Sales and Operations Director, Electric Business at BURN

About the Role

• Burn is looking for a commercially driven and results-oriented leader to lead BURN’s electric business across Tanzania, Kenya, Mozambique, Ghana, and future markets. This role will drive cross-market sales growth, profitability, operational excellence, and project delivery while ensuring strong performance across collections, customer usage, agent productivity, and service quality. The successful candidate will lead country teams, strengthen distribution and after-sales operations, and collaborate with cross-functional teams to scale the electric business sustainably. This role requires strong commercial leadership, a proven track record in multi-market consumer distribution, and a willingness to travel at least 25% of the time.

Duties and Responsibilities

Cross-Market Commercial Delivery

• Co-create the electric business strategy and own its delivery in markets. Lead sales, quality and P&L delivery across Tanzania, Kenya, Mozambique and Ghana + new markets, line-managing the country leads and owning the weekly performance rhythm. Hold each market to its forecast, sales channel mix, collections and cost-to-serve. Own route-to-market standards across the markets, deciding what is common and what is genuinely local, and approving country-level changes to either. Provide a cross-market view of volume, revenue, margin and operating cost, produced weekly rather than on request. Support entry into new markets as the business expands. The role requires at least 25% travel across the markets.

Quality & Performance Management

• Drive repayment efficiency above 90% of PAYGO sales in every market, average customer usage above 1.2kWh, and agent productivity above 30 sales per agent per month and achieve compliance metrics. Drive customer acquisition cost and sales & distribution spend per unit down quarter on quarter. Ensure monitoring is robust enough that a market missing any of these is visible within the week rather than at month end.

Operational Excellence

• Own the SOPs, SLAs and field operating standards for electric across all markets – written, adopted and audited, not written and filed. Own last-mile execution, stock point SLAs and after-sales performance. Mature the operating model as the business scales, defining the metrics that matter at each stage and retiring those that no longer do. Surface risks and opportunities to the Senior Director early, with a recommendation attached.

Project Ownership & Delivery

• Own the active project portfolio of electric projects end to end: prioritisation, sequencing, resourcing, quality delivery, and the decision on what gets stopped. Run the coordination and findings cycle so that projects move between meetings and not only during them. Give every currently unassigned project a named owner and a plan, and rebalance load. Report projects status to the Senior Director as one view of what is on track, what is at risk, and what has been stopped and why.

Team & Culture Leadership

• Manage, develop and performance-manage the direct reports in this role, and others as the structure grows. Close the capability gaps in the markets currently carrying them. Build bench strength beneath the country leads so that no market is a single point of failure, and identify a credible successor in at least one. Foster a culture of ownership and accountability in which decisions are made at the right level and numbers are owned by the people closest to them.

Cross-Country & HQ Collaboration

• Act as the single point of contact between the country teams and HQ functions (sales and planning, logistics, finance, risk, carbon, product and software), resolving at this level what currently escalates past it. Own electric's input to software prioritisation, including PRD review and sign-off on operational requirements. Move learning between markets, so that what works in Ghana does not take a year to reach Tanzania.

Approvals & Delegated Authority

• Hold delegated signing authority within an agreed threshold for field disbursements, cash advances, commissions and operational contracts, so that routine approvals clear at this level rather than queueing above it. Maintain the governance rhythm behind those approvals – risk standups, facilitation SLAs, reconciliations and audit trail.

Stakeholder Engagement

• Represent BURN electric with regulators, partners and funders across the markets, and ensure compliance with local laws, permits and licensing in each. Support carbon project integrity through ongoing customer monitoring and reporting. Bring the Senior Director into relationships that are group-level or board-facing rather than holding them alone.

Skills and Experience

• 5+ years or commercial leadership, including direct line management of country-level
• leaders in more than one market.
• Experience running consumer distribution at scale in Africa – last-mile, agent networks, aftersales ideally with a PAYGo or consumer-credit element.
• Demonstrated delivery against operating metrics (repayment efficiency, collections, agent
• productivity) across more than one market.
• A track record of running a portfolio of concurrent projects to completion, with the
• judgement to stop the ones that are not earning their effort.
• Comfortable holding people accountable to numbers across cultures and time zones.
• Decides rather than coordinates: resolves issues at their own level and escalates only what
• genuinely needs the Senior Director.
• Willing and able to travel at least 25% of the time across the markets
• Exposure to carbon-financed or grant-financed business models.
• Experience working through a matrix, where functional support is shared rather than owned.