What We’re Looking For

Role Details

Reports to: Director (or Managing Director, where no Director is yet in place)
Service line: Investor Relations
Location: Remote
Comp band: $135,000–$160,000

Who We Are

Strut Consulting partners with venture capital firms to deliver operational expertise and strategic guidance to catalyze success at each stage of growth.

Strut is the preeminent venture capital consulting firm, delivering unparalleled expertise to venture capital firms across the spectrum—from emerging to established—throughout the United States and internationally.

Founded in 2016, we are an essential cornerstone for fund managers, empowering them to maximize impact while optimizing resources. Our team of high-caliber operations, finance, and investor relations experts helps VCs catalyze exceptional performance and strategic advancement.

What We Do

Strut serves as a strategic partner to venture firms across finance, operations, investor relations, and beyond. Our fractional model allows clients to access high-caliber talent and expertise across the full lifecycle of fund management — from fund formation through deployment, reporting, and long-term firm building.

The Role

As a Senior Manager within Strut's Investor Relations practice, you lead a pod covering a portfolio of venture capital clients. This is the person Managers turn to for judgment calls, and the person GPs turn to when a fundraising or LP question is bigger than the next quarterly update.

The Senior Manager stays two steps ahead of the client. They're Strut's pattern-recognition layer for the relationship. This person starts piecing together the bigger picture across an engagement, connecting this week's work to where the client's fund or firm needs to be operationally, and pushing them toward running a more efficient, better-organized business rather than just executing the task in front of them. They run the higher-stakes client conversations (Managers keep the standard ones), lead a pod of Managers and offshore staff (Auxilians), and hold a seat that balances hands-on billable work with oversight weighted toward execution today, and is expected to shift further toward oversight as their pod grows. Senior Managers escalate what they see to Directors (or Managing Directors, where no Director sits above them yet) for client-level calls (staffing, pricing, scope) rather than acting on that judgment alone.

Key Responsibilities

1. Client Strategy, Thought Partnership & Pattern Recognition

• Serve as a strategic thought partner to clients on their service function, not just executing what's asked, but shaping how that function should work as the client's fund matures

• Build and refine the operating system around a client’s IR function, including LP segmentation, pipeline strategy, communication cadence, fundraising process, reporting infrastructure, data-room readiness, and investor experience

• Piece together the bigger picture across an engagement: connect what's happening this week to where the client's fund or firm needs to be operationally in 6–12 months, and bring that forward proactively rather than waiting to be asked

• Run higher-stakes client conversations, including renewal risk, scope changes, sensitive relationship moments, escalations, while Managers continue to own standard meetings

• Synthesize ambiguous or incomplete information into a clear point of view: what is happening, why it matters, the available options, and the recommended path forward

• Actively watch for patterns across the portfolio of engagements they oversee: signals a single Manager wouldn't see because they're only looking at one client

• Escalate strategic or portfolio-level signals to Director (or Managing Director) with a clear recommendation attached — staffing, pricing, and scope decisions are the Director's call, not the Senior Manager's to make alone

• Serve as the senior point of escalation for Managers when a client issue exceeds their judgment or authority

2. Pod & Team Leadership

• Directly manage a pod of Managers and Associates by setting expectations, coaching, and holding the team accountable

• Coach Managers specifically on judgment: when to escalate, when to decide, how to formulate a recommendation, and how to run a client relationship independently

• Review Managers' delegation and quality-control practices across the pod, not only their output

• Build Manager capability so increasingly complex work can be handled below the Senior Manager level without sacrificing quality

• Ensure work moves to the appropriate level of the team rather than allowing the Senior Manager to become the default execution layer for every complex task

• Flag pod-level capacity, skill, or performance gaps to Director/Managing Director before they become delivery or retention risks

3. Quality Control & Process

• Serve as a second, higher-altitude quality checkpoint for complex or high-stakes deliverables before they reach the client or Director-level review

• Maintain and improve Strut's processes and templates at the pod level; surface improvement opportunities visible across multiple engagements, not just one

• Contribute to building Strut’s broader Investor Relations practice through reusable frameworks, training materials, case studies, internal education, and select thought-leadership initiatives

• Identify where recurring client needs should become a standardized Strut methodology or service offering

• Track own time accurately in Clockify; oversee Managers' time-tracking compliance across the pod

4. Capacity & Utilization

• Maintain own billable utilization against the max target for the Senior Manager role, balancing a working seat with an oversight seat. Today this balance skews toward hands-on execution

• As the pod matures, expect this balance to shift further toward oversight, with billable targets adjusted accordingly

• Own client load planning for the pod: balancing own billable capacity against the team's, and flagging pod-level over- or under-utilization to Director/Managing Director

• Monitor whether client scope remains aligned with the agreed engagement and identify when the team is consistently absorbing work that sits outside scope

• Recognize opportunities to expand, contract, or restructure an engagement based on the client’s evolving needs, team capacity, and the value Strut is providing

• Bring scope, renewal, pricing, or account-expansion recommendations to the Director/Managing Director before making any client-facing commercial commitment

• Surface commercial risks early, particularly where delivery expectations, staffing requirements, or client demands are likely to make the engagement unsustainable

5. Service Line Scope — Investor Relations

• Oversee investor-facing materials and LP communications quality across the pod's client portfolio, stepping in personally for the highest-stakes fundraises or LP relationships

• Serve as a strategic thought partner to clients on fundraising strategy and LP relationship management, not just materials production

• Diagnose the maturity and effectiveness of a client’s IR operation and recommend improvements across fundraising, reporting, communications, CRM, LP experience, and internal workflows

• Evaluate fundraising pipelines based on LP fit, conviction, relationship strength, timing, and conversion — not simply meeting volume or activity

• Help clients build disciplined fundraising processes, including LP prioritization, stage definitions, follow-up standards, meeting preparation, pipeline reviews, and communication strategy

• Coach Managers on CRM hygiene, DDQ management, reporting processes, LP onboarding, side-letter and obligation tracking, and relevant compliance activities at a judgment level, correcting patterns rather than individual mistakes

• Review and elevate the quality of client-facing content: investor updates, term summaries, thought-leadership pieces across the pod

• Work effectively across investment teams, finance, legal, fund administration, and other service providers to understand how fund-level information affects LP communications and the investor experience

• Maintain sufficient fluency in fund structures, LPAs, side letters, fund economics, performance reporting, subscription processes, capital activity, and compliance requirements to identify IR implications and coordinate the right stakeholders

• Help clients professionalize their investor relations function as their fund matures: process, cadence, and LP experience maturity

• Represent Strut at a senior level in select high-stakes LP interactions or industry events on behalf of clients

Client-Management Expectations

• Owns the client relationship at the strategic layer, not just the first call for routine matters, but who clients (and Managers) turn to when something is off-pattern, high-stakes, or ambiguous

• Anticipate client needs before they are voiced, based on patterns across the engagement and similar clients

• Actively monitor client relationship health: whether expectations remain aligned, whether the client perceives clear value, and whether unresolved friction could create retention risk

• Identify early signals of client dissatisfaction, scope drift, delivery risk, or changing needs and bring forward a proposed response before they become escalations

• Communicate with clients in recommendations, not just observations: clearly explain the issue, implications, available options, and recommended path

• Escalates before making any client-facing commitment with staffing, pricing, or scope implications

• Represents Strut as a seasoned, strategic voice in the room. Clients should feel like they're getting more than execution when a Senior Manager is involved