General Manager

Budbee is a scale-up with a proven concept in the Nordics, looking to roll-out its cutting-edge technology to service merchants and end-consumers in the Netherlands and Benelux. Backed by Budbee’s HQ in Stockholm, the General Manager Netherlands will have full responsibility in building and leading the Dutch business. This role offers an exciting opportunity for strategists with a strong appetite for entrepreneurship to take the next step.

About Budbee

Budbee is a logistics technology company offering last-mile delivery services to e-commerce companies. The company is headquartered in Stockholm and operates in Sweden, Denmark, and Finland with offices in 7 cities. After rapid growth and proven success in the Nordics, with over 250 000 deliveries each month, Budbee has identified the Netherlands as an attractive next market to expand to.

Currently, the company has 40 full-time employees and 22 employees at the logistics terminals. With a run-rate of ~Eur 1 M per month and a growth rate in 2018 of 500%, Budbee is the largest e-commerce home delivery service in the Nordics – bigger even than the local postal service PostNord. For 2019, Budbee aims to grow by 350%.

Budbee is backed by Kinnevik, an industrial venture capital investor who also owns over 30% of Zalando, as well as H&M, one of the world’s largest retailers. In 2018, Budbee received close to Eur 8 M in funding from Kinnevik and targets another round of funding in Q1/2020.

All Budbee’s operational, commercial and data-science technology is built in-house. Budbee is able to offer merchants sophisticated check-out portals and customer data, distinguishing them even more from other e-commerce service providers. Their experience, larger basket size, higher repeat purchase frequency, higher customer satisfaction rates, and fewer service inquiries.

It uses both third-party courier services and owned fleet to deliver parcels, leveraging their technology to control the entire logistics operations as well as to optimize the consumer portal at the merchant’s end.

Budbee receives e-commerce goods at its terminals, sorts them and executes the delivery and return. The core strength of the company is delivery & return and considering this is the biggest bottleneck in the e-commerce industry, it’s also Budbee’s key competitive advantage in the market.

The market

After rapid growth and proven success in the Nordics, Budbee has identified the Netherlands as an attractive next market to expand. The comparable consumer behavior, the population density, the mature e-commerce market and sophisticated warehouse infrastructure drive the attractiveness of the Dutch market. The company wants to replicate their existing business model into the Netherlands and the wider Benelux from there. The first step will be to leverage Swedish merchants fulfilling orders in the Netherlands and key accounts in the Nordics that have subsidiaries in the Netherlands.

The role

The General Manager in the Netherlands will build and lead the Dutch strategy and operations with an available starting budget of Eur 5 M. This means quickly building the team and taking ownership of the local P&L, targeting the same KPIs as Budbee has achieved in the Nordics. For example, the General Manager will lead the company’s logistical ecosystem, e.g.:

• goods flow, to and from Merchants’ warehouses
• Budbee terminals,
• Budbee last-mile delivery operations

The General Manager in 2019 will also hire approximately 25 FTEs, including a City General Manager, two Sales representatives, and various terminal/operational employees.

This role provides a great opportunity to be an entrepreneur, building and running a seemingly stand-alone company while leveraging the existing organization’s state-of-the-art technology and processes and thereby entering the market already with a competitive advantage. With planned expansion into Belgium in phase 2, the General Manager in the Netherlands also has the opportunity to head the wider Benelux in the future. Pursuing this exciting new venture will, of course, come with serious skin-in-the-game: Budbee offers a considerable stock-option package alongside a competitive salary.

“We are a young company and culture with a true start-up mindset. We want our employees to challenge themselves, dare to do things differently but always make sure to have fun. We’re on this journey together” – Ida Öhlander, HR Manager

Candidate profile

Experience

• Minimum of 6+ years of experience in Management consulting / Strategy consulting
• Business development or entrepreneurship
• Experience in building a team
• Bachelor’s Degree – Relevant M.Sc. degree or MBA a plus

Skills

• Fluent in the English and Dutch languages; French is a plus
• Proficient in advanced financial modeling
• Strong organizational skills
• Ability to balance attention to detail with swift execution

Budbee works with Top of Minds to fill this vacancy. Contact
Imke Peters via imke@topofminds.com for more information.