Executive recruitment company Monroe Consulting Group Indonesia is recruiting on behalf of a leading consumer retail company. With an ambitious expansion agenda across Sumatra, our client is seeking a strategic and commercially driven General Manager to lead the overall business, overseeing P&L performance, commercial strategy, operations, network expansion, capital investment, and organisational development. The successful candidate will play a critical role in translating the company's strategic priorities into sustainable business growth and operational excellence. The role is based in Medan, North Sumatra, Indonesia.
Key Responsibilities
Strategy, Governance & Board Partnership
- Develop and execute the three-year strategic roadmap and annual business plan, translating Board priorities into clear commercial, operational, expansion, people, and investment objectives.
- Establish an effective management cadence through weekly operating reviews, monthly performance reviews, and structured Board reporting.
- Provide the Board with transparent analysis of business performance, forecasts, risks, major decisions, and capital requirements, while proactively escalating issues and recommending practical actions.
- Maintain clear decision rights, policies, and internal controls to enable agile decision-making while ensuring strong governance and accountability.
Commercial Growth & Customer Proposition
- Own overall business sales, gross margin, and market-position objectives, ensuring the customer proposition remains relevant across locations and store formats.
- Lead merchandising, pricing, promotion, category, and supplier strategies using customer insights, competitor intelligence, and store-level economics.
- Drive business-development initiatives, strategic partnerships, new channels, and service innovations to strengthen revenue, customer loyalty, and market differentiation.
- Establish disciplined test-and-learn approaches to evaluate new concepts before scaling them across the network.
Operational Excellence & Customer Experience
- Hold the Operations Lead accountable for consistent store, distribution centre, and logistics performance across the network.
- Set and maintain standards for product availability, customer service, food safety, store presentation, inventory accuracy, loss prevention, cost control, and regulatory compliance.
- Conduct regular visits to stores and operational facilities to validate reported performance, understand customer and employee realities, and remove execution barriers.
- Sponsor continuous improvement initiatives and appropriate technology adoption to simplify processes, strengthen controls, and enhance customer experience.
Network Expansion & Capital Delivery
- Lead the Sumatra network expansion strategy together with the Operations and Store Development Leads, including market prioritisation, site pipeline development, store format selection, and opening schedules.
- Review and approve robust business cases for new stores, relocations, refurbishments, and major capital expenditure, including sales forecasts, investment returns, and downside risks.
- Ensure cross-functional readiness for every new opening, covering permits, construction, systems, people, assortment, inventory, distribution, marketing, and operational handover.
- Review post-opening performance against the original investment case and apply lessons learned to future network development decisions.
Financial Performance & Resource Allocation
- Own the annual budget, rolling forecast, P&L, cash performance, and capital allocation for the convenience store business.
- Monitor key financial and operational metrics including sales, margin, payroll, occupancy, logistics, shrinkage, inventory, overhead, and capital expenditure.
- Ensure timely corrective action plans are implemented whenever performance deviates from targets.
- Balance growth investment with profitability and liquidity, directing resources toward the highest-return strategic priorities.
- Partner closely with Finance to strengthen management information, business cases, internal controls, and scenario planning.
Organisation, Leadership & Culture
- Lead, align, and develop functional heads, establishing clear objectives, decision rights, and performance expectations.
- Build a strong succession pipeline and management bench to support an expanding store network, addressing capability gaps through targeted recruitment, coaching, and development.
- Foster a culture of ownership, collaboration, customer focus, integrity, and fact-based decision-making across head office, distribution centres, and stores.
- Ensure organisation design, workforce planning, incentive structures, and internal communication support business priorities and sustainable growth.
Risk, Stakeholders & Reputation
- Maintain oversight of material legal, licensing, health and safety, food safety, employment, data, security, and other business risks.
- Build and maintain constructive relationships with shareholders, suppliers, landlords, logistics partners, regulators, and community stakeholders.
- Protect the company's reputation through ethical conduct, disciplined crisis management, and consistent standards across the network.
- Ensure material supplier and partner commitments are commercially sound, properly documented, and effectively monitored
Qualifications & Experience
- Bachelor's degree in Business, Retail Management, Finance, Operations or a related discipline; a postgraduate qualification is advantageous.
- At least 12 years of progressive leadership experience in multi-site retail, convenience, grocery, FMCG or a closely related consumer business, including at least 5 years in a senior enterprise or regional leadership role.
- Demonstrated accountability for a sizeable profit and loss, annual budgeting, capital decisions and delivery of profitable growth.
- Proven success leading multi-functional teams and a distributed operating network through expansion, performance improvement or organisational change.
- Strong command of retail economics, operations, merchandising, inventory, supply chain, store development and customer experience.
- Excellent analytical and commercial judgement, with the ability to interpret complex performance data, test assumptions, evaluate investments and make timely decisions.
- Mature people leader who sets high standards, develops senior managers and creates accountability without becoming a bottleneck.
- Strong Board-level communication, stakeholder management and negotiation capability.
- Fluent in Bahasa Indonesia and professionally proficient in English.
- Based in Medan and willing to travel frequently across Sumatra and other relevant markets.
