Vice President Operations

Job Summary

The Vice President of Operations leads the three departments that carry a client from enrollment to graduation: Negotiations, Client Success, and Post-Settlement Services. The role owns the full post-enrollment client journey — the outcomes clients get, the service they experience, the cost at which we deliver both, and the compliance record behind all of it.

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This is a builder’s role as much as a manager’s. We are adding clients and states continuously, and the operating model must be rebuilt to hold that growth: staffing models that flex, workflows that do not depend on heroics, technology and reporting that surface problems before clients feel them, and quality and compliance monitoring that would withstand a regulatory examination on any given day.

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The VP of Operations is a member of the executive team, reports to the Chief Executive Officer, and partners closely with Sales/Enrollment, Compliance & Legal, Finance, and Technology.

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Responsibilities

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1. Negotiations

Own the creditor-facing organization responsible for settling enrolled client debt.

• Set negotiation strategy, creditor-specific playbooks, and settlement authority thresholds; govern exceptions and escalations.
• Own the department’s core outcomes: settlement rate, average settlement percentage of enrolled balance, settlements per negotiator per month, days to first settlement, and re-negotiation/fallout rate.
• Build and maintain direct relationships with creditors, debt buyers, collection agencies, and law firms; negotiate portfolio-level terms and standing agreements where available.
• Design negotiator capacity, queue prioritization, and account assignment models so the right accounts reach the right negotiator at the right point in the client’s program.
• Build the negotiator career path — hiring profile, certification, coaching cadence, and compensation structure — in partnership with HR and Finance.
• Monitor creditor behavior, litigation trends, and settlement market conditions, and adjust strategy and client expectations accordingly.

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2. Client Success (Customer Service)

Own the client-facing service organization across the life of the program.

• Own client retention and attrition, program completion/graduation rate, draft health and payment adherence, and client satisfaction (CSAT/NPS).
• Own contact-center performance: service level, answer rate, abandon rate, average speed to answer, first-contact resolution, and omnichannel response times across phone, email, SMS, and portal.
• Design the client journey — welcome and onboarding, proactive milestone outreach, settlement notification, hardship and re-plan conversations, and graduation — with defined touchpoints rather than reactive service.
• Build an early-warning model for at-risk clients (missed drafts, inbound complaint signals, silence after a creditor contact) and the save/retention workflows that act on it.
• Own complaint intake, root-cause analysis, and resolution in partnership with Compliance, including BBB, state attorney general, and CFPB-routed complaints.
• Set workforce management: forecasting, scheduling, shrinkage, and occupancy targets that hold service levels without burning out the team.

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3. Post-Settlement Services

Own everything that happens after a settlement is agreed — the step where an agreement either becomes a real outcome for the client or becomes a complaint.

• Own settlement execution accuracy: payment scheduling, funding coordination with the dedicated account provider, and on-time payment performance against agreed settlement terms.
• Own documentation integrity: settlement letters requested, received, verified, and delivered to the client; zero-balance and paid-in-full confirmations; and the retention of both.
• Own broken-settlement prevention and cure — detection of at-risk settlement payments, client outreach, and re-negotiation before the agreement lapses.
• Own post-settlement dispute resolution, including credit reporting disputes, continued collection activity after settlement, and creditor accounting discrepancies.
• Own fee accuracy: that performance fees are earned, charged, and disclosed consistently with the client agreement and applicable law.

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4. Cross-Functional and Enterprise Responsibilities

• Build a single operating scorecard spanning all three departments and report it to the executive team on a fixed cadence; make the business measurable rather than anecdotal.
• Own the operations budget, headcount plan, and cost per active client / cost per settlement; deliver capacity growth at improving unit economics.
• Partner with Sales/Enrollment on enrollment quality — the handoff into operations is where most downstream attrition and complaints originate.
• Partner with Compliance & Legal on QA monitoring, call recording review, script and disclosure governance, licensing and bonding requirements by state, and audit and examination readiness.
• Partner with Technology on CRM, dialer, workflow automation, and reporting; define operational requirements, prioritize the roadmap, and own adoption after delivery.
• Own vendor management for operations-side vendors, including the dedicated account provider, BPO or overflow capacity, telephony, and QA tooling.
• Build the bench: succession planning and development for directors and managers so growth is not gated on a single leader.

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Qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree in business, finance, or a related field, or equivalent professional experience.
• 8+ years of progressive operations leadership, including 3+ years at director level or above with responsibility for multiple departments.
• Demonstrated experience leading contact-center or client-service organizations of 75+ employees through periods of significant growth.
• Experience in a regulated consumer financial services environment — debt settlement, debt collection, consumer lending, mortgage or loan servicing, credit counseling, or comparable BPO operations.
• Demonstrated fluency with operational analytics: building scorecards and forecasting models, diagnosing root cause from data, and managing a multi-department P&L or operating budget.
• Working knowledge of the regulatory framework governing debt relief services, including the FTC Telemarketing Sales Rule debt relief provisions (including the advance-fee prohibition), state debt settlement licensing and bonding requirements, UDAAP, FDCPA, and TCPA.
• Proven ability to build, coach, and retain a leadership bench, and to hold a high performance standard without high turnover.
• Ability to work on-site in Richardson, Texas.

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Preferred Qualifications

• Direct debt settlement industry experience, including established creditor, debt buyer, or collection agency relationships.
• Experience with AFCC standards, third-party audits, and state examination or regulatory response.
• Experience implementing or materially reconfiguring a CRM, dialer, or workflow automation platform in a high-volume operation.
• MBA or comparable advanced degree.
• Experience in a private-equity-backed or otherwise high-growth operating environment.