Chief Commercial Officer

About

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At Algrano, a tech-focused coffee startup from Switzerland, we are on a mission to reshape the global coffee trade. We are driven by an ambitious goal: to revolutionize the age-old coffee trade industry, making it both transparent and digital.

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Via Algrano's online marketplace, coffee farmers can effortlessly promote and sell their coffees directly to roasters in Europe and the USA. Algrano provides the online (marketplace) and offline infrastructure (logistics, insurance, financing). 

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Honored with the Best Innovation award by the European Coffee Industry Association in 2015 for our launch and again in 2022 for our achievements, we currently serve over 1,000 sellers and roasters in more than 50 countries. With the support of a robust investor network, our vision is to become the premier platform for direct coffee trading globally.

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The role

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As Chief Commercial Officer, you are a member of Algrano’s management team along the Chief Operating Officer, the Chief Financial Officer, Chief Technology Officer and Chief Executive Officer. You are responsible for leading and scaling the commercial team as Algrano enters a new phase of growth, driving both business model evolution and geographical expansion:

• Current business growth - Algrano’s growth is driven by participants in the marketplace. You align the sales, outbound acquisition and marketing teams’ actions around a joint growth strategy. 
• Geographical Expansion - Originally a Swiss-based company serving European roasters, Algrano has begun its global expansion, starting with the U.S. market and exploring further international opportunities. You will be responsible for evaluating new opportunities, building market entry strategies and ensuring the team successfully executes the expansion. 
• Business Model Evolution - Algrano is transitioning from a digital brokering and importing company to a service-driven business. You will lead the commercial team in positioning and selling Algrano’s expanded offerings, which will include market access, financial services as well as digital tools designed to enhance efficiency in green coffee management for coffee roasteries and producing organizations.
  

This role requires a visionary leader who can align commercial strategy with Algrano’s evolving value proposition, empower the team to execute on ambitious goals, and establish strong relationships with key stakeholders in the global coffee supply chain.

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Key responsibilities

• Strategic Leadership – You drive Algrano’s business model evolution: you structure new initiatives and services ensuring they form a cohesive and compelling service offering for both coffee producers and roasters. You play a key role in defining and aligning commercial strategies, establishing clear service offerings, pricing models, and go-to-market approaches.

• Team Leadership – You will be responsible for three global teams across marketing, European and U.S. sales, and producer and roaster acquisition, ensuring alignment and efficiency across regions.

• Sustainable Growth – You ensure Algrano’s ambitious growth plans are executed in a smart and predictable way, balancing expansion with long-term value creation. Your focus is on maintaining customer satisfaction and retention, driving profitability, and staying true to Algrano’s mission to democratize coffee trade.

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Your Profile

• B2B Marketplace experience: you have a deep understanding of B2B marketplaces dynamics. Ideally you’ve played a key commercial role at a B2B marketplace or in a SaaS software company.
  

• Strategic thinker: When you think about what selling a product is, you see a process. You are able to reduce complex systems, iterating and long journeys into simple logic.
  

• Entrepreneurial: you possess a strong track record in building or rolling out new products & services, testing them out and overcoming implementation challenges. You are a doer. You’re guided by the company vision and you learn and adapt on the way.
  

• Intercultural sensitivity and affinity with languages: you can deeply connect with both coffee producers in coffee producing countries and coffee roasters across Europe and the USA. Ideally you’ve lived and worked in a coffee producing country and understand first hand the day to day realities of coffee producers. Besides fluency in English, you must speak Spanish or Portuguese  and/or another language from a coffee producing country.

• Data affine: you build your growth strategy on deep market and customer analyses. Because you love data and numbers you have been using in the past different data analytic tools and are able to answer your questions with data yourself. 

• Financial skills: you are not afraid of multi million dollar contracts. You have worked with financial products in the past and understand hedging strategy and how futures and options markets work. 

• Mission driven, visionary and ambitious: you are convinced by the long term transformational power of the Algrano model on the coffee industry. This potential fuels you, you have the willingness and the courage  to lead the company in this direction in an ambitious way. Your career demonstrates your visionary and mission driven attitude in an exemplary way.

• You don’t have to have coffee industry background, but you are extremely interested in understanding the current  complex trading system, and you are fast and smart in identifying the challenges this system causes to the market participants and the value Algrano’s products and services add.   
  

• You share Algrano’s core values. Your co-employees and friends describe you as humble and down to earth. You strongly believe it is possible to dream big, be ambitious while keeping feet on the ground and stay humble in all circumstances.
  
  
• Excellent leadership & management skills: you are an experienced leader with multiple years of experience leading global teams (over 20 people). You are aware of your leadership style and understand how to leverage the different skills of people in a team.

• You are based in Switzerland, or eligible to work in Switzerland (EU citizen) and are willing to move to the Zurich area.