VP of Operations

A rail and industrial field services company sends crews to job sites across Texas and neighboring states to clear derailments, dismantle railcars and locomotives, and recover scrap. Safety is what sets the company apart. Some of the largest railroads in the country rely on its safety programs and site documentation standards, and they bring the company in when a dangerous job comes up. The work keeps coming, and the company is hiring a VP of Operations to run the field.

The company is based in East Texas, with a team of about 35. About three quarters of the work is rail. The rest comes from energy, oil and gas, mining and power customers. Most of the work comes from long-term customers who keep sending more, so crews stay busy year-round. The company is also part of a long-term ownership group that has no plan to sell. That group provides support in finance, legal, tax and insurance, so the pace is similar to a small company but with the backing of a much larger one.

The company runs five or six jobs at a time today and is building to run twice that. As VP of Operations, you take over the day-to-day across every active site, with the authority to make the operational calls in the field. You work closely with the COO and CEO on the strategic and business decisions, and the COO focuses on customer relationships, business development and winning new work. Five to six on-site managers report to you, and each runs a crew of four to eight. This is a seat for someone who wants a bigger role in building a business alongside its owners. As the company grows, you’ll have a hand in what comes next, including helping open a regional office in a market where it already does the most work.

The Goal In twelve months, the field runs through the VP, and the company is running more jobs at once than it ever has, at the same safety standard.

Outcomes You’ll Be Responsible For

Take over the day-to-day: Know where every crew is, how far along each job is and what’s in the way. Decide where crews and equipment go, weighing cost, the other jobs and who’s certified for which site. You start with a few weeks shadowing the COO, and by six months, the on-site managers report to you.

Own safety in the field: Stop work that can’t be done safely. Make it easy for crews to report problems early. Keep the certification and documentation standard that wins the company its work.

Coach the on-site leaders: Be on their sites and work the hard calls through with them until they make most of those calls on their own. The training school at the yard is yours to run.

Double the jobs running at once: Add crews, develop new on-site managers, and build one daily view of every crew and machine. Job documentation is already strong. The planning side is yours to build, and the owners want the methods you’ve seen work at larger companies.

Skills Needed to Apply

Multiple crews at once: You’ve run several field crews at the same time on customer job sites, with supervisors or site leads reporting to you.

Safety ownership: You’ve held crews to a safety program and answered for the result. Building or running one yourself is a plus.

Heavy equipment judgment: Watching a machine work, you can tell when a setup is unsafe and when to shut it down.

Job profitability: You’ve seen the numbers on the jobs you ran and can explain why one came in above or below what it was quoted at.

Heavy industrial field services: Your background is in rail services, derailment response, demolition, scrap processing, oilfield services, environmental or hazmat response, or another business that sends crews to the customer’s site on short notice.

Certifications: OSHA 10 or higher. The company can provide OSHA 30, e-RAIL SAFE and the mine site clearances after you start.

Education: No degree required. If you started as an equipment operator and worked your way up, you’re just as qualified.

Nice to have:

Time around excavators with shear attachments, or other heavy demolition equipment

Field hands you’ve promoted into supervisors

A field planning and tracking system you built or brought over from a larger company

Spanish-speaking. Much of the crew speaks it as a first language.

Qualities

Communicates ahead of the problem: You see what is going to go wrong on a remote site before it does, and you say so early. The COO’s trust is built on this.

Level head in an emergency: When the call comes in, you calm the crew first, then fix the problem.

Safety before speed: If a job can’t be done safely, you stop it, even when the schedule says otherwise.

Speaks up early: You raise bad news early, and you make it safe for crews to report problems before they grow.

Prepared before the trucks roll: People, certifications, parts, oxygen and propane are lined up before a job starts because the nearest replacement part can be hours away.

Earns trust first: You show up for the crews and follow through, so they hold the standard because they want to.

Owns the outcome: When something goes wrong on a job site, you fix it, even if another contractor caused it. Then you put a check in place, so it doesn’t happen again.