Vice President Operations

Position Overview

The Vice President of Operations at HobbyTown is a senior executive role dedicated to translating corporate strategies into consistent and measurable operational outcomes across franchise and company-owned retail stores. Positioned between the Chief Operating Officer and Regional Directors, this role is vital for enforcing leadership structure, managing daily operations, and ensuring accountability throughout the field to meet company objectives.

Executive Operational Leadership

This role directs the successful execution of HobbyTown’s operational framework across all store locations. The Vice President creates detailed operating plans aligned with top priorities, allocates responsibilities via the Regional Director network, and sets deadlines and performance standards to guarantee completion.

Monitoring operational health across the entire network, the Vice President identifies systemic issues, execution shortcomings, resource shortfalls, and emerging risks early on. The leader balances strategic advising with hands-on operational management to ensure initiatives are completed effectively and timely.

Oversight of Regional Directors

Providing direct leadership to Regional Directors, this role establishes uniform expectations for market presence, franchise collaborations, corporate support, and project delivery. Performance evaluation is results-driven, focusing on completion of assignments, field engagement, timely reporting, problem-solving, and franchise relationship building.

Franchisee Relations

Serving as a key executive contact for franchise owners, the Vice President builds trust through prompt responses, sound business judgment, clear communication, and decisive action. When complex franchise issues arise beyond Regional Directors, this role assesses and manages resolutions with defined ownership and documentation.

The position balances brand integrity with franchise support, promoting standard adherence, improving operational execution, increasing owner involvement, and ensuring long-term franchise system viability. Feedback trends inform executive leadership of systemic challenges and opportunities for improvement.

Management of Corporate Stores

The Vice President oversees operational leadership impacting company-owned stores, verifying these meet targets for sales, profitability, labor efficiency, inventory management, merchandising, customer service, staffing, maintenance, regulatory compliance, and brand appearance. Underperforming stores receive tailored recovery plans with clear goals, ownership, and follow-up.

Corporate locations also function as pilot sites for new initiatives, processes, technology, merchandising, and customer service enhancements before wider rollout.

Operational Reviews and Performance Monitoring

The Vice President establishes rigorous business review cycles—weekly through annual—to link field activities with measurable results and provide leadership with transparent insights on store performance, regional effectiveness, franchise risk, project status, and key priorities.

This role collaborates closely with Finance, HR, Sales, Marketing, Merchandising, Technology, and others to analyze key metrics like sales, profits, labor, inventory, shrinkage, staffing, turnover, customer satisfaction, franchise engagement, project progress, and compliance.

When performance gaps are detected, the Vice President identifies root causes and determines corrective actions involving operational improvements, additional resources, process adjustments, training, financial assessments, or cross-functional support. Detailed findings and plans are presented to the COO.

Store Launches, Remodels, and Recovery Initiatives

This executive manages major projects such as new store openings, relocations, remodels, resets, recoveries, and ownership changes. This includes crafting operating plans, confirming readiness, coordinating cross-departmental efforts, delegating Regional Director duties, monitoring advances, clearing obstacles, and certifying project completion with proper operational handoffs.

Availability to lead on-site efforts during critical project stages, such as openings and recoveries, is required. The Vice President may take direct control when operational risks, leadership gaps, franchise impacts, or urgent business needs demand intervention.

Post-project, formal evaluations of outcomes, costs, execution challenges, unresolved issues, and lessons learned are conducted to improve future initiatives.

Standardization and Continuous Improvement

The Vice President is charged with refining and standardizing HobbyTown’s operational processes by assessing existing practices, reducing inconsistencies, clarifying responsibilities, and creating scalable operating procedures. Collaboration with functional leaders helps develop and implement tools like audits, scorecards, readiness checks, project plans, reporting systems, escalation protocols, and communication methods.

Operational standards are crafted to be practical, clearly communicated, supported by training, and enforced consistently. The Vice President reviews any standards not producing desired results to determine if issues stem from the standard itself, communication gaps, resource challenges, or execution failures.

Travel and Availability

The position requires frequent travel up to 70%, including overnight stays, flights, driving, and occasional weekend or evening duties. The Vice President must support key events such as store openings, resets, recoveries, franchise meetings, conferences, and marketing activities.