Executive Assistant at Founders Factory

The Role

We’re looking for a highly organised and detail-oriented Executive Assistant. This position supports the CEO to effectively achieve his strategic objectives by orchestrating the CEO’s program on an operational level, which includes managing the day to day operational duties, projects, communication, implementation of key engagements, reporting on and coordinating the deliverables of his direct teams and stakeholder requirements. This will allow the CEO to focus on providing the desired strategic leadership and guidance to FFA. FFA is building one of the biggest startup portfolios in the continent and as the Executive Assistant to the CEO, you need to work with the CEO to clearly define the required business outcomes, develop a plan and a roadmap on how to operationalise the plan to achieve these outcomes. The incumbent will play a critical role in developing a framework and processes to support the CEO to drive success through his team.

You’ll bring both a creative and agile approach to the work, bolstered by strong coordination, project management and strategy implementation knowledge required to successfully deliver large scale projects.

Responsibilities Include:

• Assist the CEO in managing and building his team through tracking operational performance in liaison with the COO
• Preparation of reports and presentations with the ability to source relevant information from the Senior Leadership team and put it together in a concise way for the CEO
• Screen communications that arrive on the CEO's desk, on behalf of the CEO, and understand the business and initiatives well enough to alert for sign-off
• Researches, prioritises, and follows up on incoming issues and concerns addressed to the CEO, including those of a sensitive and/or confidential nature. Determines appropriate course of action, referral, or response
• Provides a bridge for communication between the CEO and internal departments, thus demonstrating leadership to maintain credibility, trust, and support with staff at various levels
• Works closely and effectively with the CEO to keep him well informed of upcoming commitments and responsibilities, following up appropriately. Acts as a 'barometer', having a sense of issues taking place in the environment and keeping the CEO updated
• Successfully completes critical aspects of deliverables with a hands-on approach, including drafting correspondence and other tasks that facilitate the CEO’s ability to lead the company effectively
• Collecting insights from teams to build an operational plan that takes into account the scale we need to reach in the continent
• Working with the management team and heads of department to ensure the operational plan takes into consideration the ways of work and how we deliver to founders
• Work with our talent and finance team to include budgets, talent needs, and/or estimates in a project plan
• Continuous monitoring of project plans against agreed milestones and ensuring actions are executed timeously
• Leverage various processes already in place to identify gaps and inform how this can scale with the new business plan
• Maintaining solid relationships with Heads of departments/Leads through regular interactions and identifying interventions that can help to improve the process and efficiency of delivery
• Ability to build systems and tools to enable speed of delivery e.g., driving effective collaboration through setting up CRM etc.…

Skills and Experience:

• Minimum of 5-8 years of relevant work experience in supporting Executives, project management, consulting, and coordination of various teams to get to an expected outcome
• Understands strategy development and implementation
• Has experience developing/implementing operating models
• Proven track record of synthesising insights and developing successful business plans that align with the goals and objectives of FFA
• Highly organised individual, capable of managing parallel work streams while maintaining an effective workflow and communication system
• Outstanding people skills, time management, agility, and resilience
• Ownership mentality and leadership skills, excited by building cohesive operational plans
• Ability to play a coordinating role between internal and external stakeholders.

Expectations for this role:

• This role will be based in Johannesburg, South Africa
• Ability to travel to other Regions (±25% of your time)