Vice President, Transformation

GardenCore is the leading independent provider of packaged lawn and garden consumables in North America, including mulch, soil, decorative stone, and lime, with ~$850M of annual revenue and the industry's largest US manufacturing and distribution footprint at 58 facilities. The Company serves Lowe's, Home Depot, Tractor Supply, Walmart, and independent garden centers. Recently carved out of a global building materials parent and backed by Pacific Avenue Capital Partners, a private equity firm specializing in complex carve-outs, GardenCore operates in a recession-resilient category growing ~5% annually, is executing an active bolt-on program of roughly 8–12 acquisitions per year, and is positioned to double or triple EBITDA over the next four years.

The Opportunity

GardenCore has a significant value creation agenda and needs a single leader to own it end to end. The VP of Transformation will run the Company's transformation office: turning the value creation plan into a disciplined portfolio of initiatives with clear owners, milestones, and EBITDA targets; leading the CEO's highest-priority special projects; and, most importantly, driving measurable operating cost improvement across the plant and distribution network. This is a hands-on role for someone equally comfortable on a plant floor and in a boardroom.

The VP of Transformation will be located out of the Peachtree Corners, GA office.

Key Responsibilities

• Own the Value Creation PMO: Build and run the transformation office: initiative pipeline, business cases, operating cadence, KPI dashboards, and savings validation. Serve as the single source of truth on progress for the CEO and Board.
• Drive Opex improvement in the field: Lead site-level productivity programs across 58 facilities covering labor, throughput and uptime, yield, maintenance, freight, and conversion cost. Establish best-practice standards and roll them out across the network, spending substantial time on-site.
• Lead special projects: Take ownership of complex, cross-functional initiatives as they arise, such as post-carve-out standalone build-out, network and footprint optimization, systems implementations, and pricing or commercial excellence efforts.
• Support M&A integration: Partner with the corporate development and integration teams to build repeatable 100-day playbooks and capture synergies across the bolt-on program.
• Build capability: Be a force multiplier for the CEO, GMs and broader leadership team; instill a continuous improvement culture that outlasts any single initiative.