About Olio

Half of the clothes in our wardrobes are never worn, and one third of food produced globally is never eaten. Meanwhile, our planet is on fire and people everywhere are struggling to make ends meet.

Olio is an app that solves this injustice by allowing people to pass on household items and food they no longer need to locals living nearby. By encouraging sharing or borrowing instead of throwing things away or buying new, Olio helps avoid waste while supporting communities and the planet. 

Originally created to fight food waste, Olio is now fighting against anything going to waste. We believe this will empower everyone to become part of the solution and solve the climate crisis by ending waste, one share at a time. 

Over the past 10 years Olio has grown from a local initiative in North London to a global movement. We now have 8.5m million users who have given away 110m meals and 14m million household items across 64 countries. 

This growth has been underpinned by our incredible ambassador programme, with 60k people helping to spread the word about Olio in their local community. We’re also helping over 200 businesses across the UK – including Tesco, Sainsbury’s and Asda – with over 8,000 sites to reach zero food waste via our Food Waste Heroes Programme, in which 140k food safety-trained Olio volunteers collect unsold food and redistribute it to their local communities via the app.

We’ve been recognised by the United Nations, who highlighted Olio as a “beacon” for the world, and by Vivatech who awarded Olio “Next European Unicorn”. 

The goal now is to get everyone into the world-changing habit of sharing. 

About Olio (from a finance and operations perspective)

Olio is a Series B mission-driven startup, with stage-appropriate impact (114m meals of food rescued) but Series A level revenues (mid-single digit millions per year). We’re unprofitable but are aiming to achieve breakeven by 2027 to ensure that our future is in our own hands rather than dependent on raising additional funding. 

Having gone through two restructuring rounds in the past couple of years we’re a team of 58 people – down from 108 at our peak. We therefore need to ensure that our processes are as automated as possible to enable us to operate with significantly fewer headcount. 

Background to this project

Salesforce was implemented as our CRM in 2022; however, the setup was too complicated for the majority of our team. They found it unintuitive, which resulted in them not using it or making errors while using it. This in turn led to data being incorrect or out of date; which meant that it wasn’t a reliable source of truth.

We used to have a Head of B2B Strategy and a Sales Operations Manager; however they held things together using relatively manual processes. Both exited the business in 2024 and the cracks that were being papered over are now starting to show.

As a result of our dissatisfaction with Salesforce’s functionality and its price we’re in the process of migrating to HubSpot as our CRM (deadline end-May/early June). However, the migration is being led by team members who have never done such a migration before; nor have they set up HubSpot before – so there’s an element of not knowing what we don’t know.

We want to use this migration as a mechanism to set up the CRM and dashboards correctly so that we have substantially better data, and therefore accountability. We also want to simplify the sales and CRM process in HubSpot as much as possible e.g. the lead cycle.

Accounts receivable is also a major pain point. We have a Finance Team of 1 who doesn’t have capacity to do the heavy lifting on accounts receivable so responsibility sits with Account Managers; however they need to spend more time on revenue-generating tasks. The issue is particularly acute for our catering team as our catering clients are much more complicated from a billing and reconciliation perspective – partially as a result of having multiple points of contact (see the appendix at the bottom of this document). 

Our contracts also vary significantly from one client to the next. Some clients pay fixed amounts; others pay variable amounts. Some pay monthly; others are quarterly and some have their own payment frequencies (e.g. 10 payments spread out equally over the year). In some cases we have even more complex payment models e.g. £X per site up to a threshold and then £Y per site – which couldn’t be set up in Salesforce so required a manual override. Due to the variability and complexity of our cost models, we find revenue is constantly fluctuating and we lack trust in the numbers. We require support in simplifying our contracts or how the cost models are built in HubSpot such that we can rely on our CRM as a single source of truth going forward.

CRM data is visualised in Tableau and our Tableau dashboards are used for things like client reporting, KPI tracking, and revenue. Data is calculated by combining CRM information with backend app information in Big Query, DBT and Tableau.

What we’re looking for

• We’re expecting that this is a project lasting several weeks rather than several months as we don’t anticipate that heavy-duty implementation will be part of the scope of this role (our Strategic Operations Manager and Chief of Staff will likely be leading on this). However, this might change depending on your findings and the complexity of implementing your recommendations
• Olio is a remote-first company, so the role is fully remote (UK hours)
• There are 2 phases to the project where Phase 1 is urgent and definitely required; whereas Phase 2 is conditional on successful completion of Phase 1
• Your key stakeholders at Olio will be:
  • Saasha Celestial-One, COO
  • Rohan Sheth, Chief of Staff
  • Liam Jones, Head of Revenue
  • Beth Murkin, Senior BI Analyst
  • Justin Marsh, Financial Controller
  • Lily Paterson, Strategic Operations Manager
• After you’ve had a chance to speak with us and ask any clarifying questions we’d like you to propose how long you think this project will take (broken down into appropriate workblocks) based on your experience with other similar companies and your day rate. However, please bear in mind that ‘resourceful’ is one of our 4 core values and as a loss-making startup we’re on a budget

Key questions you’ll be expected to answer as part of the project

• Phase 1:
  • How do we set HubSpot up for success; ensuring that the issues that our team experienced with Salesforce are addressed?
  • In what ways are our sales, data and finance capabilities (and their intersection) insufficient and what resourceful actions should we take to address them?
    • Why is there a perpetual discrepancy between the data in Tableau and our management accounts and how do we get them significantly better aligned?
    • How do we standardise contracts and pricing models? 
    • How do we build significantly more confidence in the accuracy of the data, and put in place checks and balances to avoid errors?
• Phase 2 (subject to key stakeholders’ satisfaction with the work conducted in Phase 1):
  • How do we improve our accounts receivable processes (i.e. make them more automated/reduce the team’s time spent on them and reduce the bad debt rate)? 
    • How do we send out invoices directly from HubSpot rather than from Xero?
    • How do we reconcile payments received via the HubSpot Xero API?
  • How do we future-proof our systems and processes to account for things like:
    • ‘Lucky Dip’ – whereby clients sell mystery bundles of discounted food and pay us variable amounts based on the number of bags sold
    • Setting us up for having a self-serve proposition in the future (e.g. accepting payments online rather than via bank transfer)
    • We might need to be able to support clients paying in currencies other than GBP in the near future 

Ideal requirements

• Experience managing (and ideally setting up) HubSpot CRM
• Experience setting up an API between HubSpot and Xero
• Familiar with data systems and transformation, including integrations between Big Query, Tableau and HubSpot
• Someone that’s willing to roll up their sleeves – we need someone that’s able to go into systems and find things out themselves; not someone that can only do things in theory
• Experience working with similar stage startups – we need someone pragmatic and resourceful; not someone that creates solutions that are too advanced or too expensive for us

How to apply

If you are interested in working with us on this project please email rohan.sheth@olioapp.com ASAP with:

• A copy of your CV
• Two paragraphs on why you think you match our requirements
• Availability (we’d like to have the 1st phase completed to match our Hubspot migration so you’d need to start mid May at the latest)
• Daily rate 

Appendix: Contact levels at caterer clients