Sales and Operations Director, Electric Business

BURN designs, manufactures, and distributes aspirational fuel-efficient cooking products that save lives and forests in the developing world.BURN has revolutionized the global cookstove sector by proving the business case for selling a high quality, locally manufactured and unsubsidized cookstoves.Since 2013, BURN has sold 200,000+ high quality, locally manu…

Sales and Operations Director, Electric Business

About the Role

• Burn is looking for a commercially driven and results-oriented leader to lead BURN’s electric business across Tanzania, Kenya, Mozambique, Ghana, and future markets. This role will drive cross-market sales growth, profitability, operational excellence, and project delivery while ensuring strong performance across collections, customer usage, agent productivity, and service quality. The successful candidate will lead country teams, strengthen distribution and after-sales operations, and collaborate with cross-functional teams to scale the electric business sustainably. This role requires strong commercial leadership, a proven track record in multi-market consumer distribution, and a willingness to travel at least 25% of the time.

Duties and Responsibilities

Cross-Market Commercial Delivery

• Co-create the electric business strategy and own its delivery in markets. Lead sales, quality and P&L delivery across Tanzania, Kenya, Mozambique and Ghana + new markets, line-managing the country leads and owning the weekly performance rhythm. Hold each market to its forecast, sales channel mix, collections and cost-to-serve. Own route-to-market standards across the markets, deciding what is common and what is genuinely local, and approving country-level changes to either. Provide a cross-market view of volume, revenue, margin and operating cost, produced weekly rather than on request. Support entry into new markets as the business expands. The role requires at least 25% travel across the markets.

Quality & Performance Management

• Drive repayment efficiency above 90% of PAYGO sales in every market, average customer usage above 1.2kWh, and agent productivity above 30 sales per agent per month and achieve compliance metrics. Drive customer acquisition cost and sales & distribution spend per unit down quarter on quarter. Ensure monitoring is robust enough that a market missing any of these is visible within the week rather than at month end.

Operational Excellence

• Own the SOPs, SLAs and field operating standards for electric across all markets – written, adopted and audited, not written and filed. Own last-mile execution, stock point SLAs and after-sales performance. Mature the operating model as the business scales, defining the metrics that matter at each stage and retiring those that no longer do. Surface risks and opportunities to the Senior Director early, with a recommendation attached.

Project Ownership & Delivery

• Own the active project portfolio of electric projects end to end: prioritisation, sequencing, resourcing, quality delivery, and the decision on what gets stopped. Run the coordination and findings cycle so that projects move between meetings and not only during them. Give every currently unassigned project a named owner and a plan, and rebalance load. Report projects status to the Senior Director as one view of what is on track, what is at risk, and what has been stopped and why.

Team & Culture Leadership