Fashion Business - Operations & Finance Manager

A hands-on Operations & Finance Manager to make a growing fashion group more profitable, better run and less dependent on its founder. 3,500-4,500/month | Full-time | Eastern Europe/South Africa. We're a growing fashion group with two businesses across the US and Peru. Our clothing brand sells direct to consumers online, on Shopify with a big paid ads engine behind it, and to retailers through wholesale.

Our manufacturing operation in Peru makes our own products and private-label products for other brands, and a general manager runs it day to day. Across three entities we have about 80 people: full-time employees, contractors and fractional specialists. Revenue keeps growing, but so do costs, headcount and risk, and too much of it still runs through the founder. We now need someone to own the profit and execution side of the business.

The founder, CEO and growth: vision, product direction, brand, strategic relationships, new sales channels and major capital decisions. You, profit and execution: profitability analysis, cost control, cash flow, resource allocation, reporting, team accountability, operating systems, AI and automation, and leading execution across departments. Your mission: make the business a more profitable machine that doesn't depend on the founder to keep it running.

We're looking for an Operations & Finance Manager who has already demonstrated ownership of operations, financial performance and cross-department execution in a physical-product business. You'll act as the founder's delegated operational authority: establishing accountability, challenging performance, resolving issues and making decisions within agreed financial and operational limits. You'll understand where the business makes money, where resources are underperforming and what needs to change, then lead those changes and measure the results.

• Understand and improve profitability.
• Cut costs and protect margins.
• Own cash flow and financial operations.
• Set KPIs and hold people to them.
• Replace manual work with AI and automation.
• Build reliable operating systems and documentation.
• Lead operations across departments.
• Own operational matters currently handled by the founder.

• Proven operational leadership: you have owned cross-department execution, held teams accountable, challenged performance and made decisions, ideally in a multi-entity, founder-led or 50+ person business.
• Experience in a physical-product business, such as e-commerce, consumer goods, retail, wholesale or manufacturing, with a strong understanding of inventory, supply chains, margins and working capital.
• Strong financial analysis skills: you can interpret P&Ls, cash-flow forecasts and receivables, assess margins, inventory efficiency, labor productivity and profitability by channel, product or customer, and turn the findings into operational decisions.
• A proven track record with SOPs, KPIs and process improvement.
• Hands-on AI and automation skills: you have built workflows and integrations yourself (Zapier, Make, n8n or similar), ideally AI agents too, and can show what they saved.
• The ability to build reliable operating systems, documentation and repeatable processes, and become productive with new platforms quickly.
• High proactivity and sound judgment: you spot problems and propose fixes without step-by-step instructions.
• Remote work experience, with the organization and follow-through to deliver without check-ins.
• Experience acting as a founder's operational second-in-command, and the ambition to grow towards a COO role.
• You enjoy this role if you like understanding how a business makes money, making decisions and leading people through operational change.
• You measure your work through stronger profitability, better use of resources…