Office and Operations Manager — Role Description
Details
Full-time position (40 hours/week equivalent)
In-person in Pembroke, Maine
$25/hour for initial 30-day trial period
$64,500 annual salary after initial 30-day trial period
Single-occupancy room in shared housing included in compensation
Family housing and relocation incentives available
Employer-funded health plan included after 30-day trial period
About the role
We are looking for someone passionate about small business administration, co-design and management who wants to work in regenerative agriculture in rural Maine. This position enacts shared office management with Severine Welcome (Owner, CEO) and Terran Welcome (Farm and Facilities Manager) in the Smithereen Farm office. This is a position for someone very skilled at administration and creative management. For an interested, committed, and competent candidate, this role has the potential to grow into a Director of Operations role in the future, with increased compensation, leadership capacity, and agency.
This role is a centralized, “go-to” administrative role, making sure that operations are smooth. The Office/Operations Manager watches over the production and producers of all the parts of the farm business this includes: farmstore, Hipcamping and other venue rentals, the production and sale of value-added products (VAP), creation and dissemination of marketing (including Mailchimp newsletters), management and payment of invoices in and out, coordination of staff/HR, and this role maintains a view into the entirety of our diverse operation.
We seek for this role an individual who has discipline and good work etiquette, who is responsible and accountable, who is precise and emotionally mature, and who is committed to our mission and the follow-through required to achieve our mission.
Essential duties and responsibilities:
Bookkeeping and budget making/ vetting
Sales/ accounts and wholesale accounts management management in collaboration with kitchen manager
Payroll oversight
Property management, restoration project management
Insurance oversight
HR financial oversight
Organic certification paperwork and follow ups
Business development, research and procedural updates
Licensing
Business development
Administrative support of Severine and Farm business
Project management/ special projects/ research
Skills:
Quickbooks basics for pulling monthly sales reports
Google docs/ google drive
Mailchimp
Wordpress / Wordpress commerce plugins
Square, Faire, Shipping software, and pulling reports
Spreadsheets
Filing and ordering capacity
Kindness, patience, solidarity, loyalty, self-starting, attention to details, strong communication
Preference for a degree in business, accounting, MFA or equivalent administrative experience
Preference for a background in small business administration
Preference for familiarity and fluidity with agriculture, education, non profit, artistic practices
General computer / software / technology literacy
Integrity and detailed focus
Able to work with creative people in a diverse, fast paced, educational work environment
About Smithereen Farm, Pembroke, and Downeast Maine
Our organic farm business contains many parts:
A complex organic farm business
Five greenhouses for nursery/seedling production
Farming and wild harvesting of algae and herbs
Value-added processing of farm products
Farmstore
Farm-based hospitality program with summer camps, residential educational courses, partnerships
Hipcamp/ Airbnb agri-tourism
Educational rentals of the campus
We live and work in a most beautiful place. Our operations take place across a decentralized campus including:
Grey Lodge, where the Smithereen Farm office is housed on the second floor of a beautiful historic building next to the Pennamaquan River in Downeast Maine, with the Smithereen Farmstore located on the ground floor.. Directly across the street is the Minke Kitchen, our cooperative commercial kitchen available for use by Washington County food producers.
Smithereen Home Farm, a diverse saltwater farm overlooking Cobscook Bay, boasting super diverse gardens, orchards, four greenhouses, and 400 fruit and berry bushes.
Blueberry Land and Cranberry Land, our certified-organic barrens, where we cultivate U-pick wild blueberries and cranberries. At Blueberry Land we host Hipcampers.
Reversing Hall, a former Odd Fellows Hall housing an agricultural library and film screening area, which we manage in collaboration with Greenhorns.
Off-campus, there are hiking trails and nature adventures in every direction. This place provides direct access to beautiful farms and local, organic food, as well as beautiful people, quaint seaside towns, lovely architecture, and it’s flat enough to bike everywhere! It is remote here, but very beautiful.
Leadership
This role answers to Severine Welcome, CEO of Smithereen Farm, who is reliably in the office from 8am–11am each day, to co-create with the Office/Operations Manager action plans and lists of tasks, signing checks that have been prepared, and discussing updates to various workplans. This role collaborates most closely with Severine.
About our team
At full scale, our diversified farm operation employs up to 10 people, with especially full houses during seaweed and blueberry harvest.
The other managers who operate on a horizontal scale with this role, and will engage in robust collaboration with this role include: Farmstore Manager, Kitchen Manager, Farm Manager, Hospitality/Agritourism Manager and Caretaker/Facilities Manager. All of these people have some interaction with the Operations Manager, and each of these managers will be responsible for select administrative tasks within their departments. As many of the other farm roles require off-site work—repairs, hosting—this role requires being reliably on-site in the office, holding space for daily administrative tasks and challenges.
Additional on-site contractor and staff within the Smithereen universe include: cleaners, shipping contractors, VAP processors / cooks, farmstore cashiers who also clean and contribute to orienting visitors, occasional artists in residence and out of town visitors, a nanny, and contract farm workers (often local teenagers or college students) who help with ongoing farm harvest or come for seaweed and blueberry harvest. Remote collaborators include: a bookkeeper, an accountant, a graphic designer, and development consultant.
Smithereen Farm works closely with the cultural non-profit Greenhorns, of which Severine is Executive Director, to complete media projects, marketing campaigns, and a series of educational summer events for the public. The collaborators involved in this project include media makers, workshop teachers, lecturers, and PR consultants. Much of this work is not the direct responsibility of the Office/Operations Manager, but Smithereen Farm’s diverse offerings extend into cultural production and there may be some overlap and collaboration with this arm of the enterprise.
Example tasks:
A shipment of materials ( jars, insulation, paint, dye for a workshop) arrives at the farmstore via bulk freight delivery. The Office/Operations Manager should be tracking the ETA of the shipment via courier tracking information, and must be nearby / on-site to receive the shipment, sign for it, and coordinate or complete unpacking / unloading the contents to the right places on campus (Minke Commercial Kitchen, Farmstore, Farm). The invoice must then be logged to the correct account.
Example, a visitor who is planning a workshop or a conference on campus comes to get an orientation of the kitchen, timberframe, farm camping options, workshop spaces and needs a detailed orientation to be able to plan their conference/ workshop including AV support. They must also fill out a campus rental agreement, get a digital set of workshop sign up sheets created, get an additional insurance certificate, and have a production schedule for our staff’s preparations/ cleanups. All elements of the educational workshop must be conceived, fact checked with all parties, agreed to with an MOU, put on the correct places on the website, with sign up forms that work with our backend templates, and then promoted according to our spreadsheet of outreach actions. Each time we do it, over 7 years, we learn more and update our internal SOPs so that we keep getting better. This paperwork and human coordination, content curation/ feedback on event structure, all in this job description.
Example, Product carry through– a new herb salt for instance might involve: researching a new jar shape for a new product under development, getting the dimensions of the jar and all details to the designer for the label, to the certifier for proofing, to the printer, making sure the process has gone in correctly from the kitchen manager, loading the new product up in our online store, faire, wholesale PDF, promoting the new product in the store, instagram and in person.
Compensation
This position is a full-time (40 hours per week) position which begins at $25 per hour for a 30-day trial period, and, upon mutual agreement, will transition into a permanent, salaried position at $62,400 with a health care package. A private, single room in a shared historic house is provided free of charge, during both the trial period and as part of the permanent salaried compensation package. Family housing and relocation incentives are available.
About Us
A diverse, MOFGA certified organic farm with groccery store and education program.
