Our Opportunity
GPJ is hiring an Account Director to support a very cool, large tech client!
This role is hybrid, requiring you to report on-site to one of the following office locations a minimum of 2 days/week: San Francisco, Los Angeles, Austin, Nashville, Detroit, Boston, or New York City.
Your Role
You are responsible for ensuring the overall success of our clients and the profitability of their accounts, particularly on larger projects. You oversee the margin levels within your assigned portfolio, which includes adapting to any service changes that may arise. Your role also involves making sure that we meet all timelines and budget requirements for every aspect of the account.
Maintaining a strategic responsibility for nurturing the relationships between our clients and our agency is a key part of your job. You actively work to build trust and engagement with senior-level clients and vendors. Additionally, you are accountable for creating and developing the direction and objectives for the accounts you oversee, and you have become a subject matter expert on our client's brand, business, and industry. In addition, you support program direction, objectives, and plans. You possess proficiency in our tools (CRM, Deltek, etc) as well as thorough understanding of our processes. You provide a high level of client service and satisfaction, all while ensuring that you consistently and efficiently deploy GPJ methodologies.
Another significant aspect of your role is driving account growth. You are continuously pursuing and generating new revenue opportunities as a regular part of your activities. You have a deep understanding of our full range of services at GPJ, and you can effectively communicate this both internally and to clients as part of our sales process. Balancing a high level of client service and satisfaction with the consistent and efficient deployment of GPJ methodologies is crucial to your role. You have strong scope of work development skills and are focused on account health which includes margin, temp spend, forecasting with levels of confidence, and staffing properly.
You take accountability for ensuring that large and complex budgets are effectively built, managed, and reconciled, and you may delegate work to key team members as needed. In terms of team management, you are actively involved in mentoring and leading your team. You take responsibility for the quality of your team's work and may have multiple direct reports. You are also capable of defining a vision for the team and aligning our resources with this vision in collaboration with functional leaders. In addition to direct reports, you lead the cross-disciplinary team on your accounts. You possess the ability to motivate and manage a team when there is dotted line reporting.
Your Skills
- Experience working with Fortune 500 brands strongly desired
- May have one or more direct reports
- Able to independently create and develop account/program strategic direction and objectives; proactively engage with and enable/inspire the team to add innovative strategic and creative contributions.
- Lead internal strategic meetings and present findings to client
- Able to help identify, lead and close new opportunities, strategically leveraging internal resources and teams (for organic and net new opportunities)
- Experience and confidence engaging and building respected, trusted peer-to-peer relationships with mid to senior level client side marketing executives
- Actively helps mentor / teach others on Account team; may help manage onsite resources
- Fully capable of building decks and presentations which tell a story in the language that the client will understand
- Possess executive presence - be able to read and 'command' a room
- Understands how to effectively oversee overall, increasingly complex project timelines in line with strategic objectives
- Understand effective budget oversight and troubleshooting for larger, more complex budgets, leveraging SMEs as needed
- Ensures team proactively addresses key project financial metrics, including profitability and margin
- Ensures team accurately interprets and proactively addresses impact of changes on project financial metrics
- Able to drive accountability with team and assist with troubleshooting / continuous improvement around financial metrics
- Able to have strategic, more complex financial conversations with clients
- Has a clear understanding of PO and reconciliation process; ensures execution of accurate, timely client invoicing
- Strong proficiency in Microsoft Office software including PPT, Word, Excel, Outlook. Previous experience with ERP, Project Management software, or similar tool is preferred
Your Competencies
Account Development & Growth - Through in-depth business, industry and client knowledge, drive forward thinking approaches and concepts aligned to and anticipating client’s needs and objectives enabling agency differentiation, identification of new areas for growth and client satisfaction.
Client Orientation - You demonstrate concern for satisfying external and/or internal clients aka client obsession. You focus always on the end clients, ensuring that response times and service are at the forefront of customer interactions, via technology or human touch points. You provide superior client service by prioritizing personal interactions (verbal or face-to-face) with our clients on a regular cadence. You listen as well as advise our clients on given situations to ensure engagement success.
Relationship Builder - Develop, maintain and strengthen partnerships with others inside and outside the client organization. Identify new stakeholders, manage client expectations, define new business opportunities and deliver against clients’ needs while skillfully balancing the needs of the client and those of the agency. Relates well to all kinds of people, up, down, and sideways, inside and outside the organization; builds appropriate rapport,: builds constructive and effective relationships; uses diplomacy and tact; can diffuse even high-tension situations comfortably.
Your Experience
Experience & Education
- 10+ years of previous industry / agency experience
- 6+ years of progressively increasing client management responsibility / experience desired
Travel & Mobility
- Ability to travel as required
- Ability to work irregular hours in addition to normal business hours, to include nights, weekends and holidays as needed
Your Impact
In your role, you will have influence and responsibility over:
- Business Development
- Strategy & Creative Development
- Management, Delivery / Deployment
- Fabrication/Graphics
- Project Launch & Resource Mgmt.
- Estimating
- Invoicing, Project Financial Reconciliation & Close
Salary Range: $110k - $130k
Salary is dependent on a variety of factors including (but not limited to) experience, skills, and location.
Who We Are
GPJ is the world leader in experiential marketing. Our 29 global offices are filled with fearless people dreaming up ideas that are transforming industries and bringing the most respected brands to life in powerfully, exciting ways. We are a part of the Project Worldwide family. An independent, employee-owned global network of complementary, wholly owned agencies.
You read that “employee-owned” part, right? You heard us correctly. You work hard, she works hard, we all work hard… we all succeed and reap the rewards. We have an Employee Stock Ownership Plan (ESOP) – providing our employees with an ownership interest. We thought you would want to know that. In fact, there is a lot more you would want to know about us, like our FTO policy (no more “accruing” time off), our employer matching 401(k) plan (no vesting period), our “no employee contribution” healthcare option. But we are getting ahead of ourselves here, let’s talk about this exciting opportunity first and we can fill you in on our perks & benefits later.
GPJ is proud to be an Equal Opportunity Employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex (including pregnancy, sexual orientation and gender identity), national origin, citizenship, disability, protected veteran status, or any other protected class. In addition to federal law requirements, GPJ complies with applicable state and local laws governing nondiscrimination in employment in every location in which the company has facilities. This policy applies to all terms and conditions of employment, including recruiting, hiring, placement, promotion, termination, layoff, recall, transfer, leaves of absence, compensation and training. GPJ expressly prohibits any form of workplace harassment based on any protected class.
