Director of Operations - Events

The Director of Operations assumes a crucial role in maintaining our high standards, ensuring that operational processes, procedures, and requirements of the events are followed, in line with our Quality Standards. The successful candidate will be a key player in our team, supporting and troubleshooting the team's daily operations with their excellent resource management skills, and maintaining good relationships with clients, team, and suppliers through their effective communication and interpersonal skills.

Main Responsibilities

Team management

· Recruit, retain and motivate the team

· This includes weekly catch-ups, annual PDPs, and checking of work quality and workload.

· Distributing work throughout the team and resourcing appropriately & efficiently

· Budget management and approvals

Budget & Proffit

· To ensure all jobs achieve the required margins.

· All suppliers are costed accurately and negotiated with.

· All teams' hours are to be logged on time and charged correctly.

· Ensure all client invoices are paid in full before the event.

· Clear and accurate reconciliation of event budgets and reporting post-event, with all budgets to be reconciled in line and in time with internal procedure.

· Robust and thorough budget management throughout project life cycles, monitoring hours and supplier costs to ensure all budgets remain on track throughout.

· Clients are to be kept regularly updated on project budgets, and any additional charges required are to be communicated in advance transparently, with clear and thorough reasoning.

· Approval of supplier POs and expenses

Projects

· Ensure all Projects are delivered against event project plans

· Ensure all projects, budgets and finances are delivered accurately through Microsoft Dynamics

· Cross-check all event plans to ensure adequate time management, enough staff for each job, and clear direction for each person working.

· Ensure all the relevant Health and Safety documentation and supplier documentation has been gathered for each event.

Onsite

· Allocating staff on-site for each event.

· Strict management of all suppliers.

· Onsite attendance at live events (when necessary) to provide strategic and operational oversight, ensuring service and quality levels are met and client expectations are exceeded and training is given where needed.

Account Management

· Managing your own client accounts where needed.

Supplier Management

· Build relationships with key suppliers to get preferred rates and support.

· Ensure the team are adding correct markups and negotiating at the point of the contract

· Ensuring SLAs are adhered to.

Recruitment & Training

· Responsible for team recruitment, resource planning, training, development, inductions, mentoring, and motivation, working with the HR Manager and Managing Director.

· Working with HR Manager and Managing Director.to implement and measure relevant training and development plans for the team alongside KPI's and their PDP's.

· Strategic knowledge and research of all industry news, trends and emerging technologies ensuring team also keep abreast of the same.

· 8 or more years of event agency experience. Preference will be given to candidates with experience in this field for event agencies specifically.

· Comfortable speaking at events, attending networking events and acting as a face of the agency.

· Generating new enquiries and contacts.

· Skills, competencies, and specialist knowledge

· Evidence of commercial results and previous accountability for P&L

· Experience in both UK and international events and service delivery

· Experience working in the Association, Pharmaceutical and Corporate event sector

· Experience in resource and project planning with a team.

· Leading by example across all company processes and procedures and being a senior role model within the agency with the ability to develop a strong working relationships across the business.

· Being positive and proactive.

· The candidate needs to be dynamic and demonstrate change management skills

· Resilient and able to work independently whilst under pressure with commercial awareness.

· Can demonstrate lateral, analytical, creative, and strategic thinking.

· Experience and competencies of working with virtual events and production teams.

· Can demonstrate the ability to work efficiently using processes and procedures.

· Competent in working with Microsoft Dynamics or other CMS solutions

Other Requirements

· Current driving licence.

· Ability to travel around the UK & overseas.

· Flexible approach to working hours as events may occur over evenings and/or weekends.

· Always comply with the company code of conduct.

· Ability to work as part of a diverse team with colleagues from different viewpoints, cultures and countries.

Worldspan is an award-winning event and creative agency with an extensive track record of producing exceptional solutions for clients. Established for over 50 years, Worldspan has designed and delivered engaging events and creative communications for some of the world's leading organisations and has a philosophy of forging long-term partnerships, challenging the norm and delivering excellence.

Worldspan is not just a business, it's a community that truly values and invests in its employees. Our team of over 20 multi-disciplined and long-serving employees enjoy a fun, friendly, yet professional working environment. We believe in supporting each other's growth and development, and that's why we provide superb training and career development opportunities. We are proud to have been accredited with an 'Investors in People Gold Award ', a testament to our commitment to our team's success.