Chief Operating Officer

About the Company

Aardvark Studios is an independent experiential marketing firm based near Philadelphia. Since 2007, the company has helped agencies and brands turn ambitious ideas into live experiences, mobile tours, and custom-built environments. Its work covers concept development, design engineering, fabrication, technology integration, program management, nationwide tour operations, on-site execution, maintenance, warehousing, and fleet operations. The business is growing quickly, with an expanded shop, larger tour operations, more vehicles, and increasingly complex projects.

Role Summary

The organization is hiring a Chief Operating Officer to lead everything that happens after a sale is won. The role spans program management, production, fabrication, tour operations, field execution, facilities, information technology, and the systems and processes that drive accountability. This is a senior leadership position that works closely with the founder and executive team, with real authority to shape teams, improve operations, and deliver measurable results while preserving the speed, creativity, and client focus that define the company.

What You Will Be Responsible For

• Strengthening the leadership bench by developing current leaders, hiring where needed, and creating clearer ownership across the business.
• Putting the right people in the right roles by reviewing the organization honestly, defining responsibilities and authority, and making difficult personnel decisions when required.
• Bringing program management, fabrication, production, tour operations, and field execution into a more unified operating structure.
• Implementing or reinforcing a practical operating framework such as EOS, Lean, or another effective system that supports clear priorities and consistent follow-through.
• Creating dashboards and scoreboards that give the team timely information on labor performance, job profitability, project status, capacity, quality, deadlines, and risk.
• Improving estimating handoffs, planning, labor management, purchasing, scheduling, job costing, change control, and closeout to increase execution quality and profitability.
• Raising the standard of quality across finished work, fabrication detail, fleet condition, facility cleanliness, and team professionalism.
• Building systems and leaders that make the organization stronger and less dependent on any one individual.
• Working directly with the founder to translate vision into execution, maintain momentum, and create a durable operating partnership.

Initial Priorities

The first focus areas will be people, people, and people. The successful candidate will start by understanding the team, developing leaders, identifying gaps, and ensuring the right people are in the right roles. From there, the COO is expected to clarify structure and decision rights, understand the business economics, identify systems that need improvement, establish useful operating rhythms and accountability, and build a roadmap for scalable growth.

Experience and Background

This is not an entry-level or first-time COO opportunity. The company is looking for a proven operator who has already led complex organizations successfully and can point to measurable improvements. Direct experience in experiential marketing is helpful but not mandatory. Strong candidates will understand project-based work with job costing, labor planning, productivity, production scheduling, quality standards, capacity management, demanding clients, simultaneous projects, fixed deadlines, and execution in both controlled and unpredictable environments.

Relevant backgrounds may come from experiential marketing, live events, touring, theme parks, commercial or specialty construction, custom manufacturing, fabrication, or similar complex project-driven industries.

Key Experience Expected

• Senior operating leadership experience in a COO, division president, general manager, or similar executive role.
• Experience leading roughly 25 to 50 or more employees across several departments or functions.
• Experience running a business unit with approximately $20 million to $50 million or more in revenue.
• A track record of building teams, developing leaders, and installing operating systems.
• Strong understanding of job costing, labor management, and project profitability.
• Experience managing complex, deadline-driven, project-based operations.
• Evidence of measurable operational and financial improvement.
• Experience partnering with a founder, entrepreneur, or highly visionary leader.
• The ability to clearly explain what you inherited, what you changed, and what results followed.
• A willingness to be hands-on and work directly in the business rather than through layers of management.

Leadership Traits

The ideal leader will be proven in complex operations, humble in approach, decisive in action, people-oriented, systems-driven, financially fluent, detail-conscious, direct yet respectful, resourceful, and ambitious. The company wants someone who can build something meaningful, leave a lasting impact, and operate at a level where they could potentially run the business someday, without any promise of succession.

Authority and Working Style

Within agreed budgets and strategic boundaries, the COO will have meaningful authority to hire and terminate employees, reorganize departments, define reporting lines, choose and improve operating systems, make operational decisions, allocate resources, approve budgeted spending, and hold leaders accountable. In the early phase of the relationship, the COO will work closely with the founder to build trust and accelerate learning, then operate with increasing independence as that partnership matures.

Compensation and Benefits

The company intends to offer a strong package for the right candidate. Compensation includes a base salary of $245,000 to $285,000 depending on experience, a meaningful performance-based bonus opportunity, benefits, and relocation assistance where appropriate.

Location and Work Expectations

This is an in-person leadership role based at the company headquarters in Conshohocken, Pennsylvania. Because the business designs and builds physical experiences, operates a large facility, manages a fleet, and leads real-world field work, the role cannot be performed effectively from a distance. Availability outside traditional business hours is also required when projects, clients, or field operations need leadership attention.

Why This Role

The experiential marketing industry is becoming more consolidated, and the company aims to offer something different: an independent, growing business where strong operators remain close to the work, move quickly, and make meaningful decisions. This is an opportunity to lead talented people, contribute to impressive work, and help scale a respected independent experiential marketing company without losing the creativity, urgency, and care that made it successful.

Application Instructions

Applicants are asked not to submit a generic résumé and standard cover letter. Instead, candidates should send a résumé along with a short note of two to three paragraphs explaining where they have done similar work before and why this opportunity fits their career stage. If there is strong interest on both sides, the company will request a deeper review of the candidate’s operating background, including what they inherited, what they changed, how they built the team, what systems they installed, what results they achieved, and what stayed stronger after they left.