Village Underground is searching for a world-class leader to help elevate it to the most important arts and cultural space in East London with a prominent international role. This person will have a track record as a business leader, have strong financial skills, be great at managing and inspiring people, and be able to strike the right balance between commercial and artistic priorities. He or she will be aware of developments in the creative and cultural industries and be excited by the opportunities and the challenges of leading a 21st century arts centre.
The Managing Director Role:
The Managing Director will be Village Underground's business leader, responsible for ensuring the organisation has a clear and ambitious strategy, a great team to deliver in all areas, and robust systems to manage a growing arts centre and business.
The Managing Director will develop VU’s culture: one of creativity and ambition and a commitment to excellence and collaboration, inspiring and leading a staff team that have a positive ‘can do’ approach to both business and artistic challenges and opportunities. Importantly the MD will support team members helping them to develop to their full potential during their time at VU.
The Heads of all VU’s business departments – Operations, Programming and Commercial Development – report to the Managing Director. The Managing Director will report to, and get strategic support from, VU’s CEO and Founder. The CEO will continue to have a strategic role in contributing to the organisation’s success.
The MD will work collaboratively with the Artistic Director (AD), who is responsible for delivering VU’s renowned arts programme. Together they will develop VU into an organisation with an international reputation and an inspiring programme spanning art forms as well as a platform to reflect, promote and host the creativity of East London.
Specific Responsibilities
People
30% of time
To enable VU to attract, retain, motivate and develop talented professionals capable of delivering its vision and business plan:
- Inspire, develop and manage VU’s dedicated and passionate team using a supportive management and leadership style.
- Overall responsibility for the HR recruitment, performance and management processes and systems for staff, freelancers and contractors, ensuring all people working for VU have the direction and support needed to perform well.
- Support the Artistic Director’s artistic leadership of VU, management of a high quality programming team, and relationship cultivation with music and arts clients.
- Support the operations department
Culture
10% of time
To maintain VU’s values and collaborative culture as the organisation undertakes a period of sustained growth:
- Create and foster a strong VU culture that reflects our values and vision and shapes all VU activity and relationships.
- Lead and inspire the entire VU team of staff, freelancers and contractors.
- Be a role model in embodying VU’s values and culture.
Business
40% of time
To ensure VU is a cutting edge creative and profitable business:
- Setting and monitoring yearly and quarterly departmental budgets, ensuring quarterly reporting and revisions as needed.
- Ensuring appropriate monitoring of business finances including cash flow, event P&L, monthly P&L, weekly updates, monthly management accounts and year end accounts.
- Develop key business performance metrics, and ensure appropriate systems and processes are in place for all departments to deliver and report regularly against these key metrics.
- Balance artistic risk and financial sustainability within VU’s programming and budget.
- Support the Head of Commercial Development in the design and successful realisation of sales and marketing plans for events and corporate hire activity, and identify new markets to meet VU’s commercial goals.
- Collaborate with the AD to develop new artistic business models and identify opportunities to commercialise parts of the artistic programme.
- Ultimate responsibility for ensuring the legal compliance and financial solvency of VU as a business.
Strategy
10% of time
To elevate VU as the vital artistic and cultural space in East London:
- Work with the CEO and the AD to develop, implement and regularly review VU’s vision, strategy and business plan.
- Ensure that all departments have clear strategies and plans that collectively deliver VU’s artistic and business goals.
- Support the CEO to achieve VU’s national and international expansion plans.
- Support the CEO in developing strategies to ensure the long term sustainability of VU
Public
10% of time
To project VU as a recognised public leader and voice in the art and community enterprise sectors:
- Serve as a public spokesperson for VU with key stakeholders, press and media and at appropriate national and international forums.
- Support the CEO in evolving VU’s brand direction
- Ensure a strong artistic identity for VU and growing reputation at a regional, national and international level
- Develop relationships with new partners, including companies, brands and arts institutions to enrich VU's programme, reputation and reach.
Experience, Skills & Abilities
- Proven track record of managing and growing a team of diverse talents, with 30+ members
- Ability to lead, inspire and motivate.
- Ability to foster a strong culture
- Proven financial track record in developing and maintaining budgets in support of challenging creative work and high quality productions.
- Ability to find new ways of realising amazing artistic and creative projects in a challenging environment of decreasing funding.
- Excellent creative taste!
- Ability to forge and maintain strong creative relationships with both commercial and artistic partner organisations.
- Excellent communication and interpersonal skills.
- A track record of working to agreed budgets and deadlines of £2M+.
- Solid grounding in compliance and business law.
Personal Characteristics
- An innovative thinker, with the ability to think laterally and find solutions to problems.
- Inspirational leader
- Understands the needs and aspirations of creative people.
- Understands the needs of the office and production teams as they work to support artistic projects.
- Artistically courageous and ambitious; able to see the value of challenging creative proposals.
- Risk aware but not risk adverse.
- Generous and flexible; willing to work in a sometimes chaotic environment while maintaining a supportive approach as a manager.
- A strong communicator; clear, direct, structured.
- Excited about the possibilities of an independent 21st century arts centre.
- Entrepreneurial
- Always willing to roll up sleeves and get stuck in to whatever it takes to deliver what the organisation needs.
A Bit About Village Underground - villageunderground.co.uk.
Village Underground was born of the need for affordable, environmentally stable studio space for artists in East London. We convinced Hackney Council to let us take over a roofless, burned out, derelict warehouse adjoined to a lost section of the Victorian Broad Street Rail Viaduct, which had been left sleeping for decades, self seeding into a meadow high above the streets.
From these abandoned spaces came Village Underground, a non-profit space for creativity and culture in the heart of East London. VU’s distinctive reused trains and containers provide creative workspace for up to 50 artists, writers, designers, filmmakers, VJ’s, musicians and other practition- ers working side-by-side in a creative community. Below, VU’s main art centre space runs an ec- lectic programme of concerts and electronic music, exhibitions, theatre, live art performances and other events. Today VU works with more than 1000 artists a year, employs around 50 people and is on the cusp of launching its second project in Lisbon.
The founder is stepping back from the day-to-day operations and running of the business to focus on its next phase - growing through local and international expansion, a new Community Cultural Programme and other creative endeavours. Seven years in and with a solid foundation, VU is look- ing for a new MD to take the reigns and drive it forward.
The Vision for the Future of VU
The core belief of VU is that the power of culture lies in inspirational, transformative experiences that have the capacity to change perceptions, people and societies.
The core purpose of VU is the present, support and produce the best new culture as it happens, pushing inspiration and creating experiences that transform people’s perceptions.
VU’s mission is to achieve this through the development of both its cultural and community pro- grammes and creative ‘platforms’ that engage artists and audiences locally, nationally and interna- tionally – festivals, creative workspaces, artistic communities – all powered by the main dynamo of the 21st century arts centre.
The next stage in VU’s evolution is the further development and expansion of these platforms and in particular the expansion of the art centres model, with new centres at home and abroad.
