Founding Growth Operations

**The Role** As our founding Growth Operations hire, you will build and operate the growth engine that turns independent insurance agencies into active Hedge customers. You will own the relationship from initial prospecting through qualification, close, onboarding, and the agency’s first qualified submissions. You will also build the systems, workflows, data, and automation that make this process repeatable. This is a hands-on, revenue-owning role. It is not an internal analytics or sales-support position. You will be expected to prospect, run sales calls, close agency relationships, and improve the machinery behind the work. A signed agreement is not the finish line. Success means earning the trust of agency owners and producers, understanding where their accounts are getting stuck, and turning the relationship into recurring submission flow. This role is focused on retail-agency growth. Carrier appointments and placement execution are owned by our markets and brokerage teams. **What You’ll Do** • Own the agency growth cycle from prospecting and discovery through close, onboarding, and activation • Build pipeline through calls, email, LinkedIn, referrals, conferences, and industry relationships • Run structured discovery with agency owners, commercial producers, practice leaders, and operations executives • Understand each agency’s book, target industries, difficult placements, existing market access, and decision-making process • Explain how Hedge helps retail agents obtain faster, stronger specialty and E&S coverage • Convert qualified meetings into active agency relationships and initial submission opportunities • Work with the brokerage team to create clean handoffs and a strong first placement experience • Design CRM stages, qualification rules, lead-routing systems, follow-up cadences, and reporting • Track conversion from prospect to meeting, agency activation, first submission, and recurring production • Identify funnel bottlenecks and fix them directly • Build account lists, contact maps, sales sequences, scripts, onboarding materials, and operating playbooks • Use AI and automation to improve prospect research, call preparation, follow-up, CRM hygiene, and pipeline management • Manage 30 to 50 active opportunities with disciplined notes, next steps, and forecasting • Handle objections involving existing wholesale relationships, appetite, responsiveness, coverage, and trust • Feed agency feedback into Hedge’s product, placement, appetite, and market-access strategies • Represent Hedge at agency meetings, insurance conferences, and industry events • Help recruit and train future SDRs, Account Executives, and growth operators **What Success Looks Like** During your first 30 days: • Learn Hedge’s target agency profile, value proposition, appetite, and brokerage workflow • Build your initial target-account list and begin running discovery calls • Establish clean CRM, pipeline, follow-up, and reporting practices During your first 60 days: • Build a healthy combination of self-sourced and SDR-generated opportunities • Run the complete discovery, presentation, objection-handling, and closing process • Identify the largest funnel bottlenecks and implement improvements • Convert initial agencies into active onboarding and submission opportunities During your first 90 days: • Close and activate your first agency relationships • Generate qualified submission flow from those relationships • Demonstrate a repeatable growth process that can be documented and scaled • Maintain accurate pipeline visibility and reliable forecasting • Show measurable improvement in agency activation and time to first submission **What You Bring** • 3+ years in full-cycle B2B sales, growth operations, insurance distribution, agency sales, wholesale brokerage development, insurtech, fintech, or vertical SaaS • A demonstrated record of personally generating pipeline and closing business • The ability to explain your quota, attainment, deal size, sales cycle, and self-sourced pipeline using specific num