Fleet Operations Manager
The package
- Base pay: £3,000 per month (contract role).
- £250 bonus on successful completion of the 3-month probation period.
- Schedule: Full-time, Monday to Friday, 7:30am – 4:30pm.
- Real ownership — the autonomy to build this function from the ground up and make it your own.
- Meaningful work — everything you keep running helps families through one of the hardest moments they'll face.
Pet Cremation UK is an independent, pet cremation and in-home euthanasia service, carrying out hundreds of collections every month across the country. Behind every collection is a grieving family trusting us to arrive when we said we would, handle their pet with dignity, and get everything right. Our operation only works if our vans are on the road, our drivers are where they need to be, and our vets are working their agreed days.
That is your job. As Fleet Operations Manager, you own business continuity — the ground work that keeps the whole operation moving. This is a build-it-from-scratch role: much of the structure you need doesn't exist yet, and you'll have the freedom and the mandate to design the systems, processes, and standards that keep us running as we scale.
The role
Your mission is simple to state and demanding to deliver: keep the business running. Concretely, that means three things are always true — our vans are working and road-legal, our drivers are in those vans, and our vets are working the days they've agreed to.
You'll have genuine autonomy to build this function the way it should be built. The stronger the systems you put in place, the smoother the operation runs — and the less firefighting lands on you. We're looking for someone who sees an empty playbook as an opportunity, not a problem.
What you'll own
Fleet reliability & road-legality
- Ensure every van in operation is legal to be on the road — road tax and MOT current at all times.
- Create and run a maintenance schedule for all vehicles, so servicing is planned rather than reactive.
- Keep all vehicles and their refrigeration units properly maintained and running — the fridge unit is business-critical and can never be the reason a collection fails.
- Arrange breakdown cover and a contingency plan for vehicles off the road, so a single failure never stops the operation.
- Record and track all enforcement tickets (PCNs, fines, clamps), resolve them promptly, and spot patterns before they cost us.
Drivers
- Own weekly and monthly rota management for the driver team.
- Track and monitor driver performance against a clear set of KPIs — you'll define what "good" looks like and measure against it.
- Drive excellence across the driver team through regular meetings, feedback, and standards you set and uphold.
- Hire, onboard, and train all new drivers.
- Carry out and keep on file all pre-employment checks for drivers — driving licence, right to work, and DBS.
Build the relief-driver pool
- Recruit and maintain a vetted pool of temporary / relief drivers who can be called on at short notice.
- Keep that pool trained, checked, and genuinely usable, with a clear call-down process — this bench is what protects the operation when someone's off, and what keeps you off the road.
Resourcing
- Ensure every driver and vet has what they need to complete their working day — collection boxes, PPE, ID tags, and any other consumables — with stock tracked and reordered ahead of need, never after.
Vet schedule monitoring
- Maintain visibility of each vet's agreed working days within the rota.
- Monitor vet attendance and, the moment a vet is absent or won't make their agreed day, escalate immediately so cover or customer rescheduling can be arranged — early warning is the whole value here.
Emergency cover (genuine last resort)
- On the rare occasion no other driver — permanent or relief — is available, you'll step in and run a collection route yourself. This is the safety net of last resort: the better you build the team and the relief pool, the less this ever happens.
What makes you right for this
- A builder, not just an operator — you've created processes, systems, or functions from scratch before, and you're energised rather than daunted by a blank page.
- A self-starter comfortable with ambiguity — you can work independently, set your own priorities, and make things happen with minimal supervision.
- Genuinely organised — you keep many moving parts (vehicles, people, rotas, checks, stock) on track at once without letting things slip.
- People management experience — you can hire, onboard, motivate, and hold a team to a standard.
- Fleet or logistics operations experience — you understand what it takes to keep vehicles compliant and on the road.
- A full, clean UK driving licence — you can and will drive a collection route when it's genuinely the last resort.
- Calm and dependable under pressure — continuity problems don't keep office hours, and you're the person who keeps a level head when something breaks.
Desirable
- Experience in a fast-scaling small business or startup environment.
- Familiarity with vehicle maintenance, MOT/servicing cycles, and fleet compliance.
- Experience recruiting and managing drivers or field-based staff.
- Comfort with data — building simple trackers, dashboards, or KPI reporting to run the operation on facts, not guesswork.
Pay: Up to £3,000.00 per month
Licence/Certification:
- Full Driving Licence (preferred)
Work authorisation:
- United Kingdom (preferred)
Work Location: Remote
