About Us:

UpEnergy delivers high-impact, emission-reducing projects that accelerate decarbonization and create long-term benefits for local communities. We focus on making life-improving clean technologies available across Africa, impacting millions of lives and significantly reducing CO2 emissions. With a growing team spread across multiple countries, we seek motivated and entrepreneurial talent eager to help us deliver even more impact.

About the role:

UpEnergy Ghana is at a time of exciting growth, and ready to launch in Ghana and expand into new geographies and new product categories. As part of this growth, we are looking to build a competent field operations team that can take our life changing products into the right homes, while ensuring that we have the right end-user data to measure and assess impact. To achieve this, UpEnergy Ghana is seeking an experienced and passionate individual who is experienced and passionate about growing our team and business via solid strategizing and excellent implementation.The right candidate will be analytical, curious and having a passion for solving problems through a data-driven, customer-centric approach.

This is a unique role in the context of UpEnergy where ‘operations’ encompass the function of distribution, marketing, and potentially telesales/ call center operations. The Operations Manager will play a critical role in UpEnergy Ghana. As Operations Manager, you are responsible for developing and implementing User Acquisition, Marketing & Business Development (Partnerships) strategies to accelerate growth with our current and new while ensuring product usage. You are also expected to identify new distribution opportunities, manage marketing efforts and coordinate the execution of market research and analysis to create business plans based on distribution opportunities.

Key Responsibilities;

1. Strategy, Planning & Budgeting
2. Governance, Reporting, Analytics & Performance Management
3. Operation management and Execution
4. Leadership, Management and Culture

Main Activities

Strategy, Planning & Budgeting (approx 10%)

• Set and manage the overarching strategic direction, priorities, and focus areas for commercial across UpEnergy Ghana over the short, medium, and long-term
• Develop the commercial strategy to drive efficient customer acquisition and growth throughout UpEnergy Ghana, including directly owning key inputs with our go-to-market strategy (locations, distribution channels, marketing, partnerships,) and collaborating cross-functionally to determine other key strategic inputs (e.g., product, pricing, data quality, etc.)
• Ensure regions have localized strategies in line with the country strategy and have robust plans to deliver the country targets, including allocating sufficient investment and resources to reliably execute
• As part of the management team, provide thought partnership for cross-functional leads, provide input into strategies, act as a key stakeholder on cross-functional decisions and ensure that core commercial and enabling functions to align with the distribution strategy
• Develop and track departmental expenditures, financial goals, and budgets
• Where required, both lead and oversee strategic commercial projects to drive user acquisition growth

Governance, Reporting, Analytics & Performance Management (approx 25%)

• Continuously manage country user acquisition and user data quality performance, including:
  • Primary focus on reduced carbon emissions, though user acquisition, product usage, and data quality
  • Secondary focus on lowering cost of distribution by identifying areas of improvement
• Set the overarching sales target setting process, approve regional sales targets
• Oversee the development of reports, analysis, and insights for financial performance and other operational KPIs for distribution (per manager/team lead/agent, active agents) and marketing (brand health, marketing spends, referrals, etc.)
• Establish the overarching governance framework to track performance against commercial goals, lead national governance forums and hold State Managers and other departments accountable for results and plans
• Where there is underperformance, provide hands-on support to turnaround and make key decisions to remediate performance
• Continuously monitor performance of other key functions that drive user acquisition, including product, pricing, distribution, data quality, software, and service with potential partners, working with them to take remediation action to address underperformance

Operations management and execution ( 45%)

• Oversees the day-to-day operations of the aforementioned departments
• Work closely with other departments such as supply chain, customer service, data & carbon team, HR, and other global functions
• Work closely with the global product/ pilot team during both the pilot phase and the transition of product to the core country portfolio
• Evaluate the needs of a telesales/ call center function, and build the appropriate structure either from scratch or in collaboration with existing teams to arrive at a hybrid solution
• Develop thorough understanding of the carbon finance market and its operations, and align our in-country operations with strategic carbon finance goals
• Compiling and presenting reports on distribution, marketing campaigns, pilot projects etc.
• Implementation, monitoring of progress, following up, and making a final recommendation for future projects
• Lead and manage the development of a robust distributions operating model, including:
  • Develop procedures and policies for core sales operations functions (lead and opportunity management, recruitment and training, tools of the trade, incentives, size, and structure, government reporting and performance management, etc.)
  • Implement procedures and policies throughout the distribution function, monitor and ensure compliance, continually test and improve.
• Lead and manage marketing operations, including:
  • Lead market research, including the market and competitive landscape to identify analyze threats and opportunities
  • Segment customers and develop tailored strategies to target
  • Identify trends in user behavior closely following sales, product usage, customer retention, upgrades, and competitors, leveraging this data to enhance our commercial strategy
  • Supervise all marketing channels and methods to ensure appropriate information is effectively communicated to external audiences (including leading campaigns)

Leadership, Management & Culture (approx 20%)

• Develop and lead a team of distribution managers, team leads and analysts, including full responsibility for coaching and their professional development
• Manage the team’s work plan and workload to ensure delivery of agreed goals
• Help recruit, collaborate with, coordinate, and train diverse teams such as Marketing and especially field sales and data teams.
• Provide strong leadership, management and coaching for regional sales teams, including with support to other members of the Management Team

Does this sound like you?

• Degree in Marketing, Business Management or other related Business field.
• Minimum of >7 years’ experience in progressive business leadership experience, with 4+ years leading a Commercial function (particularly FMCGs, MNOs & financial institutions)
• Exceptional analytical skills and ability to synthesize and interpret qualitative and quantitative data into practical strategy recommendations
• Demonstrated ability working across teams and functions on technical project
• Skilled in project management, with an exceptional ability to collaborate, influence, and execute against strategy
• Exceptional judgement, problem-solving skills, and ability to “Think Big & Make it Happen” both independently and collaboratively
• Strong understanding of the local commercial environment, ideally with time spent in various regions throughout the country
• Excited to be part of Sayari Safi’s growth story
• Strong commercial capability across sales and marketing (particularly in B2C), with a demonstrated history of leading and delivering strong commercial results
• Outstanding leadership, having led large field-based sales teams and the ability to create a performance culture with strong governance, accountability and results
• Ability to lead high-impact cross-functional strategic commercial projects end to end (including planning, analysis, conclusions and implementation) to achieve results
• Exceptional judgement and decision-making skills, with the ability to independently assess and take action to achieve results
• Outstanding stakeholder engagement and communication skills, with the ability to develop relationships with key functional leads (especially Data, and Supply Chain)) but also with external strategic commercial partners
• Demonstrated passion for our mission, values and users.

Why Join Us?

Your Impact, Amplified

Joining UpEnergy means becoming part of a mission-driven team dedicated to making a tangible difference in the world. Our focus is on ensuring that the world's poorest are not left behind in global decarbonization efforts, and that sustainable, life-improving technologies reach those who need them most. As a fast-growing organization, we provide the unique opportunity to work on innovative projects that directly impact millions of lives across Africa. Whether you're on the ground implementing projects or supporting our global expansion, you'll be part of a dynamic team where your work contributes to reducing CO2 emissions and fighting energy poverty. This is more than just a job—it's a chance to create lasting change and be at the forefront of a global movement towards equitable decarbonization.