Corporate Strategy and Planning Manager
About Homeward
Buying a home should be an exciting milestone. But all too often, it’s stressful, especially in a competitive market or when you’re buying and selling at the same time. So we’re redesigning the home-buying experience. We’re a fast-paced real estate startup that empowers agents to help homebuyers buy with cash. We buy homes on behalf of our partners’ clients with our cash, then the client buys the home back from us.
Founder and CEO Tim Heyl, a 10-year industry veteran and owner of one of the fastest-growing agent teams in the country, started Homeward in 2018. In fact, he bought our first customer’s home with his own life savings. Today we offer two services — Buy with cash and Buy before you sell.
We’ve raised more than $160MM in equity capital from top-tier venture investors, including Norwest, Blackstone Alternative Asset Management, Adams Street, Javelin, and LiveOak. Our leadership team includes experts from the real estate, mortgage, and technology industries.
About the opportunity
At Homeward, we are excited about our people. Every person has a voice, and we encourage sharing thoughts, ideas, suggestions.
In this role, you are working closely with the senior and executive leadership team, members across every department, and our external investors. The ideal candidate will have a strong ability to drive independently to answers -- sometimes across multiple questions at a time! Along the way, they will ensure they communicate effectively with relevant stakeholders so everyone’s on board. This person should also be excited to work at a start-up and eager for the opportunity to take on large challenging questions (of course with support from their supervisor and others across the business).
This role is not eligible for visa sponsorship.
Responsibilities will include:
- Answer our highest priority strategic questions; e.g.,
- How should we price our products?
- What types of and/or specific strategic partnerships should we pursue?
- How will macro trends play out in our business?
- Own and run many core corporate strategy elements; this may include:
- Working across business functions to set our long-term strategic vision and roadmap
- Owning the OKR process (incl. establishing cadence, working with CEO and functional leaders to set those objectives/goals, creating real-time tracking mechanisms, reporting out on progress)
- Establish one coordinated communication stream across and throughout the organization; this may include:
- Learning industry / start-up best practices for meeting cadence and content
- Developing perspective on how to implement these learnings at Homeward
- Generating buy-in from senior leadership and implementing your proposal
- Co-lead investor relations
- Working with the CEO to prepare messaging and content for Board meetings and updates
- Meeting with current investors (e.g., Norwest, Blackstone) and potential future investors as needed
- Own various other high priority areas and topics as needed and interested
About you:
- 3+ years of experience at a top-tier management consulting firm (preferred) or growth start-up
- Ability to run a workstream independently and prioritize effectively
- Exceptional oral and written communication skills, including ability to independently run meetings with senior leadership
- Ability to structure a clearly defined work plan that outlines how you plan to answer a question
- Ability to build an Excel model and executive-level PowerPoint presentation (note: this will be limited relative to consulting, but a part of the job nonetheless)
- A “team player” attitude -- built on trust & collaboration
- A desire and ability to work well in a fast-paced environment
- An eagerness to learn and contribute
- Willingness to travel to Austin (HQ)
Our Values
THE GOLDEN RULE
Whether we’re dealing with colleagues or customers, we follow The Golden Rule, treating others the way we want to be treated. It’s a simple rule, but it’s also significant: we don’t prioritize money or growth over people, and we practice empathy at every opportunity.
CALM FOCUS
We work in tech and build solutions for real estate. Both are fast-paced and stressful industries. So it’s important that we focus on the larger objective rather than rushing from one task to the next. If something is out of scope, we say “No.” If something feels rushed, we pump the brakes. This calm focus helps us create solutions our customers love.
ONE TEAM, ONE DREAM
Big problems require big solutions. We look at our customers’ experience holistically, and recognize that solving them requires collaboration across teams. This approach extends to cooperation among our three affiliate companies — Homeward, Homeward Mortgage and Homeward Title — and produces a more integrated homebuying experience.