Vice President - Input Business - Biotechnology (7-12 yrs)

Co Profile - Biotechnology company that uses technology to make rice farming more sustainable and profitable. The company is known for its work in reducing methane emissions and water usage in rice farming.

Key Responsibilities :

1. Business Model Strategy -

- Overall input distribution strategy and roadmap of execution planning

- Design, test, and implement initiatives to build systems for scale

- Collaborate with the Science, Product, Ops team to develop and test new operating systems

- Build strategies to maintain low working capital requirements and offer just-in-time inventory planning by leveraging remote sensing tech infrastructure

- Ensuring delivery of high-quality impacts, in a timely manner, at optimized budgets

- Building and maintaining granular task sheets and roadmaps, to ensure timeline and execution of projects are meeting requirements

- Daily/weekly analytics on performance on input distribution, offer insights to Ops Execution, Product and leadership

- Strategizing and tracking continuous improvements of operating budgets, product level improvements, and problem solving to ensure performance and improve efficiency

- Tracking of PNL, overall sales, which products to keep or remove from menu

2. Vendor Management + Input Menu Build -

- Vendor lead generation across seeds, soil amendment, crop protection, mechanisation

- Manage relationships with Vendors and undertake all negotiations and contract related tasks

- Design product selection criteria and vendor selection criteria

- Leverage insights from agronomists to improve product menu/package of practices

- Design, run, and track field level experiments of products, and coordinate advice from vendors, and share results with vendors

- Understand input licensing processes and state/central regulatory landscape

3. Sales Execution -

- Create and maintain input sales training plan for internal team, and for field agents

- Coordinate order planning with on-ground ops teams

- Organize first mile logistics and delivery basis order planning insight

- Maintain vendor invoicing and have strong understanding on recording of inventory, take lead on tracking cashflows and working capital

- Maintaining, updating and improving document repository of SOPs, Training Manuals, Processes for input product menu

- Daily standups with Ops Execution team and implementation partner's teams (at managerial and operational level)

- Build marketing material in coordination with on-ground teams to represent progress/success/wins basis data collected from fields

- Create input market material for field agents, how to pitch to farmer, how to sell product with SOPs + Video walkthroughs

What we are looking for

- Passionate about climate, agriculture, sustainability, scientific innovation and impact

- Strong negotiator and ability to get favorable contract terms, friendly demeanor, but ruthless in business dealings

- Strategic and analytical mind, and you love dealing with data and processing insights; clear goals and strategies to achieve these goals

- Ability to maintain trackers and document repositories on Notion/DocSend/Google Suite; Rigor - organized, detail oriented and obsession with performance

- Design thinking mindset - rapid experimentation and recording of experimental data to drive insight based decisions

- Agility / adaptability - excel in high pressure, fast paced environments, with flexibility to process new insights and evolution of priorities

- Communications and Interpersonal Relationships - level headed, non-emotional, develop and maintain strong working relationships with internal and external stakeholders

- Self-starter and independent task master who gets into the details, but has the ability to ask for help and rally the team to support and achieve end goals

- Strategic thinker - with clear goals and strategies to achieve these goals

Experience:

- Strong professional experience (7+ years) - ideally in agri-input sourcing and input distribution/sales, category experience in Paddy inputs is strongly preferred

- Proven experience in optimizing processes and building systems and strategies to support scale

- Strong educational background, preferably in engineering/operations/supply chain strategy type roles