Chief Operating Officer

Chief Operating Officer

Company: Confidential (Australian Family Office, Home Services Platform)
Location: Sydney, Australia
Reports to: CEO (Platform)
Compensation: US$300K–$450K base performance bonus exceptional equity
Search partner: Sitreps

About the Client

Our client is the private investment arm of an established Australian family with a multi-billion-dollar balance sheet across real estate, public and private equities, and direct operating investments. The home services platform is a direct investment, owned and capitalized entirely by the family, with the operating freedom that comes from a single committed LP and no forced exit timeline.

The family name carries significant weight in the Australian business community. The full name is shared with qualified candidates under NDA.

About the Role

An Australian family office is building a PE-style home services roll-up in Australia. The Australian residential HVAC and plumbing market is roughly the size of California, with limited PE-backed competition in country and no operator holding meaningful market share. ServiceTitan and Nexstar only entered the market in the last 1–2 years. Less than 10% of operators run modern field service software or fixed-pricing sales cultures.

This looks like the US residential services market did before the major roll-ups consolidated it: fragmented base, legacy ownership, real uplift available to anyone with the playbook and the capital to execute. Our client is the first serious well-capitalized entrant. The deal pipeline is live, with multiple acquisitions moving toward diligence in the near term; the platform plan models $300–450M AUD in revenue and $60–70M EBITDA over 5 years, against a market that's still wide open.

We're hiring the COO to run the operating engine while the CEO leads strategy, capital, and the board. If you've spent the last several years inside a PE-backed home services platform watching how the playbook actually gets built and run, this is the seat where you stop watching and start building it yourself, from the ground up, in a new country.

Responsibilities

• Operations across the platform. Same-branch performance, dispatch productivity, technician utilization, sell rates, gross margin, working capital. Every operating KPI lives with you.
• The Market Area Presidents. Direct line management of the regional / market-level operating leaders. You set their cadence, their targets, and their development paths.
• The integration engine. Each acquired company arrives with a founder-GM, legacy systems, and a local culture. Standing up the integration playbook (ServiceTitan, fixed pricing, sales training, financial reporting, branded marketing) is core COO work.
• The playbook itself. Our client is at the operating maturity equivalent of a major US consolidator at year 2–3. You will write SOPs, training curricula, comp plans, and ops dashboards that don't exist yet. This is build mode, not run mode.
• Talent and culture. Help the CEO hire the platform leadership layer and the next generation of MAPs and GMs. Set the operating cultural standard for what "good" looks like at scale.

Requirements

Must-Haves

• 5 years in home services inside a PE-backed roll-up (Wrench, Turnpoint, Service Experts, Authority Brands, ARS, Sila, Aramsco, or peer), with at least 3–4 of those years in seats that owned a multi-market or multi-brand P&L

• Direct experience as a Market Area President, VP of Operations, or equivalent. You've owned the financial plan for a region, not just executed a function inside one

• Hands-on integration experience. You've stood up ServiceTitan implementations, redesigned technician comp, run sales-culture conversions, and integrated acquired companies into a common operating system

• Comfort building, not just running. The leading US playbooks work because someone wrote them; we're hiring the person who wants to write the next one

Nice-to-Haves

• Multi-trade fluency (HVAC plumbing in particular; our client is leading with these two and electrical typically comes along)

• Background that includes a scale jump (e.g., one brand to several, or one market to several) inside a roll-up

• Comfort working closely with a CEO and a board on capital allocation and M&A pacing, even though those decisions ultimately live elsewhere

Compensation & Benefits

Base: US$300,000 – $400,000, paid in AUD or USD at offer

Bonus: Performance-based annual bonus tied to platform operating KPIs (organic same-branch growth, integration milestones, EBITDA, technician productivity). Final structure set at offer

Equity: Exceptional management equity in the platform. Initial COO grants are sized to deliver multi-million-dollar wealth creation at the modeled 5-year scenario, with significant upside above that. Standard PE-style management equity plan with vesting, good-leaver / bad-leaver definitions, and accelerated liquidity at change of control

Relocation: Visa sponsorship (Subclass 482 / Global Talent pathway as appropriate), tax equalization to US rates, housing support, schools support for relocating families, annual home-leave flights for the family. Spouse landing support included

Sydney-based for a multi-year window. Australian domestic travel is meaningful and expected. Family relocation is supported.