Air Freight Manager, ISC

The opportunity:

As a Country Air Freight Manager you are part of the core regional leadership team at Flexport overseeing the Air business for a country of Flexport. You are a strategic thinker and a strong change leader able to set and implement the strategic roadmap for the country. You excel at relationship building and can create strong partnerships internally and externally (carriers, customers) to support our strategy. You are a high energy, hands-on team leader able to lead and grow a team across multiple locations. You have a proven track record of driving profitable growth and deep experience managing P&Ls. You are a deep expert in freight forwarding market and processes, able to guide your team on how to execute as well as interact with our software engineering team on building a best-in-class forwarding product.

You will:

Set and implement the strategy for air freight in your country

• Set the financial targets (volume, revenue, net revenue, gross profit, etc…) working hand in hand with Sales, Finance and Regional Air leadership


• Develop the strategy and tactics to execute against your Annual Operating Plan (AOP).


• End-to-end ownership of country P&L including gross revenue, COGS, net revenue and operating expenses. By leveraging your core value drivers of procurement, pricing, planning and business development you will fuel growth within your country.


• Ownership of all operational metrics for your country including on-time performance, schedule quality, productivity


• Drive day-to-day the implementation of your country’s strategy, ensuring you have the right metrics in place to track performance, that objectives are well cascaded within your teams and steering execution against agreed initiatives


• Ensure we have regular reporting of your country’s progress against plan and promote visibility to the executive leadership of the company

Develop and execute your country’s procurement strategy for all trades

• Identify procurement opportunities and lead strategic negotiations to secure the most value for your country.


• Administer a clear vendor strategy for the country identifying which airlines, handlers, and truckers we should leverage; establish service level agreements; and administer rigorous performance management.


• Formalize a long-term vision on where we want to procure ourselves vs. use a third-party forwarder and maintain an implementation roadmap.


• Establish and maintain executive-level relationships with key contacts at airlines domiciled in country.


• Constantly monitor our end-to-end procurement cost vs. market and ensure the team continuously drives improvements in our overall competitiveness

Drive product development by building service capabilities for Flexport air in your country

• Align country’s product capabilities with the market by partnering closely with regional operations on end-to-end service level agreement standardization.


• Develop new products when gaps persist. You are identifying market needs and building end-to-end solutions to bring Flexport to market parity or exceed market expectations.


• Operations leadership on product quality, driving best-in-class quality as measured by on-time performance, schedule quality, and other metrics as defined


• Partner with our product and engineering teams to identify product and feature gaps. You act as a business partner to them and provide subject matter expertise in order to establish product requirements and product roadmap.

Lead and develop a high-performing country air freight team

• Define the target organization required to meet the country’s strategic goals working hand in hand with Sales and Finance.


• Recruit and develop a high-performing Country Air Management team partnering closely with other cross-functional teams such as sales and account management.


• Ensure team objectives and individual objectives are in place for each team member in your country and actively manage the team engagement, performance and growth


• Lead the team through the frequent transformations and re-organizations required in a high growth company, ensuring they constantly embrace change while maintaining a high performance


• Be a role model for Flexport values

Partner with Sales Organization to drive go-to-market strategies and lead country pricing strategy

• Drive strong collaboration between Demand teams and the regional air team to design and implement the best end to end products for our customers.


• Ensure your team provides deep market expertise, operations expertise, technological expertise and consultative sales support to the sales organization to grow our book of business in your country.


• Ensure market intelligence, as well as sales collateral on your country’s products, are properly formalized and disseminated. Enable the Demand teams on selling all air products.


• Drive pricing strategy for the country, leveraging key metrics such as conversion rates. You set the tone for how we price, leading markup management strategies for trade-lanes and customer segmentation while also spearheading investment decisions for strategic accounts.

You should have:

• 10+ years of experience at a freight forwarder, airline or in logistics operations


• Experience on procurement, and airline relationships out of India market.


• Hands on leader with experience managing and motivating large diverse team and implementing large scale organizational transformations


• Strategic thinker and very strong day to day implementer


• Deep freight forwarding market and freight forwarding operations expertise. Previous experience in leadership role in freight forwarding operations a plus


• Inclination to think-outside-the-box to always find a better solution or alternative, while remaining grounded in numbers and metrics


• Excel to manage vendor relations and create best-in-class, innovative structures to do so


• Excellent communication, interpersonal and organizational skills


• A client service mindset; you are obsessed with client and squad happiness


• Next-level attention to detail, love to dive deep in all operational processes