Vice President Purchasing & Inventory

# VP of Purchasing & Inventory**Golden Country** — Chicagoland (on-site / relocation required)Reports to: [CEO]---## The short versionWe import roughly 4,000 SKUs of Asian food from a dozen countries across dry, refrigerated, and frozen — short shelf lives, long transit times, seasonal supply, and vendor relationships that in some cases go back decades. Today those relationships and the buying judgment behind them live largely in two people's heads. We're hiring the person who will take that over, professionalize it, and grow it.This is not a job writing purchase orders. We have people who do that, and we intend to keep it that way.---## Why this role exists nowThree things are converging.**A handoff.** Our current purchasing leadership is planning a transition. That means a genuine overlap period — you will be taken to Thailand, Vietnam, and elsewhere and personally introduced to our top vendors by the person who built those relationships. That handoff is the single most important thing this role does in year one, and it is not something we're asking you to figure out alone.**Growth.** We are actively evaluating acquisitions in our space and pursuing national retail distribution. Both change what purchasing has to be capable of. You'd be building the function, not inheriting a finished one.**Fragmentation.** Category buying is currently spread across people whose primary job is sales. That made sense at one size. It doesn't at the next one. Part of your mandate is consolidating that — and you will help us define and hire the Asian category buyer who reports to you, rather than inheriting a hire we made without you.---## What you'll own**Vendor strategy and relationships.** Our supplier base is our competitive position. You'll own it — including personally visiting our most strategic vendors at least twice a year, and expecting to be in Asia roughly quarterly. You'll also own what those relationships are worth in dollars: freight support, promotional allowances, new-item money, priority allocation when supply is tight.**Inventory and demand planning.** What's our position on the top 50 items. What we carry versus what we need to carry. Where we're long on a slow mover and short on something constrained. Which items we can't sell more of because we can't *get* more — and what you're going to do about that. You'll own turns, coverage, and dead stock as measured numbers, not impressions.**Landed cost and margin.** Ocean freight contract negotiation, INCOterms, duty and tariff exposure, currency. You'll be at the table on carrier contracts.**Import compliance.** FDA prior notice, FSVP, customs classification, supplier quality at origin. If you've never had a container detained, this role will find out.**New vendors, new markets, new categories.** We know where we're strong. We also know we're underdeveloped in produce, meat, and dairy, and that our seafood buying needs rebuilding. You'll bring us opportunities we don't currently see.**The purchasing team.** You'll lead the purchasing and inventory group, including hiring the Asian category buyer. You will not be writing POs or telling coordinators which POs to write.---## What we requireThese are ranked. The first two are non-negotiable and cannot be taught. The rest matter, and we'd rather have someone at 80% across them than someone who misses the top two.1. **Deep, hands-on sourcing across multiple Asian countries and multiple vendors within them.** Not oversight of a team that did it — you, at the factory, on the quality reject, through the Chinese New Year and Tet shutdowns. Depth beats a long country list.2. **A relationship-first instinct with suppliers, and the ability to convert it into value.** Our best outcomes have come from vendors doing things for us they didn't have to do. If your track record is built on squeezing suppliers, this is the wrong company. We will check this — including with your former vendors.3. **High-SKU, multi-temperature-state comfort.** Thousands of items, twelve-plus countries, dry and chilled and frozen in the same week. If your experience is one deep category at a large retailer, you will likely find this overwhelming, and we'd rather you know that now.4. **International logistics and long-lead-time management.** Ocean freight, container economics, transit-time planning against short shelf life.5. **Seasonal and constrained-supply product experience.** Harvest windows, allocation, brand switching when your first choice isn't available.6. **Inventory and demand planning literacy.** You don't need to be a planner. You need to read a coverage report and know what it's costing you in working capital.7. **Import compliance fluency.** FDA/FSVP, customs, duty and tariff exposure.8. **Real systems and spreadsheet skill.** ERP fluency (we run NetSuite) and Excel at a working level — pivots, lookups, building your own analysis. We will test this in the interview, not take your word for it.9. **People leadership.** You'll build and lead a small team.10. **Small-company temperament.** This is a fast, hands-on environment. Some days you're setting strategy with the CEO, some days you're solving a truck problem yourself. If your last environment had a department for everything, be honest with yourself about the adjustment.**Nice to have, not required:** familiarity with the major consumer brands in these markets; produce, meat, or dairy sourcing; experience servicing national mass retail; a relevant language — useful in the informal relationship layer where a lot of this business actually gets done, though the formal business runs in English.---## Please don't apply if- Your sourcing experience is a single narrow category (frozen pizza, condiments, one aisle) at a large retail chain.- Your wins came primarily from volume leverage and cost-down mandates. We don't have that leverage and we don't want that culture with our suppliers.- You aren't willing to be on a plane to Asia regularly. Not once for the photos — regularly, for years.- You need to work remotely. The knowledge transfer this role depends on cannot happen over video.---## What we'll ask you in the interviewWe're telling you in advance because we'd rather you come prepared than perform.- Walk us through a specific supplier problem you personally handled — a quality rejection, a spec change, a shutdown, a missed vessel. We want the texture, not the summary.- You need four more containers from a supplier you've worked with for twenty years, in a tight market, and they're allocated out. What do you actually do?- Tell us about vendor support dollars you've secured, and how.- Here's an inventory report. Tell us what's wrong.- Who would you want us to call on the supplier side, and what would they say about you?---## The honest pitchWe are a mid-sized, PE-held importer with real relationships, real growth ahead, and a purchasing function that has outgrown the way it was built. What we're offering is not a seat in a finished machine. It's the chance to take over decades of hard-won supplier equity from the person who built it, put professional structure around it, and run it as your own — with the CEO in the room and no layers in your way.If that's the job you've been waiting for someone to offer you, we'd like to talk.Compensation: $175-200k (based on experience/fit) + annual bonus tied to gross margin and inventory turns + relocation