Head, Growth

Job Description

We're looking for a Head of Growth to help build Santan into the most loved food brand in ASEAN.

This is not a marketing job. This is a founder-operator role with a mandate to scale revenue, open stores, build customer love, and turn Santan into a regional icon, the way Starbucks did for coffee, Pret did for lunch, and Jollibee did for Filipino comfort food.

You'll own the commercial engine: revenue, same-store sales, store expansion, customer acquisition, loyalty, partnerships, and digital growth. You'll move fast, run experiments weekly, kill what doesn't work, and double down on what does. You'll be measured on outcomes, not slides.

If you've ever wanted to build the next great ASEAN consumer brand from the inside, this is the seat.

Why This Role Matters

Santan is at an inflection point.

We started as the food you loved at 35,000 feet. We're now becoming the food you reach for on the ground, in airports, transit hubs, offices, malls, and on your delivery app.

ASEAN has 680 million people, one of the youngest populations on earth, a food culture richer than anywhere in the world, and no dominant homegrown grab & go chain serving hot Asian comfort food at scale. That gap is ours to take.

We have unfair advantages most consumer startups would kill for: a built-in marketing platform that reaches tens of millions of AirAsia travelers a year, a tested menu of regional hits (Pak Nasser's Nasi Lemak, Chicken Rice, Rendang), a brand people already know and feel something about, and the operational backbone of Capital A behind us. What we don't have yet is the person who can turn all of that into a scaled retail business. That's the role.

Key Responsibilities

You will own the P&L for Santan's retail and digital growth. Concretely, that means:

• Driving topline revenue across every Santan channel that isn't inflight (airport stores, transit, corporate, delivery, vending, FMCG)

• Same-store sales growth at every existing location

• Store expansion across Malaysia first, then Thailand, Indonesia, Philippines, Singapore, Vietnam

• Customer acquisition, retention, and loyalty across physical and digital

• Commercial partnerships: landlords, delivery platforms, payment partners, co-brands

• Menu commercialization in partnership with our product and culinary teams (you decide what sells where, at what price, with what story)

• Continuous experimentation: pricing, formats, bundles, hours, locations, channels

• Turning AirAsia's inflight customer base into ground-side Santan customers

You will not own: aviation/inflight sales (that sits with the aviation team), food R&D and QA (that sits with our product team), or core finance and legal. You will partner with all of them intensely.

Growth & Commercial Responsibilities

• Build and own the Santan revenue model by channel, by store, by SKU, by daypart

• Hit aggressive monthly and quarterly revenue targets and report against them transparently

• Drive same-store sales growth through pricing, mix, dayparts, bundles, LTOs, and traffic-driving campaigns

• Own unit economics for every store: AOV, transactions per day, food cost %, labor %, store-level EBITDA

• Build the bundling, upsell, and combo strategy that lifts ticket size

• Lead pricing strategy across markets, premium where we can, accessible where we must

• Run a weekly growth cadence: hypothesis, test, measure, scale or kill

• Partner with the AirAsia ecosystem (airasia MOVE app, BIG Loyalty, inflight) to convert travelers into Santan regulars

Retail Expansion Responsibilities

• Build the store rollout plan: which formats, which cities, which sites, in which order

• Develop the playbook for each format: airport flagship, transit kiosk, mall inline, corporate counter, dark kitchen, smart vending

• Own site selection criteria, payback expectations, and capex discipline

• Negotiate with landlords, airport operators, transit authorities, and corporate clients

• Hit store opening targets without compromising on unit economics

• Build the operational playbook with our operations partners so every new store opens to the same standard

Customer & Brand Responsibilities

• Make Santan a brand people genuinely love, not just a logo they recognize from a tray table

• Define and protect the brand voice: proud, modern, ASEAN, warm, a little cheeky

• Own the customer journey end-to-end: discovery, first visit, second visit, loyalty, advocacy

• Build the loyalty program: points, perks, tiers, surprise-and-delight, designed for the way ASEAN consumers actually behave

• Lead all consumer marketing: social, content, influencer, PR, partnerships, in-store

• Build content engines around ASEAN food culture: Nasi Lemak heritage, regional recipes, the stories behind our dishes

• Run high-leverage campaigns tied to travel moments, festive seasons, and local cultural events

• Own NPS, customer reviews, and the response loop when something goes wrong

Data & Performance Responsibilities

• Build Santan's growth dashboard from scratch: daily, not quarterly

• Make every decision (pricing, menu, store, campaign) defensible with data

• Instrument the customer journey: app, POS, delivery, loyalty, social, and stitch the data together

• Set up cohort analysis, LTV/CAC modeling, channel attribution, and store-level performance reporting

• Run structured experiments with clear hypotheses, control groups, and decision criteria

• Use data to decide what to scale, what to fix, and what to kill fast

Team & Leadership Responsibilities

• Build a small, sharp, high-agency growth team (lean by design, not by default)

• Hire growth marketers, retail expansion leads, partnership managers, and analysts who can run independently

• Set a culture of speed, ownership, intellectual honesty, and zero politics

• Work shoulder-to-shoulder with product, culinary, operations, tech, and the AirAsia ecosystem teams

• Make Santan a place top operators want to work and stay

What Success Looks Like in 12–24 Months

In 12 months, you will have:

• Driven a step-change in Santan's non-inflight revenue

• Opened a defined number of new stores, with unit economics that work

• Launched a loyalty program with meaningful, active monthly users

• Built measurable conversion from AirAsia travelers to Santan ground-side customers

• Lifted same-store sales at existing locations through pricing, mix, and traffic

• Built a growth team of 5–10 operators

• Established a weekly experimentation cadence with documented wins and learnings

In 24 months, Santan should be the default answer when someone in ASEAN says "where do I grab a hot, good, affordable Asean meal in 5 minutes" and the financials should prove it.

Candidate Profile

You are a builder. You've either started something, scaled something, or run a serious P&L inside a fast-moving consumer business. You think commercially first, creatively second, and politically never.

You're as comfortable in a spreadsheet as you are in a store at 7am watching the morning rush.

You can write a brand brief and read a P&L in the same hour. You've worked in or alongside food, retail, travel, or consumer tech in Southeast Asia, and you understand, in your bone, why Malaysians queue 40 minutes for the right Nasi Lemak. You don't need a perfect brief to start. You need a goal, a budget, and air cover.

Ideal Background

• 8–15 years of experience across some combination of: high-growth consumer startups, F&B retail chains, ride-hailing/super-app growth teams, QSR or coffee chains, modern consumer brands

• Experience scaling a multi-unit retail business, or a digital-first consumer brand that went physical (or vice versa)

• Direct P&L ownership at meaningful scale

• Track record opening stores, launching markets, or scaling categories from zero to one and one to many

• Deep understanding of ASEAN consumer behavior ideally across more than one market

• Comfortable with delivery platforms, loyalty mechanics, app ecosystems, and modern retail tech

• Backgrounds we love: Grab, Foodpanda, ZUS Coffee, Kopi Kenangan, Flash Coffee, Jollibee, McDonald's, Starbucks, Pret A Manger, Secret Recipe, Tealive, Gentle Monster, Uniqlo, or any high-growth consumer startup that scaled hard in ASEAN

Traits We Want

• Founder energy. You move first and ask permission second.

• Bias for action. A done experiment beats a perfect plan.

• Commercial sharpness. You can smell a bad deal and a great one.

• Comfort with chaos. ASEAN is messy; you find that energizing, not exhausting.

• Intellectually honest. You change your mind when the data does.

• High taste. You care how things look, feel, sound, and taste.

• Low ego. You'll wipe a table at a store opening if it needs wiping.

• ASEAN proud. You believe the next great consumer brand will come from this region and you want to build it.

Why Join Santan

• Build a regional consumer icon from the inside, with the backing of Capital A and AirAsia

• Inherit a brand millions of ASEAN travelers already know and shape what it becomes next

• A real founder-style mandate: own the P&L, build the team, set the pace

• Direct line to the CEO and group leadership; minimal layers, maximum trust

• The chance to put ASEAN food culture on the global map Nasi Lemak, Rendang, Hainanese Chicken Rice at the scale they deserve

• Compensation tied to outcomes, not titles