General Manager - Portfolio Company

Job description

## About Aviara Aviara is a private equity shop focused on AI-enabled rollups in emerging markets. We buy durable, founder-led businesses where local trust already exists, then improve them with better operating cadence, sales discipline, AI automation, and sharper financial management. Our initial focus is Argentina and Latin America. We are looking at service businesses, software-enabled services, professional services, niche B2B operators, and legacy local companies where the owner has built something real but the business still runs on manual workflows, informal sales, spreadsheets, WhatsApp, and founder memory. We are not hiring a strategist to write slides from the outside. We are hiring someone who can run one of the businesses we acquire. ## About the Role The General Manager will be responsible for the day-to-day performance of an Aviara portfolio company. You will inherit a real business with customers, employees, habits, constraints, and local reputation. Your job is to keep what works, fix what does not, and make the company more valuable every week. That means customer calls, sales follow-up, hiring, firing, pricing, collections, service delivery, process cleanup, reporting, and hands-on AI/process implementation. This is a tactical operating role. You should be comfortable being close to the details: reviewing the pipeline, calling customers, checking cash, sitting with employees to understand workflows, installing simple systems, and making decisions quickly. ## What You'll Do - Run the weekly operating cadence: sales pipeline, customer health, delivery, staffing, cash, receivables, priorities, and blockers. - Own revenue, retention, gross margin, customer satisfaction, and basic P&L performance. - Spend time with customers to understand why they buy, why they stay, what frustrates them, and where expansion is possible. - Clean up the sales motion: lead tracking, follow-up, pricing, proposals, close rates, renewals, referrals, and account expansion. - Manage the team directly. Set clear expectations, coach people, hire where needed, and make hard people decisions when required. - Map the company's core workflows from lead to cash: how work comes in, how it gets assigned, how it gets delivered, how customers are billed, and where things break. - Identify the first practical AI/process improvements, such as call summaries, customer follow-up, quote generation, document processing, CRM hygiene, reporting, scheduling, collections, internal knowledge search, or repetitive admin work. - Implement simple tools and workflows that employees actually use. - Build dashboards and weekly reports that show what is happening in the business without needing founder intuition. - Work with Aviara on budget, hiring, pricing changes, tuck-in opportunities, and the first 100-day operating plan. ## First 90 Days - Build trust with the team, founder/seller, customers, and key local relationships. - Learn the business by sitting in the work, not just reviewing reports. - Produce a simple operating diagnostic: revenue drivers, customer segments, team strengths/gaps, margin leaks, process bottlenecks, cash issues, and AI/process opportunities. - Establish a weekly business review and a short list of measurable priorities. - Fix a few obvious problems quickly without breaking the culture. ## What Good Looks Like - The team knows what matters each week. - Sales follow-up is no longer informal or founder-dependent. - Customer issues are visible and acted on. - Cash, receivables, pricing, and margins are watched closely. - Manual workflows are getting turned into repeatable systems. - Aviara can understand business performance from clean weekly updates. - The business is more organized, more commercial, and more scalable six months after you start. ## Qualifications - 3-8 years of experience in operations, sales leadership, business operations, startups, consulting, private equity portfolio operations, search funds, local services, or entrepreneurship. - Evidence that you have owned outcomes, not just advised on them. - Strong commercial instincts. You are willing to sell, follow up, talk to customers, and ask for money. - Comfort managing people directly and holding a team to a higher standard. - Basic financial fluency: revenue, gross margin, EBITDA, cash, receivables, pricing, utilization, headcount, and working capital. - Strong Spanish and English communication for Argentina and Latin America roles. - High agency and low ego. You can do the messy work yourself before asking someone else to do it. - Comfortable using AI tools in practical ways to reduce admin work, improve follow-up, and make the business easier to run. ## Helpful but Not Required - Experience running or scaling an SMB, services business, professional services firm, software-enabled service company, agency, clinic, field-service business, or vertical-market software company. - Experience in Argentina, Latin America, or another emerging market. - Prior founder, chief of staff, BizOps, RevOps, sales, consulting, search fund, or portfolio operations experience. - Experience implementing CRM, finance systems, workflow tools, AI agents, or lightweight internal software. ## Application Questions - Tell us about a business, team, or function you personally ran. What were the weekly metrics and what changed because of you? - Give an example of a messy operating process you fixed. What was broken, what did you change, and what happened? - How would you spend your first 30 days after taking over a founder-led services business? - Describe a time you had to push a team to a higher standard. - Are you willing to be hands-on with sales, customer calls, collections, hiring, process cleanup, and AI/tool implementation?