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:

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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…