Senior Office Manager

Summary

Bell & Bly Travel is in a growth phase, so this full time position will be exciting and ever evolving. We are looking for a unique individual who is detail oriented, enjoys operational tasks, and is enthusiastic about supporting the CEO and General Manager across multiple business functions, including sales and marketing. This is a hands-on role and you’ll be responsible for supporting various members of the team, managing our back office technology, some high level data analysis, documents creation, and working on strategic ideas to advance the company. 

An A-Player for the Senior Office Manager role is someone who embodies the following: honesty/integrity, ability to learn quickly, extreme attention to detail, proactivity, ability to prioritize, ability to take an idea, create a plan, and execute on it, efficiency, calmness under pressure, enthusiasm/positivity, creativity, strong work ethic, great communication skills, and openness to feedback. 

A-Players are always looking for ways to make the business better, to support the CEO and General Manager, and to learn and grow to make themselves better. They know how to proactively get things done, are excited to take on new projects, and are willing to work on things outside their job scope when needed. Last but not least, they know how to ask for help and are committed to making Bell & Bly Travel a fun, healthy, exciting place to work.

About Us

Bell & Bly Travel is a travel firm set up to inspire and enable people to travel more broadly. We specialize in helping entrepreneurs, executives, families, and couples weave unique experiences throughout their lives. Our mantra is fewer, better clients and we help these clients with all their leisure travel needs.

Bell & Bly Travel is a member of Virtuoso and is in partnership with many of the top brands in travel like Rosewood, Rocco Forte, Oetker and more. In 2001 we won Virtuoso’s Most Innovative Travel Advisor, out of 12,000 travel advisors worldwide, a huge honor in the industry. We were also selected for the prestigious Travel + Leisure A List as well as Conde Nast’s Top Travel Specialists list. 

Though we love all kinds of travel, our business model is such that we exclusively focus on high-end experiences and luxury hotels. This focus has allowed us to become one of the fastest growing firms in the industry. 

We have also endowed a scholarship at the University of Texas at Austin to help support low income students to study abroad. The faster we grow, the more we can add to this scholarship and promote travel to younger generations!

Who We Are

Bell & Bly’s CEO, Sarah, is an experienced entrepreneur and has had a widely varying career path prior to founding Bell & Bly. You can view her LinkedIn profile here.

Our General Manager, Rachael, has over a decade of experience planning high end travel and manages the day to day operations of the team. You can view her LinkedIn profile here. 

Sarah and Rachael generally work during regular Central Time business hours. A flexible schedule will be considered for the right fit but we do have a strong preference for team members who can closely align with the same time zone (Western Hemisphere). Some overlap will be required.

This position would report directly to Rachael and will also support Sarah in many tasks. 

About the Role

Bell & Bly Travel is undergoing rapid growth, so this position will be ever evolving and changing. This makes it a great opportunity for those who can handle a multitude of tasks and some ambiguity. The Senior Office Manager is the “glue” that helps all the parts of our company stick and thus has a unique view of all the moving pieces of the business.  

Primary Responsibilities

• Back Office Management

  • Managing our internal database - making sure data is being entered correctly, improving the database from time to time

  • Managing outsourced contractors responsible for data entry, database coding, website development and maintenance

  • Accounting reconciliation - ensuring partners are paying us on a timely basis, working with them to set up accounts, working with our bookkeepers 

  • Update and maintain our technology platforms

• Sales Support

  • Review, qualify, and manage incoming leads 

  • Serve as point of contact for scheduling client calls with the GM or CEO

  • Assist the team in moving leads through the sales process

• Team Support

  • Supporting the travel planning team on anything that interfaces with the back office 

  • New project setups

  • Interfacing with clients as needed in a professional, knowledgeable way

  • Assisting in the hiring process for new team members

  • Onboarding and offboarding new team members 

  • Keeping a pulse on the team culture and being a go-between for the team and CEO

  • Light executive assistant type support for the CEO and GM

• Itinerary & Document Creation

  • Create client itineraries in AXUS

  • Create and edit client-facing travel documents as needed

• Data Analysis

  • Managing dashboards

  • Pulling information from the database to help make business critical decisions

  • Designing new tracking metrics

Working Style

• This is a remote position, working directly with the General Manager and CEO, but also often interacting with everyone on the team.

• Most work will be assigned digitally via team management software but you should be available for calls when needed during regular business hours Central Standard Time.

• We will establish a regular cadence for check in calls – on these calls we’ll catch up on tasks for the week, share feedback, and brainstorm. You’ll also attend the weekly team call to keep up with what client projects we’re working on. 

Training

• We have systemized a lot of our training so your first week will be consuming a lot of videos we’ve made, reading manuals, and talking with the team.

• After the initial week of training, training will be as we go - we believe learning our style and then implementing it is better for retention.

Who You Are

• For this senior role you should have 2 years of experience supporting a senior executive, strategic planning and project management backgrounds are also highly valued. 

• You should be HIGHLY detail oriented.

• You should be able to adapt to our Bell & Bly Travel style - early on we’ll give lots of feedback.

• You should be operations minded – thinking about streamlining processes and making the client experience better at each step along the way.

• You should have excellent English communication skills – especially written, but also over the phone. You will be representing us to partners in the industry while managing our backoffice. 

• You should have experience in excel and in pulling and analyzing data (not anything like calculus - but being able to review sales metrics, trends in destinations, etc).

• You should have a great work ethic - we are looking for energetic, proactive individuals who are committed to getting things right and completed on time.

• You should have a flexible and positive attitude towards change. 

• You should have integrity and honesty and be able to maintain the highest standards of confidentiality. 

• You should be obsessed with customer service – we advise our clients on how to spend their most valuable asset, their time. It is an honor and a privilege to be trusted with our client’s time and money, so we strive to get it right and make it memorable!

• You should get along well with our team and have fun! Life is too short to work with a team you don’t like! 

• In the “anything else we should know” section, please tell us what’s #1 on your bucket list and why.

• You should not be scared to suggest new, faster, or better ways of doing things! 

• You should be clear and concise in your communication with us, and appreciate that we will do the same for you. We foster a culture of honest, direct feedback and expect you to do the same. 

• You are committed to mastering the technology tools we use to run a fully remote office and implementing them into your day to day routine.

Skills & Knowledge

• Microsoft Word, Excel, PowerPoint

• PDF creation and editing

• Basic proficiency with databases (we use Airtable) and comfortable with analyzing data

• Asana proficiency strongly preferred

• Excellent written and spoken English

• Past experience as a high level executive assistant, Chief of Staff, back office manager, or in strategy preferred

• Experience working in a remote team setting is a plus

What’s in it for you?

• Flexible schedule – work from home, a coffee shop, wherever! As long as you’re putting in the hours and getting high quality work done, it doesn’t matter to us (so long as you’re available for calls when we schedule them and get back to clients/partners in a timely manner).

• Discover the world – experience the travel industry firsthand and quite literally spend your working hours learning about the world!

• Promote tolerance – it is our true belief that travel promotes tolerance and makes our world a better place. We help clients travel more, raise global citizens, and learn about the rest of the world.

• Be part of an industry powerhouse – Bell & Bly is one of the fastest growing travel agencies in the USA with a highly esteemed international reputation, and we need help to grow even faster!

• Travel – through our close industry partnerships you can enjoy discounts on your own personal travels and inclusion on our team trip. 

Come work with us and show more people the world!