Role: Service Charge Director
Location: Exeter
Salary: Competitive salary, plus benefits
Contract: Permanent
Hours: Monday to Friday – 9am to 5pm (35 hours per week)
Why FirstPort?
FirstPort, are on an ambitious journey to redefine excellence in UK residential property management. We are committed to elevating and resetting industry standards to be the most trusted and professional residential property management company.
By joining us as a Service Charge Director, you will play a pivotal role in achieving our vision
* Impactful Work: You will directly support FirstPort’s mission to elevate industry standards and provide an exceptional service to our customers.
* Professional Growth: With access to accredited training and development programmes, you will be empowered to reach your potential.
* Supportive Environment: We foster a culture where collaboration and innovation thrive, ensuring you feel valued and supported every step of the way.
* A Future of Opportunity: Be part of a forward-thinking organisation that is shaping the future of residential property management in the UK.
At the core of everything we do are our leadership principles:
* Collaborative: We work together, combining expertise to deliver outstanding outcomes for our customers
* Consistent: We deliver dependable results, building trust with customers and colleagues.
* Simple: We simplify the complex, ensuring our financial processes are straightforward and understood.
* Clear: We communicate with clarity, making information accessible and transparent to all stakeholders.
Your Role, Your Impact
As a Service Charge Director, you will contribute to our vision of being the UK’s favourite property manager by:
* Driving the strategic direction and delivery of our customers’ financial experience, enabling FirstPort to become a truly customer centric business and the ‘UK’s favourite’ by leading a team of service charge accountants to enable distribution of accurate and timely service charge financial accounts and budgets.
* Leading innovation and thought leadership, seeking to push the boundaries of opportunity throughout the division and the wider business, whilst leading on the BAU financial service charge delivery of customer accounts, pertaining to our first-time resolution principles with a proactive and tenacious approach to resolving and reducing complaints and financial enquires upfront.
* Leading and developing a team of service charge accountants and administrators, driving performance to enable delivery of an effective and efficient service to internal and external customers, and contractors.
* Attend Regional Board Meetings.
This role reports to the Director South-West and has a team of up to 3 direct reports.
Key Responsibilities:
* Lead and drive team performance and delivery, effectively assigning and organising all workloads appropriately to manage financial service delivery requirements within legislative requirements and company expectations.
* Provide effective leadership to motivate, engage, maintain morale and achieve high standards within their team, including one-to-one meetings, coaching, Performance Development Reviews and regular team briefings, ensuring all people-related tasks are completed as documented in company procedures.
* Continually review departmental data and trends, including employee attendance and performance to ensure set targets are met.
* Empowering teams to take ownership and use their judgement to provide timely personalised responses in a way that appropriately balances the needs of customers, our people and FirstPort.
* Creating a positive, diverse environment, identify talent and create development and succession plans.
* Encourage and promote collaborative working with operational colleagues to increase the quality and speed of responses to customers providing data and analytics to your stakeholders to drive service improvements and operational accountability.
* Ensure all Service Charge Accounts and Estimates are issued on time, are accurate and are of highest quality within required timescales and standards.
* Identify ways to improve the service charge accounting process, pack of information to customers and reduce queries and contact first time every time.
* Establish and embed clear and rapid escalation processes ensuring that we deal with customer escalations in a speedy manner, and providing feedback to the team to improve customer experience whilst supporting first time resolutions are in place and collaboration with Customer Services enables resolution of complex service charge finance queries.
* Drive strategies across the team to enable financial accountability and upskilling surgeries to your Operational stakeholders to educate on Service Charge Finance protocol, procedures and legislation impact.
* Strengthen relationships with Operations and our Customer Service Teams through refined and simplified processes.
Required Skills & Qualifications:
* Professional accounting qualification.
* Strong accounting technical knowledge and people leadership capability.
* Experience working with Audits and process improvements.
* Self-motivated and works well in a fast-paced environment.
* Excellent IT skills, and up to date with new technology with a strong finance Systems Knowledge specifically essential for QUBE.
* Experience in leading teams, employing a range of leadership skills tailored to the collective and individual needs to drive performance and employ performance management plans where required.
* Strong customer and employee focus with the ability to utilise data insights to drive performance improvement and capability.
* A driven individual with the ability to work at pace and be agile, reacting to customer demand where necessary.
* Taking a customer centric approach, anticipating the customer’s future needs and building your team’s skills and performance accordingly to truly drive the highest level of customer experience.
* Confident, articulate communicator – both orally and in writing; able to build relationships with all employees, from site-based colleagues to directors, key clients and stakeholders.
* Ability to establish the root cause and remove demand failure.
* Ability to influence individuals and engage and manage stakeholders at all levels of the business.
* Results orientated and delivers against action led deadlines and legislative requirements.
What’s in it for you?
Our customers deserve the best and the same applies to our people. We will provide you with the technology, training and support that you need to do your job well. We offer competitive salaries and a range of benefit packages depending on the grade of your role, such as private medical insurance, pension contributions and life assurance. In addition, we also offer a range of exclusive discounts on extra benefits to help you, and your family make the most of your money, safeguard your future and look after your health, including discounted gym membership for all colleagues.
Diversity
We’re committed to promoting diversity at FirstPort and recruit on merit. We will ensure we make any adjustments that we can to support both through the recruitment and on-boarding process.
Ready to make a difference?
If you’re ready to take the next step in your career and make a difference we’d love to hear from you!
All applicants must be eligible to live and work in the UK without restrictions, and documented evidence of eligibility will be required.
Join us at FirstPort, where we not only manage properties but strive to lead and transform the industry. Together, we can make a difference – for our customers, our colleagues, and the future of residential property management in the UK.
Elevate your career. Reset the standard. Join FirstPort.