Vice President of Production

What you will do

Run our entire production organization as its own business. You will own the production P&L, the people, the output, and the unit economics: turning raw fibre and labour into finished product at a quality, cost, and pace that lets the company scale 20x within 2 years without breaking. You will inherit a team of 130+ people and double it every half-year.

Who we are looking for

A senior operator who has already built and run a large production or factory floor of 500 to 1,000 people and knows how to do it again, faster and leaner. You think like a general manager and a factory engineer at once: you can read a financial model and adjust it, and you can sit at a sewing machine and learn the job well enough to know what good output looks like. You are not precious about hierarchy. You will install structure where there is none, get performance out of large teams, and keep cost per unit inside the economics that make the business work.

Who this role is for

You have run production at scale, and you are looking for the place where you get to own the whole thing.

You understand that a production floor is a living system: people, machines, materials, targets, morale, and money all moving together, and a problem in one shows up as a symptom somewhere else. You can look at an underperforming floor, diagnose the real cause beneath the noise, and fix it, whether that means retraining a supervisor, re-cutting a target, redesigning a workflow, or moving someone out of the business quickly and humanely.

You believe the best operators get their hands dirty. You will learn to produce every item we make, not to do those jobs forever, but so that no supervisor or analyst can ever tell you something is impossible when you know it isn't. You have operated across every role on a production team before, which is exactly why you know who to hire, where to find them, and how to train them well.

You are comfortable owning a P&L. You understand that improving employee satisfaction and holding unit economics are not opposites; they are a balance you are paid to strike. You can argue for a salary increase and show, in a spreadsheet, how the efficiency gains pay for it.

You are fluent with data and modern tools. Spreadsheets are second nature, you adopt new technology without friction, and you use AI as a daily operating tool, not just as a chatbot.

You are building for scale without bloat. Because we are still bootstrapped, you will scale first with supervisors and operations analysts rather than a layer of middle managers — and because you will have personally operated every function, you will know exactly what each future manager's role should be before you ever hire one.

This role is not for you if you need a big team underneath you to be effective, if you consider any task beneath you, or if you have only ever inherited well-run operations rather than fixing broken ones. It is for you if you can hold a high-level strategy and a sewing needle in the same week, and find satisfaction in a floor that runs the way it should.

Our culture

Our culture at TSL is defined by six values:

• Speed — Do not be a blocker to someone else's progress. Understand how your work affects the person who consumes it next.
• Teamwork — Be reliable and trustworthy. Keep to your end of the deal and your timelines.
• Respect — Be kind and do not assume malice. Do not waste people's time or the company's money.
• Initiative — Act like a scientist. Start from the outcome you want and work backwards to find the path.
• Visibility — Carry people along. Communicate timelines early and share results and feedback quickly.
• Excellence — The minimum requirement for doing any work is doing good work. Tie every decision to the outcome you want.

For this role specifically, Initiative, Excellence, and Visibility carry extra weight. You will manage hundreds of people, many of them on piece-rate income, where your decisions directly affect what they earn. How you communicate change, set targets, and treat the people on the floor is core to the job.

What you will own

Production P&L

• You receive a defined percentage of each sale as your production budget — the cost to make each item, including labour, plus a margin. Everything downstream of that: inventory, salaries, floor costs, bonuses, runs inside that budget. You are accountable for keeping the whole operation profitable within it. The percentage is set by the business, but you can challenge and renegotiate it with a better model and a sharper framing.

People and performance at scale

• You own recruiting, training, performance management, and retention for the entire production team. You will train supervisors to manage their own teams well, identify poor performers and bad fits early and move them out quickly, and keep retention high so the business is not endlessly re-training. You are responsible for the environment, culture, and satisfaction of a large blue-collar and white-collar workforce.

Efficiency and unit economics

• You keep cost of production inside the numbers that make the business model work. When you want to spend more — higher pay, better tools, a new location — you show how it pays for itself in throughput, quality, or retention.

Scaling the operation 20x

• You will design the floor, the workflows, the supervisor structure, and the physical space required to take production to 20x current volume within two years.

What you need to have

Non-negotiable

• A track record of running a production, factory, or large operational team of 500–1,000 people.
• Direct, hands-on experience across the roles of a production line, which means you have operated the floor, not just managed it from a desk
• Strong P&L ownership and the financial fluency to read, build, and adjust unit economics models in spreadsheets
• Demonstrated ability to recruit, train, and retain large teams, and to train supervisors to manage well
• The judgment to identify poor performers and bad fits early and act decisively and humanely
• On-site in Lagos, able to be physically present on the production floor

Strong advantages

• Manufacturing/factory operations background (garment, textile, FMCG, electronics assembly) or large-scale agriculture
• Experience scaling an operation through a high-growth period
• Experience having worked directly with and alongside a senior decision-maker (founder, MD, plant director) in a large organisation
• Heavy, fluent use of AI beyond just AI chatbots.
• Experience building structure in an under-managed or fast-growing environment.