Vice President Operations Jobs in Santa Rosa, CA

Hybrid or Remote

If remote, this leader will need to be onsite regularly at the St. Helena/Santa Rosa, CA site, particularly during key planning, business review, and cross-functional collaboration cycles.

Our client adheres to Activity-Based Collaboration (ABC), a work model where collaboration is organized around the specific activity being performed rather than around a fixed location, department, or schedule.

This role offers a very compelling compensation and benefits package with short-term and long-term incentives.

Lead enterprise FP&A transformation for a premier luxury consumer brand at a pivotal moment of portfolio focus, transformation, and private equity ownership.

Our client is a leading luxury wine company with approximately $500M in FY24 net sales, 3M cases sold, 11 winery brands, and more than 3,000 estate acres. Headquartered in St. Helena, California, the organization combines luxury brand stewardship, estate agriculture, and scaled consumer products operations.

The company is entering a new chapter of focused growth, brand concentration, distribution transformation, and data and planning modernization. The VP, FP&A, will lead the financial planning, forecasting, reporting, and decision-support engine for the enterprise, translating business complexity into clear decisions for the CFO, CEO, executive leadership team, and private equity ownership while helping the organization improve forecast discipline, reduce business surprises, and support profitable revenue growth.

The ideal candidate is a hands-on enterprise FP&A leader who does not need to come directly from wine but must have a genuine passion for the category, an appreciation for craft and brand stewardship, and the curiosity to understand a business that spans estate agriculture, winemaking, manufacturing, distribution, and luxury consumer engagement. This leader will serve as a true right hand to the CFO, bringing financial clarity, forecast discipline, business judgment, and executive-ready communication to a complex, multi-brand, multi-channel business. This is an opportunity to gain meaningful exposure to a private equity board and its value-creation agenda while helping to scale the company’s planning, analytics, and decision-support capabilities.

This is a coach-player role for a builder at heart. The right leader can move comfortably from the balcony to the floor: setting direction, building tools and cadence, coaching the team, and rolling up their sleeves to create the planning, forecasting, and reporting capability the business needs.

• Lead the enterprise FP&A function, including the annual budget, quarterly and rolling forecasts, long-range planning, risks and opportunities tracking, and executive reporting cadence.
• Lead, coach, and strengthen the FP&A team, setting clear priorities, raising analytical standards, improving cadence and accountability, and building a more proactive business-partner mindset.
• Build and mature driver-based financial models that connect revenue, volume, mix, pricing, channel performance, inventory, COGS, OPEX, capital investment, cash flow, and operational constraints.
• Improve forecast discipline and reduce business surprises by building a more anticipatory planning process, clearer risk/opportunity tracking, and stronger insight into the drivers of performance.
• Develop clear, concise financial reporting and dashboards that help the CFO, CEO, executive leadership team, Board, and ownership group understand business performance and make informed decisions.
• Translate financial and operational complexity into practical recommendations that highlight key performance drivers, risks, opportunities, and trade-offs.
• Partner across Commercial Finance, Sales, Marketing, Operations, Supply Chain, Accounting, IT, and executive leadership to ensure financial plans reflect business strategy, operational realities, and portfolio priorities.
• Leverage and improve planning systems, reporting tools, data governance, and dashboard infrastructure to create a more reliable source of truth for enterprise decision-making.
• Identify and implement practical AI-enabled tools and advanced analytics to improve forecast accuracy, reporting efficiency, scenario modeling, and the finance function’s ability to support faster, more data-informed decisions.
• Build the insights, analytics, and executive-ready materials needed for internal monthly reviews, quarterly business reviews, Board discussions, and private equity value-creation priorities.
• Support strategic finance workstreams, including capital allocation, ROI analysis, pricing and margin insights, portfolio planning, M&A support, integration, and value-creation tracking.

Requirements

• 10+ years of progressive finance experience, including significant leadership experience in FP&A, strategic finance, corporate finance, or business planning.
• Demonstrated success operating as a hands-on builder or coach-player leader in a mid-market, transformation-oriented, or high-growth environment.
• Demonstrated ownership of enterprise planning processes, including annual budgeting, forecasting, long-range planning, management reporting, and executive-level financial analysis.
• Demonstrated ability to connect financial and operational metrics to business outcomes, translating channel, customer, distributor, and brand performance into specific, actionable growth and improvement opportunities.
• Experience building or improving driver-based planning models tied to business fundamentals such as volume, mix, pricing, channel, inventory, COGS, OPEX, working capital, and cash flow.
• Strong operational finance fluency in a physical-product business, ideally in beverage, food, agriculture, premium CPG, manufacturing, or another inventory-intensive consumer-products environment; wine experience is helpful, but not required.
• Experience improving planning systems, reporting processes, data quality, and dashboard infrastructure; familiarity with tools such as Anaplan, Adaptive, Planful, Power BI, Tableau, NAV/Dynamics, NetSuite, SAP, or similar platforms is preferred.
• Demonstrated curiosity and practical experience applying AI, machine learning, automation, or advanced analytics to strengthen forecasting, scale the finance function, and build a forward-looking, anticipatory planning capability over time.
• Strong executive presence with the ability to translate complex financial analysis into clear recommendations for senior leaders, board members, and ownership stakeholders.
• Genuine interest in the wine category, with the curiosity and humility to learn the craft, operating model, culture, and portfolio dynamics of the business.
• Proven ability to lead, coach, and elevate finance teams, including setting priorities, improving cadence, raising standards, and fostering a proactive business-partner approach.
• Experience in a transformation-oriented or high-growth environment is strongly preferred.
• Bachelor’s degree required; MBA, CPA, CFA, or other relevant advanced credential preferred.

Benefits

• Comprehensive Benefits