Regional Director – South West

Location: South West UK (Exeter / Truro)

Type: Full-time. Office-based.

👋 I’m Oren, Co-founder of Zen Educate

We’re looking for a Regional Director to join our commercial leadership team as part of our next chapter of growth in the UK.

If you’re passionate about improving children’s lives, building teams, developing effective managers, and using technology to solve slow archaic inefficiencies, then keep reading.

Why we exist

Education is the cornerstone of a thriving society. Schools do their utmost to provide children with positive experiences, but having the right staff is essential to fulfilling that promise – that’s where we come in. Whether it’s a year 1 teacher to greet her “good morning” or a Teaching Assistant to support him in the break times, Zen helps schools find the right educators faster without breaking the bank.

Schools in the UK spend over £2bn a year on agency staff. Zen is an all-in-one digital platform that gives schools full control over how they find, vet, and manage temporary educators. School leaders can search, book, and manage staff in real time, while gaining full visibility and control over their spend and compliance.

To go with our technology, we practice a culture of “we care more”, so that ultimately, by improving staffing in schools, we’re delivering thousands of smiles to children’s faces every single day. What we need now is to reach the next level in school awareness and adoption. That’s where you come in.

What we are looking for

We’ve built strong foundations already:

• We are one of the leading suppliers in our industry and one of the fastest growing companies in the UK

• A high-performing team in place across the South West of England, craving leadership.

• A differentiated product that makes a genuine impact on the lives of educators, pupils, and the education system

We’re now looking to level up even further. You’ll be excited about this role if you:

• Set a high bar for your team and are skilled at coaching both managers and ICs to be the best version of themselves as possible.

• Are a proven leader that is just as obsessed about building systems and leading teams as you are about hitting growth targets. 

• Are as comfortable aligning strategy and process with central supporting functions as you are with rolling out initiatives in your region. 

Some traits that usually correlate with success in this role

• You’re passionate about making real world impact on the education system

• You think BIG, not only incrementally. In three years your region will be

• unrecognisable from where it is now

• You’re process-led and hyper-structured. You plan meticulously and build playbooks to

• deliver commercial results, rather than relying on herculean individual efforts

• You can align teams, not just ideas

• You love finding simple answers to complex problems

• You love looking around corners and out-maneuvering the competition

What your first 6-12 months might look like:

• Take over a high performing team from a successful leader who is progressing within the company. 

• Become an expert in our customers’ pain points, how we solve them and where our platform can add value. Use this to inform the standards you set for your managers and your team. 

• Establish the biggest opportunity to increase growth in each of your teams and put in place the plan to pursue it. 

• Develop playbooks and operating procedures that ensure both a great customer experience and operational efficiency. 

Who you’ll work with

We’re a 500+ (and growing!) team operating across the UK, US, and Canada. We’re well funded, growing fast, and have tremendous unit economics. Simply put, we’re doing really well by doing good. As such, we’re a passionate group of missionaries rather than mercenaries. We’re looking to find someone who shares our passion for the mission of making education better.

What you might like or dislike

Every place makes trade-offs based on what they value and where they are in their journey.

Here’s a list of things you might find useful in figuring out if this is the right role for you. If we end up chatting, feel free to dig deeper into any of them.

• Slope and passion over Y Intercept. High-trajectory individuals with a passion for what they do very quickly lap those with a higher initial starting point in their domain but slower trajectory. That means Executives at Zen often end up spending more time up-front investing in the upskilling of colleagues from non-traditional backgrounds but it quickly pays dividends many times over.

• Building the system rather than individual heroics: having great players on the pitch is critical. However, a great system trumps the best salesperson without one. We’ve got a product with genuine product market-fit that makes our customers lives better. We’re looking for someone who can level up the system in getting the word out across the South West. 

• First principles reasoning rather than replicating other companies best practices: we believe every situation has nuance. Experience is an input in decision making, but not the only one. The leaders that do best are endlessly curious and deconstruct problems to first principles. They’re not just making decisions because they’ve seen them work at previous companies, they experiment a lot and double down only on the successful ones.

Interested? Let’s go!

If you’ve made it this far and you’re excited then hit apply. If the timing isn’t right or you’re not sure it’s a right fit, reach out anyway. We’re always open to talking to those who believe in our mission.

Let’s build something that actually matters!