Job Description

The General Manager runs a business unit. Reporting to the COO, the role carries a profit and loss statement of $6 million or more, leadership of two to four teams totaling 8 to 15 people direct and indirect, ownership of the customer relationships within the unit, and accountability for the financial result. You will set the priorities, build the team, and be compensated on what your unit delivers.

The responsibility is genuine, and so is the foundation underneath it. Tharp Custom Cabinetry has been family owned for more than 50 years and is the largest custom cabinet manufacturer in Colorado. The plant, the order volume, the brand, and the balance sheet are established. This role offers the experience of running your own business without the personal capital, the payroll exposure, or the constant hunt for the next project that ownership normally requires.

Scope of Responsibility

• Profit and loss. Margin, labor, and the operating decisions that move them. You will read the statement, act on it, and answer for it.
• Team leadership. Project managers, project coordinators, and installation personnel who are already capable. Developing them further is the largest part of the role.
• Customer relationships. Builders, designers, and homeowners throughout Colorado. The work ranges from an $18 million Denver estate featured in the Wall Street Journal to a single vanity for a homeowner in Loveland. The vanity receives the same drafting, the same finish room, and the same installation standard as the estate. These relationships are yours to protect and grow.
• Process and continuous improvement. Meaningful latitude to redesign how work flows through your unit, with the expectation that you will use it.
• Escalation and resolution. Judgment on when a project issue warrants escalation, and presence in the room when it does.

Leadership Team and Operating System

The General Manager serves as a member of the Tharp leadership team. Backgrounds around that table range from decades in custom cabinetry and millwork to senior roles at leading corporations, top universities, and management consulting firms. Expectations are high, debate is direct, and decisions are grounded in data. You will be challenged, and you will be expected to challenge in return.

Tharp operates on Lean principles and the Entrepreneurial Operating System (EOS), and is now building on that foundation toward the Shingo model. The General Manager will be an

active participant in that work. Prior experience with these tools is not required. We will teach the methodology. The curiosity and discipline to pursue a problem to its root cause are what we cannot teach.

The Nature of the Work

Custom cabinetry moves thousands of individual parts through design, drafting, production, finishing, delivery, and installation, on a schedule set by a general contractor who is coordinating a dozen other trades at the same time. A single dimensional error in drafting surfaces six weeks later as a failed installation. The substance of this role is determining why that occurred and building the process that prevents the next one.

Market conditions are demanding. With the ebbs and flows of the Front Range housing market, Tharp continues to take share. This role suits a leader who finds that combination motivating rather than discouraging.

Performance is measured. You will be accountable for team capacity, productivity, profitability, and quality, and you will have a direct hand in defining the metrics themselves.

Three background experiences map well to this position:

• Construction and project leaders in the finishing trades who are prepared to own the financial outcome rather than the schedule alone.
• Cabinetry and millwork professionals who have outgrown a smaller shop and want the process, equipment, and scale of an established manufacturer behind them.
• Operators from other build-to-order manufacturing or service businesses. We will teach the product. We cannot teach judgment.