Account Director

Location We are offering a hybrid working pattern to combine home and studio, your studio days will be in either Leeds or Manchester, depending which location is closest to home

Working Hours Full Time, Monday to Friday, 38 hours per week, Permanent Contract

Company Benefits 25 Days Holiday + Bank Holidays + Your Birthday off! Contributory Pension Scheme, excellent training and development opportunities, early Friday finish!

We’re on the lookout for someone to achieve excellence in ‘Client Delight’ through an enviable service that creates raving fans of Aire, our work and our people. To form, manage and drive a culture of client-centrism in a brand environment. Meticulously overseeing the delivery of creative and adaptive packaging projects.

Role purpose

To achieve excellence in ‘Client Delight’ through an enviable service that creates raving fans of Aire, our work and our people. To form, manage, drive and measure a culture of client-centrism through meticulously overseeing the delivery of our design, production, technology that spans pack, POS and ecommerce. To support the Transformation team with a strong and candid leadership role model that enables a sense of purpose that facilitates individual and pod excellence to drive performance – delighting our clients daily and achieving core business objectives across the Aire Global group. To evolve a culture of excellence through the execution of the following KRAs.

1. Client

• Leading out on chosen account with the overall responsibility for the client-agency relationship.
• Understanding the client’s culture, values, ways and ‘isms’ so we speak, act and behave in a way that seamlessly connects with them.
• Delight our clients by always delivering on the ‘ask’ through effective questioning and when necessary challenging the parameters to ensure we do not exist in a complacent ‘tell and do’ relationship.
• Set, drive and measure our service standards through action plans, SLAs and KRAs, client surveys.
• Implement a clear contact strategy that promotes simple regular communication both at a project and strategic relationship level.
• Work with the clients to gain visibility of annual workload to support internal planning and resourcing.
• Own relationships with our client’s suppliers that facilitate reliable delivery and a win-win at the minimal effort to our clients.
• Establish and grow a strong relationship with multiple senior clients demonstrating industry knowledge and applying the application to business challenges.
• Maintain a detailed awareness of relevant market trends affecting the account, and developments in the wider packaging, POS and ecommerce industries.
• Deliver client onboarding that educates and facilitates working methods that do not undermine our internal ways of working.
• Proactively identify opportunities for Aire Global to reliably grow and expand our remit.

2. Team

• Managing the work, performance and professional development of team members.
• Planning and managing the resource of the account.
• Manage day-to-day activities of Senior Account Managers, Account Managers and Account Executives.
• Provide support and guidance to the Account Management team.
• Coaching and developing the team with a view to ‘growing our own’ future managers and leaders.
• Provide regular developmental feedback to all that support the account to ensure we create a culture of continual improvement.
• Lead and inspire the client team, the wider business, clients, and other external partners.
• Responsible and accountable for own and others’ work, delegating effectively to balance a varied and demanding workload.

3. Continual improvement

• Work with the Client Delight Director, Production Director and Production Manager to establish, document and drive processes and ways of working that facilitate realistic, efficient, simple and reliable outputs that are commercially viable.
• Work with the Senior Management Team and Senior Leadership Team in identifying business success factors and risks.
• Lead out with a proactive approach to periodically review our ways of working.
• See the opportunity and seize the opportunities to refine processes to maintain speed, reliability and simplicity.
• Drive actions of the wider team to make stuff happen at pace for our people, business and clients.
• Confidently evaluate creative work; able to give and receive feedback to support its development.

4. Commerciality

• Track and monitor overall account performance to meet revenue targets.
• Drive the team’s commercial awareness in tracking costs and ensuring these are correctly charged back to the client in line with the agreed rate card.
• Work with the Client Delight Director, Finance Manager and Managing Director to manage contract renewals, rate card negotiations.
• Prepare a monthly overview of client activities, revenue forecast and plan.
• Manage internal department budgets that support effective service and healthy P&L for sustainable growth.

5. Culture

• Our people’s behaviour defines our culture; therefore, we should lead by example and always display the business’s core values in everything we do. Creating an affinity for Aire and our clients, ‘we do what we do well because we love what we do’.
• Do it with pride, use good honest judgement, see the opportunity, seize the opportunity, delight our clients every day and make stuff happen, going the extra mile for clients and each other.
• Challenge behaviours that do not support our culture, values or business objectives.

Skills

• Proven strong leadership skills.
• Extensive people management experience.
• High levels of organisation with the ability to direct, support and control a multitude of activities.
• Confident in preparing strategic and creative proposals.
• Proven clear, confident and unambiguous communication skills to meet requirements of daily contact with the client and internal departments.
• Demonstrable confidentiality and integrity.
• A proven approach to problem analysis that utilises insight and critical thinking skills.

Experience and Knowledge

• A proven track record of marketing experience managing one or more contracts/client accounts or a management role in a similar agency or service environment.
• Experience of task/project achievement requiring some strategic foresight.
• Able to present across all media channels to a high standard (Packaging, POS, ecommerce).
• Previous experience in motivating teams and developing colleagues.
• Can confidently manage client and internal department budgets.
• Commercial experience including leadership and man-management expertise in a service environment with substantial Retail and FMCG exposure.
• Confident in using Macs and Google Suite applications.