succession

One of your most important responsibilities will be building the leadership bench. You will assess current leaders and emerging talent, identify capability gaps, coach managers to think and solve problems independently, strengthen delegation and accountability, address underperformance directly, build succession coverage, develop Store Manager candidates internally where appropriate, and recruit externally when needed. Success will not be measured by how many coaching sessions you conduct. It will be measured by who becomes capable of carrying greater responsibility because of your leadership.

Hospitality, Sales & Guest Experience

We believe hospitality and commercial performance reinforce one another. You will ensure teams consistently welcome, engage, and guide guests; create personalized discovery; use product knowledge and culinary storytelling; execute SalesRX behaviors; sample and educate appropriately; maintain strong selling standards; and create memorable experiences without making the interaction feel scripted or pressured.

People Leadership & Performance Accountability

This is not simply a coaching role. You must be comfortable with hiring and selection, onboarding, performance expectations, feedback and recognition, employee development, attendance and reliability, difficult conversations, corrective action and documentation, conflict resolution, retention of strong performers, and difficult personnel decisions when necessary. We value warmth, fairness, and humanity. We also believe avoiding accountability is not kindness.

Operational Excellence

One of our core operating principles is: Standardize the predictable so people can personalize the exceptional.

You will help make opening and closing, scheduling and labor deployment, inventory controls, receiving, production and blending workflows, replenishment, merchandising, store recovery and readiness, cash controls, training, onboarding, SOP execution, leadership cadence, and performance follow-through increasingly reliable. Our strongest candidates naturally think in terms of observable behavior, management rhythm, root causes, metrics, inspection, coaching loops, and accountability rather than repeated reminders or personal heroics.

A More Complex Business Than the Store Count Suggests

We currently operate three locations, but the operating environment is more layered than a traditional three-store retail portfolio. The business spans three states and distinct destination markets, significant seasonal differences, specialty retail and hospitality, tea service and experiential guest engagement, inventory-intensive operations, in-house production and blending, receiving and replenishment complexity, seasonal merchandising and gifting, developing store-management structures, and a franchise brand system combined with local ownership and operating responsibility. You need to enjoy operational complexity without creating unnecessary complexity yourself.

You Will Join During an Active Transformation

The company is well established. You are not walking into a start-up with no foundation or a turnaround with nothing working. You will inherit established stores, experienced team members, loyal guests, proven practices, significant institutional knowledge, a recognized franchise brand, and emerging store leaders who already own meaningful areas of responsibility. At the same time, we are strengthening the operating platform. Longstanding knowledge and practices are being converted from tacit experience and oral tradition into documented, teachable systems while new technology, reporting, training, and management infrastructure are introduced.

You will inherit neither a blank slate nor a finished corporate operating manual. Initially, we expect you to learn before broadly redesigning: observe how work actually happens, understand why practices developed, learn from experienced employees and ownership, identify contradictions and gaps, preserve what works, question what no longer serves the business, and test improvements in actual store conditions.

Over time, you will assume increasing responsibility for the accuracy, adoption, and continuous improvement of the store operating system. Administrative, AI, and knowledge-management support can assist with documentation. Your highest-value contribution should remain operating judgment, field leadership, people development, and execution.

Working With the Founder - You will report directly to the Founder/Owner. The Founder is progressively concentrating on company strategy, organizational development, business development, partnerships, new concepts, acquisitions, major operating architecture, and future growth. The Director will increasingly own the store operating organization.

This requires a mature, high-trust relationship. You should be comfortable making decisions without constant permission, bringing recommendations rather than simply problems, respectfully challenging assumptions when evidence supports it, knowing what requires escalation and what does not, absorbing historical context without becoming dependent on it, and creating confidence through consistent execution.

Clear decision rights and increasing operating independence are intentional parts of the organizational model.

The Leadership Organization You Will Inherit

One location currently has a Store Manager. The others use a distributed leadership structure involving Operations & Integration, Sales leadership, Inventory Control, Floor Readiness, and Keyholders/first-level managers.

These roles allow people to develop meaningful management capability before assuming responsibility for an entire store. You will be expected to understand this structure before changing it, clarify accountability where responsibilities overlap, develop the strongest internal leaders, prevent distributed leadership from becoming diffuse accountability, determine when broader management responsibility is warranted, and develop or recruit Store Managers when the organization needs them. We are intentionally building a leadership bench, not merely filling boxes on an organizational chart.

This Is a Field Leadership Position - This role is on-site and multi-location. It is not remote or hybrid.

Your office will substantially be the stores. You will spend meaningful time in Alexandria, Annapolis, and Rehoboth Beach. Initial leadership-development and operating attention is expected to be concentrated primarily in Alexandria and Annapolis, where leadership structures are evolving most actively. The Director must also establish a deliberate, recurring presence in Rehoboth Beach and a strong working relationship with its Store Manager and team.

The allocation of time among stores will change based on business conditions, seasonality, leadership needs, performance, and organizational development. This is not a fixed “X days per store” role.

Hospitality, leadership presence, selling behavior, merchandising, store readiness, workflow problems, operating drift, team dynamics, and management capability cannot be credibly evaluated primarily through dashboards and video calls. You need to see how leaders actually lead, how employees interact with guests, how stores operate under pressure, where systems break down, and whether standards are truly embedded.

You will use data extensively. You will combine data + direct observation + judgment.

The role also requires selected presence during weekends, holidays, peak selling periods, major events, and other times when seeing the business under actual operating pressure is important. This is not a traditional Monday–Friday corporate-office position.

Required Experience & Capability - We are looking for demonstrated operating pattern recognition, not merely potential. Strong candidates should bring:

• Meaningful multi-unit leadership experience in a customer-facing operating environment.
• Direct accountability for location performance.
• Strong financial and KPI literacy.
• Experience managing labor and productivity.
• Experience hiring, developing, and managing leaders.
• Evidence of developing managers who subsequently carried greater responsibility.
• Experience addressing underperformance and difficult employee issues.
• Experience implementing consistent operating standards across locations.
• Strong coaching and communication capability.
• High agency and sound judgment.
• Emotional steadiness under pressure.
• Willingness and ability to work substantially in the field.

We are more interested in what you have actually owned and improved than in having one exact prior title. A strong District Manager, Area Manager, Regional Manager, Multi-Unit General Manager, or comparable hospitality operator ready for broader organizational ownership may find this an especially compelling next step.

Experience leading roughly 3–10 locations, direct labor and margin accountability, meaningful team scale, development of store leaders, SOP implementation, and exposure to underperforming or inconsistent units are useful indicators of the operating depth we seek rather than rigid numerical gates.

Especially relevant backgrounds may include hospitality, experiential or specialty retail, specialty food or beverage, restaurant/fast-casual operations, franchise organizations, seasonal or destination-market businesses, inventory- or production-intensive environments, founder-led entrepreneurial businesses, and military leadership followed by meaningful commercial operating responsibility.

We value diverse career paths. We do not substitute leadership potential alone for the commercial operating experience required to succeed in this role.

The Kind of Leader Who Will Thrive Here

You may be a strong fit if you notice drift before it becomes a crisis; are warm with people and firm with standards; enjoy developing managers more than proving you can do their jobs better; can move between people, numbers, customers, and operations comfortably; use systems without hiding behind them; make decisions with sufficient information rather than waiting for certainty; can enter an evolving organization without either resisting change or trying to replace everything; build capability that remains after you leave the room; and want significant responsibility and direct access to ownership.

This Role Is Probably Not for You If…

This is probably not the right role if you are seeking remote, hybrid, or primarily administrative work; have managed stores but have not meaningfully led across locations or developed managers; prefer fixing problems personally to building leaders who can solve them; avoid difficult accountability or performance conversations; are uncomfortable owning commercial, labor, people, and guest-experience outcomes together; require mature corporate infrastructure and highly defined answers before you can operate effectively; want the Director title but not substantial time inside stores; or primarily describe leadership through communication, positivity, or “leading by example” without evidence of operating cadence, standards, and measurable results.

We are looking for someone who can strengthen the system without becoming its newest indispensable person.

What Success Looks Like

During the first year, the right leader should help produce clearer leadership accountability, stronger store-level decision-making, increasing consistency across locations, improved commercial and operating performance, stronger labor and scheduling discipline, better hospitality and sales execution, stronger manager and middle-manager capability, more effective performance management, better succession depth, increased SOP adoption and operating discipline, reduced routine Founder intervention, and greater readiness for future locations or acquisitions.

The expected progression is: Learn deeply → establish clarity and cadence → develop leaders → improve performance → increasingly lead through capable managers rather than direct intervention.

Compensation - Competitive base salary plus meaningful performance-based incentive.

We are currently finalizing the compensation structure to appropriately reflect the operating scope and seniority of this position. Final compensation will consider demonstrated multi-unit operating experience, financial and people leadership capability, leadership-development track record, and overall fit with the role.

Why This Opportunity Is Different

This is more than another district-management assignment.

You will have the opportunity to work directly with ownership; influence how an established company develops its next generation of leaders; help shape a scalable operating system while remaining close to guests and teams; develop managers rather than inherit a fully built hierarchy; preserve strong entrepreneurial practices while strengthening operating discipline; work across three distinctive destination markets; and help prepare the organization for additional stores, acquisitions, and future concepts. We are not looking for someone simply to preserve the status quo. We are also not looking for someone who assumes everything needs to be replaced. We are looking for a thoughtful, commercially minded operating leader who can: Learn deeply. Lead decisively. Develop people. Strengthen systems. Produce results. And leave the organization more capable than they found it.

Our Selection Process

Because this role matters, our hiring process will go beyond a traditional resume-and-interview process. Candidates advancing through the process should expect some combination of written application questions, short recorded video responses, behavioral and operating interviews, discussion with the Founder, leadership/behavioral assessments, visits to one or more operating locations, a practical operating assessment or written evaluation, and professional references.

We are interested in specific examples, decisions, outcomes, and lessons from real experience—not rehearsed leadership language.