Operations Fellow

This role is designed to provide a natural on-ramp to senior leadership roles within or outside our fast-growing, 31 count (and growing) portfolio of small businesses by providing an approximately 24-month employment tenure during which you’ll learn the Saturn Five Way, experience firsthand the joys and challenges of supporting small businesses, and gain invaluable hands on operating experience and operational finance reps. As an Operations Fellow, you’ll engage directly with our team of Operating Partners, executing key strategic and tactical projects and providing lift to the CEOs, GMs, and Presidents of a unique network of profitable small businesses, all while building your small-business leadership toolkit.

What We’re About

Saturn Five is a long-term-hold investment firm focused on buying and operating some of the best small businesses in America. We are, technically, a lower-middle-market private equity company, but we're a bit different. We buy and hold our investments for the long term, and we invest in companies that we're proud of, but most of the private equity market isn't interested in. If you love the impact of well-run businesses and want to run one yourself someday, we may have a seat waiting for you. We don’t define success simply by the profits of our businesses. We think we can’t really measure what we’ve accomplished unless we also count the ways we’ve made life better for our investors, our team, and our portfolio-company customers and employees, and the world. Our aim and admittedly imperfect attempt is to live out a redemptive [generative] alternative to private equity. You can learn more about Saturn Five in our 2026 Annual Letter.

What Makes This Role Different

This is a compelling opportunity to support the operational needs of a 31+ company portfolio, all while receiving training and seeing how best-in-class lower-middle market company leaders operate, and simultaneously posturing yourself for leadership of a small firm in the near future.

You will:

• Get front-row access to the operational processes and systems it takes for excellent small businesses to succeed,
• Work alongside a 20-person team that genuinely loves working together to build good businesses for the long-term, focusing on sustainable growth rather than quick exits, and
• Guide and assist portfolio companies to meet quarterly distribution targets to investors, all while helping employees flourish.

Core Responsibility: Supporting Saturn Five Operating Partners

Provide meaningful lift to portfolio companies and the Saturn Five Portfolio Management Team through hands-on project work supporting individual businesses. Example projects might include:

• Reviewing and improving portfolio company-level budgets and annual plans
• Designing and modeling key-employee incentive compensation plans
• Serving as a ‘running buddy’ to portfolio company leadership to address major sales, supplier, or operational issues
• Tackle key projects or domain-specific initiatives to level-up or shore-up an operating business
• Building and improving Saturn Five playbooks using your and our lived experience and tactical examples for common SMB challenges and opportunities

Typical Trainings and Learnings

Get lots of “reps” across a diverse range of businesses to sharpen and expand your management toolkit via projects such as the following:

• Finance: Understand the specifics of a small business budget, 13-week cash projection, and monthly financial forecasting, through hands-on strategic planning processes
• People: Run a mid-level-manager hiring process, serve as point-person on a current portfolio company HR compliance issue, design a key employee compensation plan, conduct 1:1 coaching/mentorship meetings
• Sales: Build a ‘customer experience journey’ artifact and sales pipeline process for a project-based portfolio company, join a company leader in building a customer roster and cold-calling for a new product offering, conduct customer satisfaction follow-up calls
• Ops: Learn and coach the Saturn Five Way of Weekly, Monthly, and Annual status updates, conduct a morning toolbox meeting, design a simple inventory count and management system.
• Cash: Create a recommended quarterly distribution for a portfolio company based on cash needs and recent performance, build a CapEx plan with and without financing options for critical portfolio company equipment, help build a 13-week cash-flow forecast product

Who You Are

• You're wicked smart and proactive
• You’re kind, firm, and grounded
• You work hard and are a great teammate
• You willingly serve others
• You have a good sense of humor and can roll with the unpredictable punches inherent to the world of small businesses … you take your work seriously, but not yourself
  
• You prize excellence, and hold a high bar for the quality of your work
• You’re comfortable with some ambiguity and stepping into messy situations, with a bias towards process improvement and systematizing healthy practices
• You want your work to matter
• You share our core values of Adventure, Joy, Trust, Excellence, and Love

What You Bring

• Unquestionable integrity and trustworthiness in stewarding investors’ dollars
• A true passion for small business and a commitment to leading one soon
• Five-to-ten (5-10) years of post-undergrad work experience
• Real-world, small unit / team leadership of front-line employees
• Operational finance chops
• A history of direct exposure to financial statements and their analysis
• Comfort with high levels of ambiguity and day-to-day variance in your job focus
• A four-year undergrad degree … business or finance focus beneficial, but we’re open to other backgrounds

What'd be Nice-to-Have

• Management-team-level experience in a small-to-medium-sized company ($2M - $10M in EBITDA)
• Domain expertise in a small-business-related cross-company functional area (SEO, hiring, inventory management, job-costing)
• An MBA or equivalent professional degree

Compensation:

• $150k base salary, commensurate with experience
• Performance-based bonus equal to 10% of base salary
• Betterment 401(k) with an up-to 4% match
• Health and dental insurance
• Self-directed PTO
• Monthly coaching/counseling stipend
• Monthly date night allowance for you and your spouse