Group Senior Commercial Manager - 12 Month FTC

About us:

SSP is a leading operator of food and beverage outlets in travel locations worldwide, with c.42,000 colleagues in over 600 locations across 37 countries. We operate sit-down and quick service restaurants, cafes, lounges and food-led convenience stores, principally in airports and train stations, with a portfolio of around 550 international, national and local brands.

These include our own brands Upper Crust, Millies Cookies etc. as well as franchise brands such as M&S, Starbucks and Burger King.

Our purpose is to be the best part of the journey, and this is underpinned by our aim to bring leading brands and innovative concepts to our clients and customers around the world, with an emphasis on great value, taste, quality and service.

About the role:

The Group Commercial team are at centre of all the regions and countries we operate in, sharing best practices, processes and the right way to operate commercial and strategically, working closely with global stakeholders at Director and CEO level, employing critical thinking and problem solving skills to ensure value delivery.

We support the pursuit of opportunities to improve EBITDA performance across specific or multiple markets, with a primary focus on Sales and Gross Profit levers working closely with the wider Group Customer team and regional Analysts/Managers, interrogating, interpreting and presenting back data to support effective decision making and what opportunities can be had to help SSP achieve our targets.

What you’ll be doing:

• Build communication channels with Commercial teams across the Group, and as appropriate external stakeholders including our brand partners.
• Work with cross functional teams (e.g. Sustainability, Group Business Development) to support/own project delivery.
• Utilising global data to deliver opportunities for the business ie. extracting raw till data and P&Ls, manipulating large data sets, benchmarking, spotting opportunities, validating opportunities, forecasting value and feeding back to regions for implementation.
• Develop, capture and push out global best practice.
• Monitor regional value delivery and team capacity and capability gaps, course correcting where required.
• Project manage key projects across multiple countries.
• Support and train local teams in price, range, display and space, upselling, margin and category optimisation.
• Manage team resource (1 direct report) adapting to the needs of specific projects or tasks, from full project management or deploying in country support, through to light touch governance.

To be successful in this role you will need:

• Evidence of building effective working relationships with stakeholders using your persuasive communication skills.
• Strong project management skills with the ability to self-manage, work under pressure and deliver within deadlines.
• Be Innovative and bold – able to find new ways of doing things, challenge the status quo, take an entrepreneurial approach (measured risk, high reward).
• Structured and analytical thinker, with a good understanding of data.
• Experience of using price, range, display and space, upselling, margin and category optimisation to deliver commercial results.
• Previous experience in a commercial/strategic environment within F&B/Retail/FMCG environment.
• Track record of driving decision-making through analysis and based on evidence, rather than intuition.
• Must be able to develop innovative ideas to drive top and bottom line, testing, learning and refining to fit in to real world context.
• Holistic understanding of the impact of external factors on growth, including competition and seasonality, and customer behaviour.

Belong at SSP:

Great food and drink are diverse by nature. It’s authentic, creates great experiences and brings people together. The same goes for our Belong strategy at SSP. By empowering our colleagues and celebrating our differences, we create great experiences for our people, enabling them to thrive as one global team.

Spanning 6 continents, we’re very diverse when it comes to our backgrounds. But it’s so much more than that, it’s listening with humility, taking conscious action, and having the determination to do the right thing. True diversity, equity and inclusion can only happen when everyone feels able to bring their full self to work. We encourage and welcome applications from a diverse range of candidates regardless of background, gender, race, religious beliefs, disability, sexual identity and orientation or age.