Business Operations Strategist

Logistics Summary:

• Location: 100% remote, international
• Hours: EST business hours (9am-6pm EST) - part time, freelance, or full time options
  • This role will start as part-time 10-15 hours/wk, but can expand into a full time role
• Type: 1099 subcontractor
• Compensation: we have set comp ranges with specific benchmarks of experience and performance: 
  • In-Training = $45/hr (you will start at this level)
  • Solid = $50/hr
  • Senior = $55/hr
• Requirement: 
  • Minimum 5+ years in a cross-functional operations, consulting, business management, or strategy role within a startup, agency, or B2B environment.
  • Must NOT be growing your own business. Having your own freelance clients is fine, but it would be a conflict of interest to develop an agency/consultancy alongside of ours.

Seeking you... if you:

• have/could run your own business, but choose not to and prefer working within a collaborative team
• your verbal and written communication skills are the G.O.A.T. — clear, concise, collaborative, and kind
• geek out on all things operations, management, building teams, and growing small businesses
• have very high mental acuity and can easily pick up on new situations and environments
• are masterful at context switching in a fast-paced startup environments and work best when juggling multiple clients and projects
• feel an insatiable desire to excel, learn, persevere, optimize, deliver quality, and get results
• love engaging with all types of people, especially visionaries/founders of SMBs, and adjusting your communication to meet them where they are
• are seasoned in working remotely and the self-management organization + communication practices needed for collaborative and efficient asynchronous team structures
• believe in a people-centric approach to collaborating within a team and a commitment to DEIB
• are a “drive + doer” that’s resourceful, proactive, reliable, accountable, and a hands-on problem solver - heck, you thrive on it!

Who We Are

Magical Teams is a premium operations agency that works with mission driven B2B small businesses. We are strategic and implementation partners who offer custom "team built for you" services that integrate into our clients’ businesses. Our core values are communication, shared ownership, kindness, freedom, and leaning into our optimal zone of discomfort. Our CEO, Christina Salerno, has been building and supporting small businesses for over 15 years and we've built an impressive team who bring a wealth of expertise across all areas of operations. We are a small team with big hearts and exceptional work ethics. We have a very high bar for quality + efficiency.

Our clients have established small businesses and startups, but they are at a growth point and need extra support to up-level. Sometimes they really don’t know what they’re doing when it comes to building/managing a business and they’re looking to us to learn how to do this and get the execution support to set a team up for success. Other times they simply have run out of capacity and know what needs to be done, but they need to outsource it so they can focus on being the visionary / business owner.

✨  READ MORE on our Careers Page  ✨

Responsibilities and Areas of Need

Our Strategist role at Magical Teams is a client-facing, cross-functional business partner who leads accounts, drives business growth, and ensures client success through strategic insight + practical execution.

Part consultant, part business architect, part team/project leader, part client relationship owner. You will support founders, CEOs, and leadership teams by designing solutions, managing complexity, facilitating decisions, and holding boundaries with kindness and command.

This role requires someone who can read between the lines, thrive in ambiguity, and drive results through people — without needing everything explained.

Strategists typically are assigned between 4-8 clients. 

You'll lead “pod” teams in developing and executing strategic initiatives, ensuring they stay within budget and deliver measurable results. You'll guide clients in setting ambitious goals, prioritizing initiatives, and defining impact and metrics for success. You’ll need to be equally comfortable with strategic thinking and getting into the nitty gritty of the execution.

If you love 0→1 environments, solving complex problems, and being a reliable driver of momentum all the while doing it for multiple clients at one time… this is your dream role that will stretch and accelerate your career.

Why This Role Is Hard (But Rewarding)

Most people who apply think “strategist” means being operationally savvy at the functional level. That’s not this role (feel free to consider our coordinator role instead). 

Here, a Strategist is a cross-functional business strategic partner who can:

• drive ROI across the whole business
• translate big-picture strategy into a plan of action
• hold clients accountable (without burning bridges)
• read between the lines and absorb complexity quickly
• facilitate tricky conversations and navigate with tact + firmness
• generate momentum and results through leveraging others
• and operate with high ownership, high reliability, high emotional maturity

If you love being the “steady hand” who orchestrates people, projects, and priorities — you will thrive here.

Additionally, this role requires a demanding level of ownership, collaboration, and context switching between multiple clients and never-ending competing priorities.

Due to the custom nature of our work, no client / situation / week is the same. For those who love to be challenged, there’s always interesting work to keep you engaged.

If this environment sounds like your vibe, you'll be able to have a massive impact!

Core Responsibilities

Client Leadership & Account Management

• Serve as the primary strategic partner for your clients, building strong, trust-based relationships.
• Translate client goals into actionable plans, scopes, and prioritized roadmaps.
• Hold clients accountable to decisions, deadlines, and commitments — with diplomacy and firmness.
• Navigate challenging client dynamics with emotional maturity and clear, concise communication.

Business Strategy & Operational Clarity

• Assess client needs across people, process, systems, revenue, and operations.
• Bring a generalist lens to problem-solving, identifying root causes and proposing practical solutions.
• Read between the lines and proactively surface risks, misalignments, or opportunities.
• Utilize data and metrics to inform decision-making and measure impact.

Team & Project Leadership

• Lead client project plans, ensuring clarity in scope, sequencing, owners, and timelines.
• Support clients in change management, decision-making, and strategic alignment.
• Provide feedback, advice, training, mentorship, and coaching to clients and their team.
• Oversee high-quality deliverables and execution across all client touchpoints.
• Step into hands-on execution for more advanced or high-value initiatives and projects.

Sales, Scoping & Budget Management

• Support client expansion through scoping new work, identifying value, and setting realistic budgets.
• Help prepare proposals, project outlines, and potential upsell recommendations.
• Understand budget constraints and ensure alignment between scope and delivery.
• Join sales calls as needed to represent operational expertise.

Internal & Team Leadership

• Collaborate with Success Squad leadership, other Strategists, and the MT team overall.
• Model reliable, articulate, emotionally mature communication.
• Provide guidance, feedback, and clarity to your pod team members.
• Act as a sponge — absorb context, patterns, and best practices from top performers and integrate them into your work.

Additionally Strategists lean into 1–2 specialty lanes of expertise:

• Business (planning, KPIs, leadership)
• Tech (tools, automations, systems design)
• People (team management, performance, culture)
• Recruiting (sourcing, interviewing, hiring systems)
• Revenue (sales, marketing, CS, funnels, revops)
• Finance (cash flow, budgets, P&L, metrics)

Ideally at least one primary lane of depth + one secondary lane of strength, while also functioning as a cross-functional business generalist.

We are not looking for someone who is “kind of familiar” with these areas.

We are looking for someone who can say: “I have led in this lane in a variety of businesses. I have built systems, solved problems, delivered outcomes, and guided teams in this specialization.”

Skills That Will Enable You To Thrive:

• You ramp ridiculously fast. You can drop into a messy business, spot what’s off, and get oriented without needing hours of backstory or hand-holding.
• You thrive in ambiguity. Give you half the picture and you’ll figure out the rest — asking sharp questions and filling in gaps proactively.
• You see the root causes. You understand how people, processes, tools, and priorities interlock — and you read between the lines and spot risks long before others see them.
• You communicate like a leader. Direct. Clear. No fluff. You can shift a conversation, de-escalate a tense room, or reset expectations with calm authority.
• You can hold boundaries with grace. You’re diplomatic, but you don’t get pushed around. Clients feel safe with you because you’re steady, honest, and consistent.
• You drive hard toward outcomes. You don’t wait. You don’t stall. You move things forward, unblock people, and keep momentum alive even when things get messy.
• You are a strategist who executes. You’re equally comfortable zooming out to analyze the goals + challenges and zooming in to move a project from 0→1 with speed and excellence.
• You manage yourself like a seasoned operator. Multiple clients, shifting priorities, fires, deadlines — you can hold it all without dropping balls or needing babysitting.
• You are deeply reliable and ownership-driven. You keep your word, follow through no matter what, and maintain crisp communication about what’s happening, by when, and what you need.
• You learn by osmosis and initiative. You absorb best practices, patterns, and expertise from top performers around you and continuously sharpen your craft.
• You are reliable in the ways that matter most. You follow through. You communicate. You finish what you start. People trust you because your word is solid.
• You pick up tools fast. You can learn new client tech in an hour or two and can skillfully utilize our core tech: Slack, ClickUp, Google Drive, TMetric, LastPass, and whatever else shows up.
• You live our values. Clear communication. Shared ownership. Kindness. High standards. DEIB. Personal growth.
• You’re detail-oriented. Still here? Add “I have found my peeps” to the 2nd-to-last application answer.

Why It's Awesome To Join Our Team

1) Get the freedom and ownership levels of running your own business, but with the support of a team and business infrastructure already built for you. 

2) We are fully remote and always will be. While we do work within Eastern Standard Zone business hours (typically 9am-6pm EST), there's a lot of flexibility for how you approach and complete your work each day.

3) Team collaboration. Work with exceptional operators and extraordinary people and get hands-on mentorship and collaboration. You’ll grow faster here than almost anywhere else. You’ll collaborate closely with others Strategists, leadership, and top-performing team members. If you like working with organized, passionate, responsible, communicative, talented, accountable, creative, generous, fun, and ambitious people… that’s us.

4) Meaningful impact. You’ll help mission-driven businesses scale and thrive. We care about people, empowerment, inclusion, wellbeing, and we implement this in our client services and internal team. If that’s appealing to you - and you care too - you’ll be able to have a direct meaningful impact!

4) High-performance culture. We have a high bar for excellence, execution, efficiency, results, and integrity. If you love to roll up your sleeves and be dedicated to detail-oriented, efficient quality, you’ll succeed here fast.

Magical Teams is an equal opportunity employer. We celebrate diversity and are committed to creating an inclusive environment for all employees. We highly encourage candidates who are LGBTQIA2S+, BIPOC, neurodiverse, disabled, from rural areas, and other communities.

Important: We take the time to read each and every application submitted. We request thoughtful responses to the application questions in order to be considered for proceeding forward in our process.