M&E Operations Manager

United States

Full time

J-85343

Amex GBT is a place where colleagues find inspiration in travel as a force for good and – through their work – can make an impact on our industry. We’re here to help our colleagues achieve success and offer an inclusive and collaborative culture where your voice is valued.

The Studio Operations Manager leads a dedicated Experience Studio team built around one enterprise client, owns resourcing, quality, and reporting across that client's full calendar of meetings and events, and is the daily contact for the client's event leadership. The client's event leadership sets the portfolio and its priorities, and Account Management owns the commercial relationship and the contract. The Studio Operations Manager runs the team and the service the client sees every day.

• Lead the dedicated account team, including a Senior Event Producer, a Senior Sourcing Manager, Senior Event Managers, Event Managers, Attendee Experience Coordinators, and a trade show team, with direct responsibility for hiring, assignments, performance, development, and coverage across the program calendar.

• Serve as the daily contact for the client's event leadership, so they always know how the portfolio is performing, where the risks sit, and which decisions are waiting on them.

• Own delivery against the statement of work: service levels, scope, and the quality of every program the team touches.

• Run resourcing across the full calendar, matching people to programs, balancing concurrent workloads, bringing in peak support from the wider Experience Studio, and recommending staffing changes as the client's needs evolve.

• Own the governance rhythm with Account Management, including monthly reviews and the 90 day and six month reviews, with performance, volume, and savings data the client can act on.

• Own account reporting, including the event by event activity and cost reporting the client uses to allocate spend across its business units.

• Set the quality standard for each function and audit against it: sourcing contracts and documented savings, budgets and reconciliations, registration builds, planning files, and onsite delivery.

• Take every escalation the program leads cannot close, whether supplier, budget, or stakeholder, and bring the client a resolution or a recommendation, onsite at flagship programs when needed, with the travel that comes with it.

• Establish how the team works inside the client's environment: onboarding onto client systems, including its Cvent instance, clean handoffs between sourcing, planning, attendee experience, and onsite, and the data, privacy, and brand standards everyone is held to.

• Partner with the Head of Event Operations on account planning, scope management, staffing forecasts, and change requests, and raise scope creep, risk, and resourcing gaps early with a recommendation attached.

• Ten or more years in corporate meetings and events, with at least five years leading a dedicated client team.

• Direct leadership of ten or more planners working inside a client's systems, including senior managers and functional specialists.

• Experience running delivery under a client statement of work, including service levels, scope control, staffing changes, and business reviews with senior client leaders.

• Portfolio scale: dozens of programs a year at different stages, including multi-day executive programs, audiences of 500 or more, and budgets above $1 million.

• Working knowledge of every function on the team, from venue sourcing and contract terms through budgets, registration, onsite delivery, and trade shows, deep enough to judge the quality of the work.

• Resource and capacity planning skill: able to forecast workload, read utilization, and make a staffing…