- Salary
- $90k+/yr
- Location
- Coeur d'Alene, Idaho, US
- Type
- Full-time
- Department
- Operations
- Source
- BetterTeam
Description
Field Operations Manager
(a.k.a. The Person Who Finally Gets Randy Off The Job Site)
Cross Creek Landscape - Coeur d’Alene, Idaho
Full-time | $90K base + bonus (total earning potential $110K+) | Relocation help for the right person | Company truck | One (1) free Coeur d’Alene sunset upon arrival.
Read This Part First (Don’t Skim):
We are not looking for a manager. We are looking for a field general. An A-player. The kind of person who shows up on day one, looks around, and quietly thinks “oh, I know exactly what’s wrong here — and exactly how to fix it.”
Cross Creek builds luxury landscapes in North Idaho — fire features, hardscape, water features, outdoor kitchens, the works. The kind of backyards people post on Instagram and their friends accuse them of buying off Pinterest. Our crews are good. Our standards are high. And the owner (Randy) is currently the bottleneck on every job site. He knows it. That’s why this listing exists.
We need someone who can walk onto our sites and run them better than he can. Someone who has done this before, at a real company, and is ready to do it again — this time at a place where the owner actually listens, the team actually loves each other, and the work actually matters.
If you are looking for a comfortable seat in a beige office with a foosball table you never use, this isn’t it. If you are looking for a company you can shape, a team you can lead, and an owner who genuinely wants you to push back when he’s wrong — keep reading. We’ll wait.
“Iron sharpeneth iron; so a man sharpeneth the countenance of his friend.” — Proverbs 27:17 (KJV)
What You’d Own: (And It’s A Lot):
Everything that happens between the design being signed and the client shaking your hand at the final walkthrough. Which is to say: most of the chaos. Specifically:
- Production schedule — who’s on what job, when, with what equipment, and which sub is allegedly showing up Tuesday but probably won’t.
- Quality control — daily site visits across active jobs, catching things before clients catch them (and they will catch them).
- Foreman leadership — directly developing Branden, John, and the leads coming up behind them. These are good men. Treat them like it.
- Client-facing field communication — pre-construction kickoffs, mid-build walkthroughs, final handoffs, the occasional “why is there a trench in my lawn” phone call.
- Subcontractor coordination — concrete, masonry, irrigation, electrical, fence. Herding cats, but the cats drive F-350s.
- Equipment and logistics — making sure nothing on a job site is waiting on something the field team should have already handled. Nothing kills a margin like four guys standing around looking at their phones.
Within 90 days, when something goes sideways on a job, the foremen should be calling you, not Randy. That’s the goal. Randy would like to go to his daughter’s soccer games without his phone buzzing every six minutes.
What We’re Looking For: Non-negotiable (we mean it):
- 8+ years running field operations at a design/build landscape company, custom home builder, or comparable construction operation. Not 8 years of “being in the industry.” Eight years of actually running it.
- You’ve personally overseen at least $1M+ in annual construction volume — ideally more. You know what those numbers feel like when they’re going right and when they’re going sideways.
- You’ve managed multiple crews and multiple subs simultaneously, on multiple active job sites, without losing your mind or your weekend.
- You can read a landscape plan, walk a site, and immediately see the three things that are going to cause problems in two weeks.
- You’ve held people accountable without breaking them. There’s a difference. We can tell.
- You understand that on-time and on-budget mean nothing if the craft isn’t there.
What separates a candidate from a hire:
- You’ve built or improved a production system somewhere — and you can describe what changed and why, without using the phrase “synergistic alignment”.
- You actually like developing people, not just managing them. The crews you’ve led don’t just respect you — they’d follow you to your next job if you let them.
- You’re the kind of person who, when the owner asks “what would you do?”, has an answer. A real one. Not “well, it depends”.
- You’ve worked at a place where the standards slipped and you didn’t let yourself slip with them.
What we don’t care about:
- Degrees. Don’t have one? Fine. Have three? Also fine. Have a horticulture certificate from a community college in 1997? Honestly that’s kind of cool.
- Whether you’ve done luxury work specifically — if you’ve run high-end custom home builds, fine-finish carpentry crews, or commercial sitework with tight tolerances, your skills translate.
- Where you live now. Coeur d’Alene is beautiful, the cost of living won’t make your spouse cry, and we’re paying to help the right person move.
- Whether you’re an extrovert or not. Some of the best field generals are quiet people who happen to know exactly what they’re doing.
How You’d Get Paid (Real Numbers):
Base: $90,000/year, paid bi-weekly. Direct deposit, like a normal company.
Bonus, structured so you actually see the money:
- $500 for every completed job that hits on-time, on-budget, AND passes the quality gate — paid the next payroll. No “well, we’ll figure it out at year-end” nonsense.
- Annual true-up based on your qualifying-job rate: $5K at 85%, $8K at 90%, $12K at 95%+. The better you do, the better you do.
- Total earning potential: $110K+ if you run things tight. Uncapped on the top end if you crush it. We are not in the business of clipping the wings of the people who make us money.
The quality gate exists on purpose. We will not pay you to hit a schedule by cutting corners. The work has to be right. If you’re the kind of person who quietly fixes a crooked joint nobody else would have noticed — you’re going to like it here.
Also Included: company truck (not a beater), fuel card, phone, PTO (2 weeks year one, 3 weeks year two+), paid holidays, paid continuing education (ICPI, NCMA, OSHA 30, whatever you need), relocation help up to $8K for the right out-of-area candidate.
About Cross Creek (The Honest Version)
We’re a team of around ten. We build beautiful landscapes for clients who care about craft (and a few who care about Instagram, but we love them anyway). We treat each other well. We pray before some meetings. We laugh at most of them. We’re a Christian-owned company, and we operate this business as a ministry — meaning, the people we hire matter as much to us as the work we produce.
You do not have to share Randy’s faith to work here. Plenty of people on the team don’t. What you do have to do is treat every person on this team with dignity, hold people to high standards without humiliating them, and be honest when it’s costly. If you’re the type who yells at crews or talks down to anyone you outrank — we are not the place for you. Move along.
“Whatsoever thy hand findeth to do, do it with thy might.” — Ecclesiastes 9:10 (KJV)
What This Job Will Probably Cost You:
Some early mornings. Some hard conversations with people who’ve been here longer than you. The discomfort of taking over an operation that’s been run a certain way for a while. The first six months of figuring out how Randy actually wants things done versus what he says he wants done (these are not always the same; we’re working on it).
If that sounds like a deal-breaker, this isn’t the right seat. If it sounds like Tuesday, we should talk.
How to Apply:
Send us:
- A resume or work history (formal or informal — we care about what you’ve actually run, not how pretty the document is. If it’s in Comic Sans we’ll judge you slightly, but only slightly.)
- A short note — three or four paragraphs, not a novel — answering: What’s the hardest field operation you’ve ever turned around, and what did you actually change to do it?
- Two references we can call. One should be a foreman or crew member who worked under you (we want to hear from someone you led, not just someone you reported to). The other can be whoever you want — your pastor, your last boss, the guy who sold you your truck. Up to you.
We will read every application. We will respond to every person who applies (it might take a week, but we’ll do it). If you make it past the first round, expect a phone call from Randy, a working site visit where you’ll actually walk a job with us, and a conversation with the foremen you’d be leading. We want this to be the right fit — for you and for us. A bad hire here costs both of us a year of our lives.
Looking forward to meeting you. Bring boots.
— Randy & the Cross Creek team
Skills
OSHACarpentry
